by Kim Dinan
Earlier, as we’d walked into town, two young children had followed behind us calling, “Namaste! Namaste! Sweet?” We’d grown used to the kids we encountered asking for candy—that type of begging was fairly common but discouraged in Nepali culture—so I’d barely glanced behind me to say, “No, no sweets.” Still, they followed us. “Hello? Hello? Namaste. Sweet?” But when I turned, ready to rebuff them again, I saw that they were not asking but offering us sweets. In their chubby hands they held out two wrapped pieces of toffee.
I knelt down to accept them. “Thank you, thank you,” I said to the children. They giggled and scurried away without asking for anything in return.
Taking the candy from Brian, I unwrapped it slowly and placed it on my tongue feeling humbled. Brian held his toward the twilight as if to make a toast. “To the beautiful people of Nepal,” he said, and slid the candy between his teeth.
Once again I looked toward the mountains. I realized I felt close to something that I had wanted to be close to all my life. I felt insignificant and yet essential, rooted, like my legs had sprouted and grown all the way to the center of the earth.
The monk led us back to the entrance of the monastery in the waning evening light. A small table stood in the corner near the door, stacked with pamphlets about the school, and I picked one up. We urgently need stable sources of funding, it said, to meet basic day-to-day expenses. Our school lacks reliable funding support because our donations are irregular and unpredictable. Your pledge to help, no matter how small, inspires us deeply.
I handed the pamphlet to Brian. He slipped his shoes on and wordlessly headed out to the fence where we’d propped our backpacks. He dug through mine and grabbed the yellow envelope. When he returned he handed the money to the boy. “A donation,” he said, “for the school.” The monk put his hands together and bowed to us in gratitude. We did the same.
Money seemed like a trivial way to show our thanks for what the people of Nepal, their culture, and their landscape had offered us. But that was what we had to give, so we gave it.
As we walked away I hoped that in one hundred years, our great-grandchildren might stumble upon this special place and find it filled with young monks. Maybe they would walk through the cavernous rooms and hear the monks calling their prayers and they, too, would feel the undercurrent of a timeless energy. Maybe they would one day be lucky enough to learn what Brian and I had learned during our weeks of walking in Nepal: that they are standing in the presence of something that must never be lost.
• • •
The tinkling of a bell was the first sound I heard the next morning, louder even than the roosters that crowed unapologetically just below our teahouse window. Outside, the sun sat fat and glowing on the horizon. Two men were herding baby goats on the hillside. A group of schoolgirls in brown sweaters descended a stone staircase, their black hair flying behind them like capes. By the looks of it, the world was alive and thriving. So were we.
It was the one-year anniversary of the day we’d left Portland. I sat back from the window and turned to Brian, who remained asleep beside me. When I nudged his shoulder his eyes fluttered awake. “It’s been a year,” I told him. “Can you believe it?”
A small smile emerged on his lips, and he rolled over to swing his arm around my waist, burying his head in my lap. “We made it,” he said softly.
I smiled. “We did.”
“Hey,” I nudged him again. “We missed the morning prayer with the monks at the monastery.”
Brian pulled his head back and looked up at me. “That’s okay,” he said. “This entire year has been one long prayer.”
Burrowing back down in bed, I closed my eyes and remembered pulling out of town on that rainy Portland morning. I thought about how tears had filled my eyes when I’d read Wendy’s text message, “There’s a reason why Portland cries today.” Back then I’d wondered if we were making the right decision. Now I had no doubt.
The past 365 days had been some of the most challenging days of my life. There had been loneliness and uncertainty and heartbreak. But there had also been so much joy and awareness, like the year had allowed me to peel open the layers of my life and expose the very center of my being.
There’d been many times when I’d wanted to give up on traveling, on Brian, and on my own search for whatever the hell I was looking for out here. But even the worst days had been streaked with an undertone of blessing. I had only to see the yellow envelope in the bottom of my backpack to remember how lucky we were.
Our weeks of walking were giving me the chance to reflect on all of the changes that had taken place inside of me. South America had emptied me, drained me like a leaky tank, and India had plugged the hole and refilled me with a new kind of fuel.
“You can do so much with a year,” I exclaimed to Brian hours later as we hiked, wondering if we were even the same people that had piled into the car that wet spring day. I recalled a sentiment I’d read recently in Peter Matthiessen’s book The Snow Leopard: “This experience has moved me. As in, I’m moved in such a way that I can never go back.”
Up ahead of me, Brian walked through a bright-green field of wild marijuana. His broad shoulders and strong arms swayed as he navigated the stepping-stones beneath his feet. My heart swelled with the sight of him.
In Japanese culture there is an art of fixing broken pottery with gold or silver lacquer. The lacquer highlights the pottery’s flaw as a celebrated part of its history. Because the piece has been salvaged and repaired, pulled back from the edge of destruction, it is considered even more beautiful for having been broken. We’d been broken. And then we’d been pieced back together. The turmoil had been meaningful because now there was gold where the cracks used to be.
