Getting Lost For The First Time

There’s a young woman I work with who is about to head off on some aimless solo travels. She’s just finished uni, and has no real plans or itinerary although she does have some accommodation booked at her first destination, and of course, she has a smart phone so she’s never far away from anyone or anything. I was once that person (minus the phone because they didn’t exist) and as she was telling me about her upcoming travels I got to thinking about my first bit of solo travel.

In March 1997, having recently finished getting a BSc in Environmental Science, I set off with a return ticket to Bangkok that had a one year validity. That was the extent of my planning. Be back in Bangkok by March 1998 at the latest in order to get my flight back to Australia. I’d been working with someone back then who had done a bit of travelling and her advice amounted to get a Lonely Planet and head for Khao Sanh Rd in Bangkok. I’d wondered about booking a room for the first night but she said nothing in Khao Sanh Rd could be booked, and it was easy enough to get to from the airport.

I got off the plane figuring I’d get an airport taxi to Khao Sanh Rd and find a place to stay. When I’d bought travellers cheques at the bank before leaving they’d also changed some money in baht so I had no need to go to the currency exchange window at the airport. However after I went through customs and came to the line of people changing money, I noticed a few had big travelling backpacks and figured they were probably also heading in the same direction. I went up to the line and loudly asked if anyone wanted to share a taxi. That’s when I met Dale.

Lost in Bangkok

He was probably 15 years older than me, and we’d been on the same flight from Sydney. Unlike me, a novice traveller, he was very well travelled. He was in Bangkok for 3 days before heading onwards to India. He’d been to the kind of places that if it were post-9/11, he’d probably have been arrested and stuck in a CIA prison just for being in. Over the couple of days we hung out, he told stories of being in Eastern Europe as communism fell and getting arrested for illegally crossing a border to see what was on the other side. Of staying in a village in Pakistan and being invited to go and visit his host’s family in a different village. Which was in Afghanistan, and his hosts family belonged to a group that later became part of the Taliban. He went, ate and fired a few machine guns for fun. Of course, no one had heard of the Taliban back then.

It was late afternoon and he said there was no point getting a taxi because it’d get stuck in peak hour traffic and cost a fortune so we may as well take a public bus. He led the way to the bus stop, and along the way we were joined by Larry and Elaine, a French couple who decided to travel for six months, then, if they hadn’t grown sick of each other, to get married. Our foursome headed out of Don Muang airport to the road in front, until an old red bus number 59 came along. Unlike the buses I was used to in Sydney, it didn’t fully stop meaning we had to scramble on, 4 travellers with big backpacks on our backs and daypacks on our fronts. It had open windows to cope with Bangkok’s heat, that only served to let the traffic fumes into the bus. 3.5baht for the ride which took about 2 hours to cover the 25km to the Democracy Monument. One stop past that, we got off, crossed the 10 lane road and a short walk brought us to Khao Sanh Rd. Along it we trooped. Dale had said was better to stay behind the temple at the end, in a quieter street but still only a couple of minutes away. I popped into one of the shops along the road to grab a bottle of water and we continued on our way, 3 of us marvelling at what we were seeing for the first time. Across the road at the end, through the grounds of Wat Chanasongkram, and out the back gate onto Soi Rambutri where we found cheap guesthouses for about 70 baht per double room. We all ate, then Dale led us on a wander down Khao Sanh Rd.

Along Khao Sanh Rd that first night.

It was the next day that I got lost for the first time, an essential rite of passage for the solo traveller, so it was probably best to get it over with quickly. After a morning spent wandering around the Khao Sanh area, Dale had shown me where the river ferry wharf was. My plan was to go and see Wat Arun a few stops down and across the river. I hopped on the next ferry going in that direction only to discover as we went past Wat Arun that I was on an express boat that didn’t stop everywhere. I hopped off somewhere random to find I was near the Sheraton and I wandered out to the road and look around some market stalls. One of them sold Tin Tin shirts, and a friend back home had a young son who was into Tin Tin, so I bought a couple to send wherever I was at a post office. Back to the river and a boat heading back upstream which, naturally enough, didn’t stop at the stop I’d started from. Or the one after that. It finally stopped, I got off and a kindly monk followed me to the main road and pointed me in the right direction.

Wat Arun and the stop I didn’t make.

I still didn’t have any real plans. There was an intention to probably head to Sumatra at some point in order to go surfing at Nias. I’d been tossing up on whether to go north to Chiang Mai, or south to the islands and do some scuba diving. Dale’s suggestion to head south, loop through Malaysia and Indonesia, then work my way back up and visit Chiang Mai then made sense. There were plenty of travel agents in the Khao Sanh Rd area selling bus / boat tickets to the islands but another, cheaper option was to take the local Thai highway bus to Surat Thani and then the boat from there. That sounded good and it was there that I promptly got lost for the second time in the 4 days I’d been in Bangkok. I looked at the Bangkok bus map I had, found a bus that seemed to be bound for the southern bus terminal where I could get a bus south, and hopped on. An hour or so later, it seemed that the bus wasn’t going in the right direction, at least according to my map. I checked with the conductor, who spoke as much English as I did Thai, and it turned out I was on the wrong bus. She wrote down the number I needed to get, and pointed me across the road. As I crossed to that other bus stop, the same number bus I’d just got off approached going the other way. I decided to hop on and take it back to Khao Sanh Rd and just buy a bus / boat ticket from a travel agent and follow all the other travellers on the well worn path to the islands.

When lost in Bangkok, take a photo on the bus.

Those first few days in Bangkok served me well. The incredible information I’d received from Dale about travelling, plus those experiences getting lost and finding my way back were invaluable. There was still an awful lot that I didn’t know but I’d been challenged and got through with no problems. From the Thai islands, through Malaysia, Sumatra, Singapore, Bali, Lombok and the Gili’s, I generally always had someone I’d met along the way to travel with. There would be times alone for a day or three, then I’d get chatting to someone, find out we were both heading in the same direction and off we’d go together. It was as I headed through Java on my own on the way back up to Thailand that I began feeling really comfortable as a solo traveller. I’d been on the road about 4 months by this stage, and by the time I got back to Bangkok about 6 weeks later, I felt like an old hand, and ready to head across to Nepal and India.

One of the great opportunities that travel provides is being out of your comfort zone. Getting lost twice in four days in Bangkok as a very green traveller showed me that things will always tend to work out if you let them. That’s a lesson that’s particular to me and my circumstances. If I were female, or if I weren’t white, maybe it would have been different. I can never know that. I can only relate my own lived experiences and how they shaped me. It gave me the confidence to make travel a massive part of my life, my work, and later led to me living for years in a country where I wasn’t part of the privileged majority. I never saw or heard from Dale again after those first couple of days. There was no social media then, we didn’t even have email addresses. So if you happen to be reading this, thank you Dale.