For lunch, we find a nearby café called Eat Play Love, where families dine on Western food and then afterward, children make crafts at the community art table while parents sip cocktails and coffee. Our kids glue cardboard, use scissors, and wind yarn around their fingers for the first time in three months.
Lunch takes hours, and afterward, I sense the need for a serious break. I’m trembling, weak, overstimulated. We take a bus and head back to our hostel for mandatory quiet time, where everyone in the family is required to stay on their beds with curtains drawn and do whatever they want so long as they don’t talk. It’s mildly successful. At the end of the hour, my head still spins, my muscles ache, and the kids are all talking at the same time in an echoey concrete room with no rugs or art to cut the reverberation. I feel my insides spiraling downward, wonder if my outsides will soon follow suit. I am swimming in cacophony.
Kyle is cut from different fabric than I. For twelve years, we’ve traveled together, worked side by side on business projects, and run a household together. But we are very different people. I like to think of myself as flexible, that I’m good at going where the wind blows, but when I need to adapt to unsavory conditions that test my senses, my body and brain overload.
Kyle, however, is the epitome of adaptability. He makes small talk with taxi drivers as they take convoluted routes and tell about their family exploits. He lets people wrangle for priority in front of him as he queues in line, because why fight it—this is simply how it is done in their culture. He deals with a sensory overload of flashing sights, pungent smells, and dissonant sounds because, well, it’s Asia. That’s what one does when traveling in Asia. Kyle is the masterful cross-cultural explorer. He also knows me better than anyone, and knows when I am about to shatter.
“Kids, let’s go out. Tsh, you stay here,” Kyle says. Right now, there aren’t eight more beautiful words in the English language.
Kyle is the parent who pushes our kids to try hard, new, risky things. He’s confident in his conviction that the heavy backpack is good for our six-year-old son’s muscle tone, no matter how much Reed flails in theatrical fatigue every time we walk through an airport. He doesn’t flinch from the symphony of childish whining during hours of wandering foreign metro systems. Kyle is the parent to meander through Singapore sans agenda with the three kids.
I insert earbuds, start my sleep playlist, turn down the lights, and read a book. Twenty minutes later, I strap on my eye mask and take a long nap, hugging the white linens and spreading out starfish-style on the queen-size mattress.
Several hours later, Kyle returns with coffee. It’s instant, and it’s from the hostel’s break room, but it is caffeinated, and that’s what matters right now. He is the yang to my yin. He anticipates my needs, my moods. I thank God that we met on a dirt road in a Kosovar village fifteen years ago.
Outside, the sun sets, and we pack our bags for the ninth time in three months. Finn asks if we can keep his construction paper and cardboard creations from lunch yesterday. They’re cumbersome and oversized, too big for any of our packs. I hesitate.
“Yes, we can keep them,” Kyle says.
The next day, we board a plane to Australia. We shoulder our packs, each carrying our weight. Kyle carries an extra paper bag, one containing masterpieces of crayon and cotton ball.
A Market Street in Asia
Lambent lights peddle in lines and squares
Hawking janky batteries and meat-on-sticks,
Some still writhing in final gulps of life.
I tread in a sea of dark-headed waves
With noodle dough jump rope swung between men,
Thwapping in cadence to calls and crows.
Playthings rat-a-tat on wilted boxes, mine for eight quai.
The melon, the meat, the additive music
Pulses me onward, sagacity my sails.
As for me, coruscate shops and sales pale
To earthy mettle, sullied soles, and raw, sticky-still bark.
Light wanes behind me.
Onward.
PART III
The greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time.
—Bill Bryson
6
AUSTRALIA
It’s a strange phenomenon, listening to Bing Crosby croon about a white Christmas while driving in the summer on Highway 1 along the Queensland coastline. It’s Christmastime, but it’s not winter, and it’s anything but white. You’re stopping for ice cream on the way to the pool, or you’re letting your shorts dry on the clothesline while your kids jump on the backyard trampoline. But there’s also a Christmas tree inside, Santa-shaped cookies are baking in the oven, and Bing’s there, singing about his white Christmas.
We arrive in Australia from Singapore in early December on a cheap, region-specific airline with stellar ticket prices because they don’t serve water on the flight. Or rather, they do—for five dollars per bottle. Had I known we’d be unable to slake our thirst for an eight-hour flight, I would have snuck contraband water in our backpacks. Thankfully, this is an overnight trek, so the kids mostly sleep while I try to ignore my thirst. Five hours in, I cave and crack open a bottle of water.
Our first layover is Sydney, then Gold Coast (with the delightful airport name Coolangatta, named after a schooner that wrecked there in 1846); then we catch a northbound train to Brisbane, where we spend the night in a dingy, fluorescent-lit motel near the airport so we can catch an early-morning flight north to Cairns. This means that we fly almost four thousand miles south, then hop a train, and another plane, and trudge another fifteen hundred miles back north. It is the equivalent of flying from Los Angeles to New York in order to get to Dallas. Convoluted itineraries often save enough money to make voyages possible.
It is a jolt, landing in Cairns. The previous twenty-nine hours were spent moving our bodies through airport terminals and train stations, restlessly sleeping and refueling with foreign fast food with jet lag as a familiar friend. We traveled at night, so when we walk up to the car rental desk in Cairns on a bright Friday morning, the woman behind the desk is an alarm clock of cheer. I need coffee.
“Good morning! May I have your confirmation number?” she asks with a smile. Kyle reads her the combination of numbers and letters.
“Ooh, I see that you’re American. Whereabouts you coming from?”
“Well, we’re from Oregon, but we’ve been in Asia for several months now,” Kyle answers.
“You don’t say!” she says as her fingernails clack the keyboard. “I spent some time in Portland a few years back. Beautiful part of the world, that is.”
My ears perk, both at the name of a familiar place and at the opportunity for a breezy conversation in my native tongue. “What were you doing in Oregon?” I ask.