Author: Richard Senior

Keeping it Capsule

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Capsules

An alley led through to the cheaper restaurants, a few hostess bars and the capsule hotel I was looking for.

I took my shoes off at the door and put them in a locker. There was a sign with a tattooed man crossed out. It technically meant what it said: that you were not allowed in if you had tattoos, but what it really meant was that you were not allowed in if you were a gangster. The yakuza famously have full-body tattoos.

I filled out a form at the desk and paid, and they handed me a pair of pyjamas, a towel and a plastic wristband with a locker key folded inside. It looked like something the courts would impose on you for a minor criminal offence.

Capsule hotels are aimed at salarymen who have got too drunk at corporate events to find their way home, or would not be let in by their wives if they did. But they are used, much like hostels, by anyone who wants a cheap place to sleep in the city. The other guests were all Japanese, and sober; but it was still a bit early.

There was a vending machine in the lobby with everything a guest might need in the morning: toothbrush and toothpaste, shaving kit, clean underwear and headache tablets. The inside of the lift was papered with flyers for food – to soak up the drink – coffee – to sober you up – laundry – in case you had made a mess down the front of your suit – and massages – in case you could not make it to the hostess bars round the corner.

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On the upper floors, there were beer vending machines and rows of desks with power sockets and partitions, so that sozzled salarymen could set up their laptops and bash out emails they might suddenly remember in the morning, with a stab of panic, as they open their eyes experimentally and start to work out where, why and how.

I changed into the pyjamas, which were made of brown corduroy and reminded me of the jacket my middle school art teacher wore, and shut my clothes and daybag up in the locker. The backpack had to stay out in the corridor.

There were sinks and toilets on that floor and a communal bath in the basement. It was the usual Japanese set up, with sit-down showers around the wall where you scrubbed yourself up before soaking in the hot tub. There were sauna rooms, too, and because it was all-male they had televisions inside screening football, instead of that soothing music which is supposed to evoke temples and beaches.

The capsules were arranged like train station lockers, stacked two-high in parallel rows with a walkway of perhaps two metres wide between them. Some of the guests had left their screens open and, with the rows of feet, it was hard not to think of a morgue. There were rubberised steps and a chrome grab handle to get to the upper capsules. It was like climbing onto the back of a truck. I would not like to try it if I were in no state to get myself home.

The capsule was much nicer than I had imagined, though. It was more cosy than claustrophobic. There was enough room to sit up and read, and a decent light to read by; and there was a television, in case I wanted to watch people being loud and hysterical in a language I did not understand. It was quiet enough with the screen pulled at the end and the sliding door shut on the communal area; but I wore earplugs anyway. Some of the drunker guests who arrived in the early hours made enough noise to wake me up as they tumbled in, but I slept at least as well as I ever do in hostels.

© Richard Senior 2015

Byron Bay: If You Can’t Surf or Skate, Do a Handstand

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No one in Byron Bay seems to do what parents call a proper job.

They run craft shops and galleries, surf shops and skate shops. They play Spanish guitars on street corners for dollars. They make and sell funky jewellery. Or they sit on the rocks and sketch. In their spare time, they surf. Everyone surfs. Old men, surf. Teenage girls, surf. Little kids surf.

You are never more than six feet from a surfboard. They are on sale and for hire in the shops. Strapped to the top of Volkswagen campers, slung in the back of vans, poking through the hole where the window used to be in an old Holden estate. Laid out in rows on the beach.

I watched the surfers riding the swell and gliding right onto Main Beach, or else falling headlong into the waves, then getting right up and trying again. It has got to be the coolest of sports.

But if the surfers are cool, the lifeguards are cooler, strutting about the beach, looking as if they have been carved out of marble. Those who are neither surfers nor lifeguards find their own way to be cool. One spent a day on the beach doing handstand after handstand. Another stood facing the sunbathers, juggling four balls without pause for a morning. He was not after spare change: just showing off.

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One evening I saw a guy on a mountain bike pop a wheelie and sustain it all the way down Jonson Street. A unicyclist passed him, going the other way. Guys in their twenties and thirties skate barefoot round town on old-fashioned downhill boards. I saw one the other side of 45 skating down Marvell Street. Even he looked cool.

Jonson Street, Marvell Street, Tennyson Street, Burns Street: it was all, apparently, a misunderstanding. Captain Cook sycophantically named Cape Byron after Vice Admiral The Hon. John Byron, whose grandson, George, would become a famous Romantic poet to help him pick up girls. But a clerk in Sydney assumed it was that Byron, and named the streets of the town after all the poets he had heard of.

I am not a surfer and I have not skated since I was 15, and I have never learned to ride a unicycle; so I went sea kayaking instead.

