Hitching to India: The Hunt, Day 1

I figured, what better place to leave than Phuket? I had a terrible impression of this place for years before I even go here, and I arrived to find out that it's bad, but not as bad as I thought it would be. It's full of Russians and resort hotels and scooters and hookers and cheap food and beer. You win some, you lose some, right?

Anyway, this is the place to hitch my way onto a boat, if I'm going to do it at all. It's a super developed island in terms of tourism and big money options. It has at least four marinas for all sorts of boats: sailing yachts captained by retired couples from San Francisco, super yachts owned by anonymous millionaires with crew that look like models, and yachts run by dirtbag travelers who've matured enough to have a boat.

Plenty of opportunities.

Or so I thought. When I made it to Yacht Haven, my last stop of the day, I finally got to talking to a bunch of people who told me that I was about 2 weeks too late. Everyone they knew left towards Sri Lanka early in January. Favorable winds and weather and whatnot.

Well I hadn't spent all day writing notes to post on bulletin boards and zipping around the island's hell-born traffic and road system to give up. Some other people told me that I just need to ask and I'll find something eventually, and I choose to believe them.

After all, if I fail to get a boat, what am I gonna do? Stay in Thailand? Go south through Malaysia? Or get on a plane, god forbid? Fuck that, all three of them. I want to go to India, and I want to go there on a boat.

I posted 8 notes at four marinas. The notes went something like this:

to INDIA and/or SRI LANKA

crew available

Hi, I'm a 27 year old male, American, hoping to travel to Sri Lanka or India.
I'm trying to circle the globe by land and sea only. I've made it this far from
South Korea.

I'm willing to cook, clean, share costs, play mediocre guitar, do general
maintenance, etc. I can leave anytime and have my visa to India already.

Please contact Ethan at:

cyphecks[at]yahoo.com

or

08-8869-5434 (text only though - the microphone on my phone is broken)

Thanks!

I hope it works. I'm going to go back to Chalong Bay, The Boat Lagoon, and the Royal Phuket Marina tomorrow to talk to more people. I'm not going to Yacht Haven again since I spent the most time there today, and more importantly, it's like 45 kilometers on crowded roads through a low atmosphere of smog.

Buses Buses Buses

It was time to get out of China. I was in the south and Vietnam was the next logical step. We left Yangshuo at 11:30AM on a bus and got into Nanning, the provincial capitol around 6PM. You wouldn't think it's too hard to find a taxi at a long-distance bus station after a bus gets in - and it wasn't - but it was difficult to get someone to let us into one for some reason.

After collaborating with a British couple we were on the bus with, we got some guy to get some other guy to let us in his van. We all spent the night at an apartment hostel, quite similar to the one I stayed at in Busan on what was technically the first night of this trip. It was run by a talkative Texan named Weston who had questionable but entertaining parenting impulses.

The next morning we had another problem getting a taxi because the massive boulevards were jam-packed with such a torrent of vehicles that it was uncertain whether one would actually be able to stop to pick us up. We did make it though, and boarded a bus to Hanoi, again with the British couple.

Two days on a bus is not my idea of fun. You stop at piss-rank gang bathrooms and can buy only imitation Pringles and shrink-wrapped meat and flat Red Bull to sustain yourself. I guess it could've been worse though.

When we got to the Chinese-Vietnamese border, we were shuttled off the bus to the first processing building on the Chinese side by long covered golf carts. The Chinese official had a hard time believing that the handsome, bearded, long-haired man in my passport was the same handsome, clean-cut, short-haired guy standing in front of him. Just like the offical when entering China. Fortunately his superior came over and waved me through.

We were shuttled to the Vietnamese processing building, breezed through, and were shuttled onto another bus on the Vietnamese side. All in all the border process was like a casual drive through a leafy mountain park, a world away from the penitentiary-like marches on the Mongol/Russian and Mongol/Chinese borders.

The "bus stop" in Hanoi was a wide street even more choked with scooters and traffic than any street I'd seen in China. It was borderline inconceivable how a coach bus like ours could navigate the beat-up alleys full of scooters coming towards us, and even pull U-turns across roads that seem too dense to walk across. I guess if you're big enough, anything will stop for you.

As if two days on a bus weren't enough, Adam insisted on getting the hell out of Hanoi ASAP. He claimed it was just another city, but I thought it was possibly the most interesting city I've ever been to based on the few hours and one night we spent there. I can visit more on the way back.

