Destination 0

Out of the pure luck I seem to have when it comes to travel opportunities, I find myself on my way to Bali to meet up with some friends for the entire month of August :)

My first stop on my long crusade to the paradise island, is Hong Kong and here I will be for the next 9 hours waiting for  my flight to Kuala Lumpur (a destination I mainly want to go to because the name sounds like Koala bear and who doesn't love Koalas?).

When you're booking flights with long stop overs because you end up saving 20$, it always seems like a great idea when you're on Expedia or Skyscanner, you're like yeah 9 hours, I'll go into the city, have Dim Sum maybe some shopping..... yeah.  The reality after a 17 hour flight where you couldn't get a moment's rest is somewhat different.

So there I was, desperate to lie down, hungry, thirsty and inevitably having to pee and in that tired state where you almost feel like you're drunk.... you have euphoric minutes when everything seems wonderful and you love everyone and then you crash and you hate your life, your new haircut and you really want DIM SUM!!!!

In the trance state of travel, I for one, get very nostalgic, in another life I would have made a great drinking companion to Hemingway.  So Hong Kong is where 7 years ago I started and ended my 8 month hiatus in South East Asia.  I started my trip on a quest to discover the Orient, meet new people and as always try to save the world.  I ended my trip heart broken and without having saved the world.

7 years ago, a great friend of mine came to 'pick me up' in Bangkok where we spent a  few days and then a few days in Hong Kong.  The idea was for us to hang out of course and for her to somehow ease me back into my return.

I remember being in this airport and feeling completely lost, after a year and and half of travel, volunteer work, new people, questioning life, my existence, consumerism, the planet, what was I going back to?  My regular life?  My friends ?  But how could I I was so different now and I wanted to stay different.   And to top it off, on a much less original note, I had said goodbye to what at that moment felt like the love of my life :)

We met in Nepal and ours was a meeting that was movie worthy, long walks under a star filled sky, Everest in the background, prayers in Buddhist temples, at night we would light candles that hardly burnt because of the lack of oxygen, we would burst out laughing when losing our breath after kissing for 2 seconds, we read Nepalese proverbs and listened to local music all night..... it was perfect!  Of course he lived on another planet and ours was never meant to be more than a brief fairy tale romance I could write about 7 years later, but regardless at the time I was heart broken and it felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders.

Now here I am 7 years older, 7 years wiser????  Somehow, for very different reasons I'm almost in the same place (not just physically), I'm once again confused about the direction I want my life to take and once again, for very different reasons, heart broken (God I hope I don't end up here in 7 years....).  So the only thing to do really to make it all better is to get that F**** DIM SUM already!