I paddled hard through the waves the surfers are there for, let them lift me up and carry me over and slap me back down at the other side; then again and again, until I was through and into smoother water. I spotted a pair of dolphins out to the left, leaping joyously out of the ocean: a wonderful sight. They slipped under the water and disappeared and I paddled on round the easternmost point of Australia.

The sun was hot, the sky was clear and it was hard to think of a more perfect morning.

© Richard Senior 2015

Graduating from Uyuni

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The bus driver stopped twice on the way to Uyuni: once to dump some old tyres at the side of the road, and once for a toilet break at a remote house with an outside loo. It was not at all obvious that the owners had said that he could. The women from the bus formed a long line to use the one toilet. The men, of course, pissed where they felt like.

Uyuni is a small town with a frontier feel and the temporary look of a film set. The wind howls down the broad streets, whipping up dust, and you expect, when it clears, to see Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach among the filthy jeeps and kids on old BMX’s. It is a staging post for the famous salt flats. Every parking space is claimed by an overland truck with the logo of an ‘adventure travel’ company on the side, or a Land Cruiser belonging to one of the local outfits. Buses arrive as incessantly as planes into Heathrow, disgorging travellers, who struggle down the street under backpacks. Everyone ends up in Minuteman Revolutionary Pizza. It has a happy, hostel-like buzz, but the food is not at all revolutionary. I had spaghetti with ‘pesto’ which came from a jar, as I ought to have realised it would.

The Uyuni salt flats, the world’s largest, extend over 12,000 sq km, roughly the area of the Falklands; NASA uses them to calibrate satellites. The outer edges were still under water from the rains of a few days before, and through some alchemy I would not understand if a scientist patiently explained it, the salt, the sun, the water and sky came together to create a perfect reflection.

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The view from the jeep was a view as if from a plane: clouds above, clouds below, and clouds to infinity each side. Without a mountain or another jeep as a reference point, there was no way of telling where the salt flat ended and the sky began.

What used to be the Paris-Dakar Rally before fundamentalists forced it out of Africa had roared through the salt flats a few weeks before and Juanito drove as if training for next year’s event; he had the stickers on the flanks of his jeep already. Further into the flats, the salt was dry and cracked into pentagonal shapes. The sky was a searing, intense blue, the salt flat dazzling white. Flamingos occasionally scrawled a pink line between them.

The conditions induce psychedelic effects. I watched a column of jeeps roll along the horizon and distort into weird, trippy shapes; the bodies compressed, the wheels stretched like elastic, until the jeeps had morphed into a camel train. All sense of perspective goes: someone standing ten feet away looks beyond walking distance. A camera is as easily fooled as your eye, and we spent a giggly hour taking novelty pictures of the sort which appear in the brochures. I held a tiny person in the palm of my hand, then a giant dangled me from his fingertips, a group of us stood in a bowl, resigned to being eaten by a hundred foot man, then a big cartoon dinosaur chased us all away.

Near the edge of the salt flats, there are two long rows of rusting steam trains, sunk into the ground to their axles. They call it El Cementerio de Trenes. The trains were apparently abandoned there when the mines they worked closed in the 1940’s, but someone has gone to the trouble to arrange them artistically in parallel lines and hang children’s swings from a few. Others have gone to the trouble to steal anything worth a few Bolivianos.

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We turned south and drove on until late afternoon, then stopped for the night in a one street town with a cluster of houses, a shop and a backpacker hostel. The room smelled like laundry left in the machine for a very long time and the bed felt like concrete. It was concrete. But I slept better there than I often do at home. Perhaps I should build a bed out of concrete; and, when my neighbour asks me what I am doing with the cement mixer, I can tell him I am making the bed.

© Richard Senior 2015

Gangneung: Sun, Sea and Spy Submarines

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It was a magnificent coastline. The rocks extended out into the sea, an abstract beauty above the surface, a dark shadow beneath. The water was turquoise near the shore, fading to deep blue further out. There were stripes of white sand at the foot of the cliffs.

Yet no one sat on the beach. No one paddled in the sea. No one clambered over the rocks. They might have been shot if they had.

A sturdy fence surmounted by razor wire stretched along the coast. The waves broke onto tank traps. There were watchtowers every few hundred yards, manned by camouflaged soldiers with heavy machine guns and rifles.

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I missed the stop for Unification Park and got off at the next one and set off walking down the coast road, along the security fence. There was nothing to stop me, but it felt like I ought not to be there. It was as if I were walking through a war zone. There was no one else on foot.

It was a hot morning and pleasant to walk and silent except for the droning of insects and the occasional car on the road, and there was a glorious view through the fence. But I could not help but be anxious.  I wondered how I would explain myself to an excitable soldier with whom I had no words in common.