We took a bus, part of a three-day tour, the next day to Halong Bay, a world-famous climbing destination of thousands of gumdrop karst pinacles towering above turquoise waters. Judging by the tour buses and hordes of tourists, it's also a world-famous tourist trap. Understandably so, as beautiful as it is, but that's another story.

Stop! Thief!

Recently, a lovely afternoon of bike-riding through the idyllic countryside surrounding Yangshuo was marred by a heinous act of crime.

Adam and I were peacefully navigating the tiny cement pathways that wind around farms and fields to the southwest of the city. We had just spent the day cycling out towards Moon Hill, a striking natural stone arch cut out of one of the numerous karst peaks rising out of the greenery.

I was riding in front on rickety one-speeds we rented from our guesthouse. My bike had a sluggish bell on front a makeshift basket on the back. I had my day bag stuffed in the little basket with my camera and journal tucked inside.

Suddenly, in the blink of an eye that seemed too short to contain all that it did, I heard a zooming approach me from behind and shake my bike and produce a sharp ripping sound as a scooter screamed past me and jerked my bike a bit off balance.

Not 'til the two teenage boys on the scooter were about 15 feet past me did I realize what had just happened. The little punk on the back had snatched my bag as his buddy gunned it past me, but had failed to actually steal it thanks to the fact that I had the foresight to wrap the strap around my bicycle seat.

The strap catching produced the ripping sound I heard and the jerking off the bike. I didn't fall over, but stopped when I realized what happened and put my bag back in the basket and screamed threats and obscenities at the kid as he smirked at me as he was fading into the distance.

What really got at me, beyond the fact that a little fucker on a scooter nearly took off with my camera with hundreds of pictures on it and my journal with months worth of thoughts and observations and activies was that look on his face.

It was the look that said it was just a game to him. What would've been a near catastrophic loss to me would've been something fun for him, something funny he did to a stupid foreigner he could laugh about with his pimple-ridden buddies, and the fact that he didn't get away with the bag meant nothing to him and that smirk told me he'd probably just get the next one.

I was irate, I wanted to hunt him down and pulverize his skull with my bare hands. I didn't even realize which way he and his friend went off at the next fork in the road because I was too busy getting my bearings back, but the rest of the ride I thought only of violent fantasies that involved me running into him further down the trail, or me re-working the moments of the actually attempted robbery.

Here are some highlights of my fantasies of vengeance, which quite fortunately for him - and me, as I would've surely wound up in a Chinese prison cell had I gone through with any - didn't come true:

1. My reflexes were like a cat's and I recognized the threat of theft as soon as I heard the buzz of the scooter approaching and before the pair on the scooter can zoom by me I throw my left elbow out and knock the passenger off to the ground. As he is stumbling to his feet with a bloody face I knock his teeth out with a punch and then turn to his buddy, the driver, who by now has turned around to try to help his friend. I pull him off the bike and kick him off the cement path down to the farmland a few feet below.

2. The little punk grabs my bag, but I leap off my bike and grab a nearby rock (or my folding pocket knife) and pelt him square in the back of the skull so he falls off and drops my bag. I retrieve my bag, and then continue to the violence described above.

3. The little punk grabs my bag, but I leap off my bike and snatch the scooter of a local farmer and run them down. The kid sees that I'm crazy enough to be scared of, and throws my bag away hoping it will distract me. I scoop up my bag, and continue chasing them until I can knock the passenger off. Proceed with violence described above.

4. Recognizing the kid in town, on a crowded street where I couldn't just start pounding him, but where I could order a dish with the most peppers I could find, I walk over towards him and "accidently" trip and smash the fiery dish into his eyes, curtly "apologize" and walk away while he is writhing in pain on the cobbled stone sidewalk.

All above instances except for the last one, with other variations that involve me hitting the driver's hand with a rock so he fucks up the steering and crashes, and so on and so on, would naturally end with me ghost-riding his scooter into a ditch or throwing a match into his tank or otherwise wrecking his ride, and spitting in their beaten faces and then taking the money out of their pockets and ripping it to shreds and smothering it into their bloody faces along with the spit.

Of course, the best part of the story is that the little fuckers didn't get away with my shit and none of the above had to happen. I guess I'm lucky I had the foresight to wrap the strap around my seat, though I never really thought anyone would try to steal it.

A lesson learned indeed, almost the hard way.