I thought back to the second day of our trek. We’d walked all day through a humid valley and eventually stopped for the night at a faded teahouse in a village so small we could stand on one end of town and watch what happened on the other. In the dining room that evening we’d met a French woman. As Brian and I sat on the benches sipping Nepali tea, we’d told her about our roaming, and it pleased her to hear it. At sixty-five, she’d lost her job three years back and took to traveling herself. “I only wish I’d done it years ago,” she said, not sadly, but with the satisfaction of someone who lived the way she wanted to now. “Enjoy this wonderful space in your lives.”
I watched Brian step carefully from stone to stone, his head bowed in concentration. He aimed toward a stand of trees and whatever lay beyond them. Perhaps we would sit down there like Buddhas in the afternoon sun. “Enjoy this moment,” I told myself. “Enjoy it, enjoy it, enjoy it.”
• • •
Two weeks later we emerged from the trail and caught a cab to Pokhara, a small tourist town at the edge of the Annapurna Mountains. We tracked down a guesthouse on a street of guesthouses named for other countries, ours being Iceland, and were shown to a room by the owner, a cheerful Nepali man. The lovely room had two big windows and two small beds, a bathroom, and a full-length mirror nailed to the wall near the door. I dropped my backpack beside my bed and stood in front of the mirror, noting the differences in my body after thirty-four days of trekking in the mountains. The pudginess I’d discovered during my time with the mirror in Peru was gone. Brian walked up next to me and we stared at our reflections. “Look at us,” I said.
Brian winked at me, “We look good!”
I laughed. “We do.” We were fitter and stronger than I had ever seen us.
We took warmish showers and dropped our stinky trekking clothes off at a roadside stand with a handwritten WASH sign hung crookedly from the canopy above it. Back in our room, we pulled our laptops from our bags and connected to the Internet for the first time in over a month.
When I opened my email I cringed at the hundreds of unread messages, scanning through them in search of news from home. At the bottom of my inbox my eyes landed on an email
with the subject THE YELLOW ENVELOPE. I clicked it open.
Hi Kim,
I stumbled upon your blog while looking up world travel online. My husband and I plan to ditch our current lifestyle and travel the world in a couple of years once we get everything in place. I love reading about your story and how you got started on your journey. My husband and I have discussed ways in which we could help people and give back to others as we travel. I was very touched by your story of the yellow envelope and was wondering if I could send you money to be added to the envelope? I’d love to live vicariously through you until we are able to start our own travels.
Jaimie and Will
I’d shared Michele and Glenn’s letter on my blog hoping that their generosity might inspire others, but I never imagined that anyone would actually offer to add to the yellow envelope. “Brian!” I shouted. “You will not believe the email I just got.” Walking over to his bed, I sat down excitedly beside him. “Read it!”
He squinted at the page. “Oh wow,” he said. “Do you know them?”
“No!” I exclaimed. “What should I tell them?”
“Tell them they can add to the envelope! Why not?”
I wrote back, and for the next few hours I felt high from the unexpected generosity of Jaimie and Will’s gift.
Later that evening, back in our room after a dinner of chili momos, I turned to Brian and asked, “What now?” The bike trip to Vietnam with Michele and Glenn was still a few months in the future, and there was no place that we needed to be before then.
“Let’s go back out there and walk the Annapurna Circuit all over again,” he said.
Stretching my legs in front of me, I looked down at them. “Don’t tempt me. I’d move into those mountains if we could get Internet connection. Maybe we should go trekking somewhere else?” I pulled up my browser and typed in a search for flights to the Alps, and the rates popped up on the screen. “Uh, maybe not.”
Brian leaned over to look at the prices. “Yeah, definitely not.”
“How about the beach?” I offered. “We could soak our legs in warm water after all that walking.”
“I could be convinced…”
I typed in a new search. “Oh,” I said. “What about Indonesia—Bali?”
“Bali,” Brian said, rolling the word around on his tongue.
“You know, I’ve heard great things about Bali,” I told him. “And the price is right.”
“Okay, do it.”
“Really?” I squeaked.
“Really!”
I pulled up the flight options. “We’d need to get to Kathmandu the day after tomorrow to catch the flight. Is that too soon?”
Brian smiled. “Nope.”
So I bought the tickets, the thrill of a new country tingling in my spine.
Indonesia
Chapter 16
Like a dream, the travelers on our airplane filed out of their seats and into the aisle one row at a time, no thrown elbows or WWE wrestling maneuvers like we’d grown used to in India and Nepal. “Getting on this plane is a full contact sport,” Brian muttered under his breath as we loaded onto our plane in Kathmandu. But now, like magic, those same pushy people had transformed into line-forming, personal-space-giving, model passengers.
After five months in India and Nepal, the airport in Jakarta, where we were grounded on a twelve-hour layover, sparkled shockingly clean and modern. Feeling suddenly self-conscious, I ducked into the bathroom to splash water on my face and run my fingers through my greasy hair.
The immigration officer smiled at us while he stamped our passports, and the kid at the coffee shop gave us each a free donut. “Where are we?” I said to Brian as we made ourselves a spot on the airport floor.
“I don’t know, but I like it here.”