I had laboriously copied 통일공원 – Unification Park – on a sheet of paper to show to the bus driver (he had nodded, then shot past the stop); but I saw the scope for a terrible misunderstanding if I reached for my pocket when challenged by men with guns, so I took out my sheet of paper and clutched it as I walked down the road. I wished that I had not brought my daypack.

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I tensed whenever I walked towards and past a watchtower, and deliberately did not look up at the soldiers, but there was never a shout, or – worse – the click of a safety catch. A troop carrier seemed to slow as it passed me and I thought that it was going to stop, but it was just that the driver was struggling with the hill.

Then a company of fully-armed combat troops with rifles, packs and steel helmets marched up the road towards me. I held my breath as they came close but they marched past, an inch away, as if I were not there at all. It was a routine patrol.

There is good reason for the strong-armed security. One night in 1996, North Korean commandos landed on the shore nearby. When the submarine came to collect them after their spying mission, it snarled up on rocks and stuck fast. The captain burned his papers and tried to destroy sensitive equipment, although it would probably have been of more interest to museums than military intelligence.

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He and ten others were later found shot dead, presumed, by some, to have been executed for negligence. The other fifteen tried to sneak back to the North on foot. They stole food, stabbed three civilians, strangled a soldier and stopped at a ski resort to play video games; but after a frantic seven-week manhunt, all but one had been killed or captured. No one knows where the other one went.

The submarine is on walk-through display at Unification Park. It is claustrophobic enough when you squeeze through it alone with all the hatches open: unthinkable to spend days at a time locked inside it with twenty-five others struggling for space between the engines and bulkhead, the pipes, the gauges, the valves, and the periscope tube. It has had a fresh coat of paint on the outside, but there are still the scorch marks and melted radios in the cabin, and a smell of oil and diesel.

Nearby, there is an old American destroyer which went into service a few weeks too late for the War in the Pacific but got its chance to fire at North Vietnam twenty years later, before it was sold to South Korea. It is claimed as the only warship displayed on land anywhere in the world. I doubt that, somehow; but I cannot immediately think of another, and the point is too trivial to research.

© Richard Senior 2015

Watchtower image via Shutterstock

Fence image via Pixabay

To Set Foot on a Foreign Land

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“The whole object of travel,” wrote Chesterton in The Riddle of the Ivy, “is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land”.

The parochialism of the British newspapers seemed laughable after six months away. They wrote as if the nation’s power and influence were unchanged since 1860, as if it were in a Cold War with the European Union, whose member states were all virtually communist, and as if the entire population of every country outside the OECD were determined to come to Britain to claim Job Seeker’s Allowance, and would if the borders were not kept on a war footing. I had forgotten all that.

I had forgotten, too, that everything here always seems to be broken. The toilet at the airport did not flush; no water came out of the taps, no air came out of the hand dryers. The trains were delayed, as they usually are; several were cancelled, as ever. Every third or fourth shop on the high street had a fading To Let sign in the window. Some big names had gone bust while I had been away. Pawnbrokers were back, although they were not called that anymore.

I got cash from an ATM and stared at it for a moment, nonplussed. Sterling looked like something from a museum: so big, so thick, so conservative in design. No one else’s currency is like that.

It was a five hour journey on four trains to get up north to see my family. Six months earlier, I would never have contemplated it straight after an overnight flight. But it no longer seemed such a big undertaking. In Australia, in New Zealand, in the States, I had routinely spent seven or eight hours on a bus, sometimes day after day. My sense of scale had changed.

For a time, I saw home as a tourist sees it. I noticed the black cabs and red buses; the unarmed policemen; the bluebell woods and the drizzly skies; the thatched cottages and cricket greens; and, less happily, the casual destruction of century-old buildings to make way for disposable office blocks.

The gratuitous thank yous and sorrys seemed quaint now; and it was alarming to see – underneath the civility – a constantly simmering aggression. There is the baffling hostility from shopkeepers who need your custom to stay in business, the tuts and muttered insults in the supermarket aisle if your trolley crosses somebody’s path, the furious faces of the commuting crowd, the people who leap from their cars at the lights and scream obscenities at some other driver, and the virtual certainty of seeing a serious fight if you go out for the evening.

What was wrong with everyone, I wondered. Where was their sense of proportion? Why did they let themselves get so angry over so little? How could someone end up in intensive care because he, or the other guy, spilled a drink?

Seemingly I had set foot on a foreign land.

© Richard Senior 2015

Image: “Red Phone Box” By Dunpharlain (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

A Bog Above Standard

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It is a squat toilet in Southeast Asia: a hole in the ground with grips for your feet to stop you from falling in, a bucket to flush and a hose to clean yourself up.

In Africa, it is a long drop – just the hole in the ground. Sometimes you have as much privacy sitting on the loo as you do when sitting on a bus.

