“It is very likely we will miss our transit flight to Bali.”
My phone flashed with the message, but my eyes remained fixated on the changing flight details on the screen. The lists kept spinning.
Why the fuck are there no Bangkok–Denpasar flights?
If you travel often, this kind of panic feels way TOO familiar. No flight on the screen. Flights don’t just disappear. If a flight is cancelled or delayed, it still shows up on the board. Which means…
Shit, I came to the wrong airport!
I rushed down to the taxi stand and paid $25 for a one-way ride to Don Muang International Airport. Not only did I come to the wrong airport, but my last night’s stay was also planned around Suvarnabhumi Airport, where I was now. Well, that’s the next level of dumbassness.
Later, like the blink of an eye, I was teleported to Bali. With barely any sleep last night, plus the traveling, I felt like my body and brain were about to come crashing down.
I am here for a friend’s wedding, who has already missed the flight back. She and the groom were having a pre-wedding trip in Chengdu, the city she first moved to when she left America. The city she is most lovingly fond of, which I’m yet to experience. Now, they were waiting for a transit in Ho Chi Minh City.
We were all supposed to take a bus together to the Mainland Java at 4 pm. But it was 2 pm, and there was no sign that their plane would show up. As stressed as I was, I knew if I had to travel alone, it would be an excruciatingly long, tiresome night. So, I headed quickly to her home to take a shower. Without realizing it, I was alone on a bus leaving Bali for the mainland.
Say this — yes, I have been traveling alone so much, like crazy. I have been to India alone, TWICE. However, midway, when the bus was already on the ferry, it was like I realized I was traveling alone, in quite a male-dominant environment. I looked around. Yes, there were women, but they were covered, and most of them traveled with male companions. The smell of the gasoline, the humidity — it started hitting me that this might not be as ‘easy’ a trip as I thought. But maybe it’s just me. I started panicking.
Or maybe it reminded me how comforting it was to have male companionship. The thing I had a few days ago while traveling. How, despite some, could make us feel ‘at risk’, the presence of some can make us feel held and protected.
We were suddenly escorted off the bus and told to get into the ferry hall because of engine smoke. I tried my hardest to communicate with the people, the drivers, and the crew via Google Translate. I felt a bit at ease. Slightly.
After talking to me, a few of them gathered around and started talking about me, which I definitely tuned in to. They were taking turns guessing where I was from. To my surprise, they concluded I’m Vietnamese.
Wrong, motherfuckers. There’s no fat Vietnamese.
Long story short, I arrived at the groom’s hometown with all 32 organs intact. None were passed into the black market. However, in a small town like that, finding a decent hotel is like finding a needle in a haystack. The first two nights, I ended up in an 8-dollar-a-day hotel, which I was pretty sure could easily connect me to the spirit world if I just asked nicely.
Trenggalek, located on the east of Java Island, feels like a mixture of all the places I’ve been to in Southeast Asia. The rice fields reminded me of Vietnam, the mountains of Chiang Mai, and just half an hour south, there’s an incredible beach. The morning fog is beautiful, and the air remains fresh and untouched. While the majority of Indonesians are Muslim, a small proportion of locals are Christians, including the groom. And the people in this region speak Javanese, not Bahasa.
Warning: No, there’s nothing about the Java programming language here, trust me. I tried my best to make a correlation by going into the dark web (a.k.a. the second page of Google), but there’s no evidence that JavaScript was named after the Javanese Indonesian language.
Finally, Autumn arrived. (-condt.)
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