Besides the donut, we hadn’t eaten since the modest breakfast our guesthouse had served that morning. My stomach began to rumble. “You hungry?”
“Starving.” Brian dug around in his day pack. “We’re out of snacks.”
By now we should have known better than to embark on a travel day without a backpack full of food. “We never learn!” I said, exasperated that after a year of full-time travel we were still making rookie mistakes. I stood and wiped the airport floor crud from the seat of my pants. “I’ll find an ATM and buy us something for dinner.”
As I walked through the terminal I passed a wall of windows. Palm trees were planted in a tidy row just outside. Beyond them, heat shimmered off of the runway. I was still dressed for the mountains in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, but it looked to be a hundred degrees outside. It occurred to me that instead of overthinking things like I used to do, now I barely thought through them at all. I was getting too good at the first rule of the yellow envelope. We’d spontaneously booked plane tickets to Bali and then shown up at the airport without considering that we’d need food for the long flight and clothing for the tropics.
At the ATM I pushed a series of buttons until I found one that read ENGLISH. How many Indonesian rupiah would I like to withdraw? I realized I had no idea of the exchange rate. Swiveling my head in all directions, I searched for some frame of reference. Down the way, a kiosk sold soda and snacks, and I squinted toward it but couldn’t see the prices. The screen beeped at me. Did I need more time? I typed in 50 and hit enter. INSUFFICIENT ENTRY. Scanning my brain, I tried to remember how much money we had in our checking account. I did not want to overdraw. 500, I typed. INSUFFICIENT ENTRY, the screen said again. I added another 0. INSUFFICIENT ENTRY. Cringing, I typed in 50,000. It seemed like an awfully large number. The machine made some beeping sounds and spit out a wad of bills. I shoved them in my pocket and raced back to Brian.
“I think I might have just overdrawn our account.”
“How much did you take out?”
“50,000 rupiah.”
“50,000!”
“I know! Shit.” We did not keep large sums of money in our checking account in case of robbery or fraud. In India the exchange rate had been 50 rupees to every dollar, and in Nepal it was 100. If Indonesia was anything like that I’d just withdrawn way more money than we had in our account. “I started with 50 but it kept telling me my entry was insufficient so I just added zeros until it gave me money.”
“Kim—”
“I know, I know,” I interrupted him. “I panicked.”
Brian stood up. “Watch the bags. I’ll go see if I can figure out the exchange rate.”
He returned a few minutes later with a piece of paper in his hand. “Listen,” I said. “I’ll call the bank as soon as we can get on Skype. Hopefully they’ll understand and waive the charge. I’ll move money over from our savings account ASAP.”
Brian smiled. “No need.” He held the paper in front of him. “You withdrew a grand total of…” He squinted, trying to decipher his own scribbled handwriting. “Three dollars and sixty-seven cents.”
I laughed. “You’re kidding me?”
“Not at all.” Brian handed me a Coke. “And here is your dinner. The ATM won’t let us make another withdraw, so this was all we could afford.” He dropped a few silver coins, the remainder of our money, into my hand.
We found a quiet corner of the airport and settled in for the night before our flight at ten the next morning. I drifted off to sleep for a few hours, but my growling stomach woke me up again. Beside me, Brian read in his sleep sack. Snuggling deeper into mine, I pulled out my Kindle, but just as I switched it on, an announcement came over the loudspeaker informing us that the airport was closing.
I shot a glance at Brian, unsure if I’d heard it right. “What’d that say?”
“The airport is closing.”
“But airports don’t close!”
In fact, the airport was not closing, but our terminal was. We gathered our belongings and left to find a spot in a twenty-four-hour terminal where we cou
ld spend the rest of the night.
Though it was near midnight, a heavy humidity clung to the air. We walked along a covered, open-air corridor to the next airplane terminal. Almost immediately my shirt became drenched in sweat. “I miss the mountains,” I whined. “It’s so freaking hot.” Alongside the walkway whole families were sleeping, their suitcases stacked in tall piles around them, seemingly unbothered by the heat.
We entered the airport again through the front doors of the main terminal. A small woman in a navy suit and a walkie-talkie hitched on her belt stood guard in the lobby. Digging my ticket from my backpack, I showed it to her.
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“No.”
Sweat puddled in my bra and beaded at my temples. I dropped my backpack. “But see.” I pointed at our flight number. “We have tickets.”
“No,” the woman said again, and my pulse began to quicken in anger. Was that the only word in her vocabulary?
Baffled by her response, I was repeating it again, “But we have tickets—” when Brian stepped in front of me. He handled these situations better, patiently and calm.
“We’re flying out tomorrow morning,” he explained. “See?” He held the ticket up for her to see it.
“Tomorrow,” the woman said, emphasizing both the word and how completely clueless we were. “Not now. You come back tomorrow.”
“Can’t we just come inside now?”
“No.”
“But where are we supposed to go?”
The women shrugged her shoulders to indicate that she did not care where we went but that we could not stay there. “Outside,” she said and shooed us toward the door.
Exhausted and hungry, I was irrationally pissed at the tiny tyrant who’d denied us admittance to the airport.
“She’s just doing her job,” Brian grumbled.