You will not so readily complain about trifling discomforts back home once you have used a squat toilet with an upset stomach and a backpack and nowhere fit to put it down. It will seem luxurious to have a locking door, a flush handle, a seat and soft paper.

Yet in Japan, the average Western crapper – the bog standard bog – seems as primitive as any squat toilet, as brutally functional as the long drop. Almost everywhere, there – even in bus stations and cheap hotels – you get a thunder box with a control panel which looks as if it belongs to an aeroplane, or at least a very expensive washing machine.

You will have a heated seat and a deodorising button, in case you stink the place out, and a sound of loudly percolating water you can switch on if you are planning to make a lot of noise.

There will be a jet of warm water you can adjust for aim and pressure, although if it is new to you, it will make you think you have been taken suddenly ill. That is, if you manage not to misunderstand the picture. Many a traveller has left a Japanese restroom angrily after mistaking that button for the flush and squirting himself in the face.

You start to wonder how even the grandest, most demanding people at home can be satisfied with just a locking door, a flush handle, a seat and soft paper.

© Richard Senior 2015

Poling Day

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The Okavango River was clogged with chest-high papyrus reeds and looked from the bank like a field after weeks of rain. As the polers approached, they seemed to be floating supernaturally over the ground, until they came closer and you could see their makoros through the reeds.

They were modern makoros, made of fibreglass, instead of the hollowed-out trunks of sausage trees. I had seen Malawian fishermen in the traditional sort; but they are rare, now, in Botswana. I slung the tent and my day bag inside, and the poler took my bedding roll, unfurled it with a flourish and fashioned it into a seat.

I sat between the bags and he stood at the stern and poled us away from the bank. The flat-bottomed makoro slid over the reeds with a gentle rasping sound, and into a channel where the reeds towered over us and brushed against my arms either side, and the makoro creaked and the water lapped against it and there was a splash like a pebble flicked into a pond when the poler sunk the pole to the bottom to push us along.

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We followed the small procession of makoros as it snaked along the channel. Flies droned and dragonflies hissed; kingfishers trilled and barbets chattered and lilac-breasted rollers made a sound like a man half-heartedly sawing wood.  Cape Turtle Doves kept up the chant they start at dawn and never let up all day: Bots-wana, Bots-wana, Bots-wana, Bots-wana….

The channel widened further in, and water lilies were scattered across the space which the reeds had surrendered; a little further, we were out in the open river. It was a deep blue against the green and yellow of the reeds, and the poler’s reflection shimmered in the surface. The papyrus closed in on us again as we neared the uninhabited island where we were to camp for the night. The polers ran the makoros aground, and we jumped out, pitched the tents, dug a toilet, gathered firewood and sat out the heat of the day.

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In the late afternoon, we set out again in the makoros. Bullfrogs growled, hammerkops manically cackled, and a bush shrike seemed to be trying to whistle When the Saints Go Marching In. A family of hippos waded between islands in front of us. The weaver birds’ massive communal nests hung from branches over the river. They are built like city apartment blocks, with chambers for each of a hundred pairs, or more.

The sun leaked out of the sky and dripped onto the horizon and its orange effulgence spread over the water. In the half-light, as we creaked and splashed back to our island, the papyrus around us erupted with whistles and cackles, trills and chirps, shrieks and hisses and the hammer-drill grunts of the hippos.

© Richard Senior 2015

Phnom Penh’s Ghosts

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“Phnom Penh city wakes up early to take advantage of the cool morning breeze before the sun breaks through…. Street vendors push food carts piled with steamed dumplings, smoked beef teriyaki sticks, and roasted peanuts along the sidewalks and begin to set up for another day of business.”

Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father

Phnom Penh is still recognisable, forty years on, as the city which Loung Ung so vividly recalled from early childhood, before the horror began.

The architecture the French left behind is mostly still standing, although often close to derelict. There are still the apartment blocks built in the optimistic first ten years of independence in the Bauhaus-inspired Modern Khmer style.

Street food vendors still congregate on every corner. Locals still breakfast on Phnom Penh noodle soup. Motorbike engines still echo through the streets; and cyclos still pedal round looking for custom.

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The old Olympic Market which Ung wrote about – in disrepair then – has since been demolished and replaced with a concrete monstrosity. But the street markets are still what they have always been: meat and vegetables laid out on mats on the ground; fish swimming in washing up bowls.

The French installed Norodom Sihanouk as king, because they imagined him to be malleable; but he ended up leading Cambodia to independence, and tacking to the right or the left as events seem to demand. He was ostensibly neutral in the Vietnam war, but instinctively anti-American and worried about a South Vietnamese invasion; so he let the communist North build sanctuaries in Cambodia.

The US secretly carpet-bombed them, with much collateral damage among the peasants. Sinahouk allegedly approved the bombing in private; and the CIA allegedly approved the coup by General Lon Nol which deposed him.

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Sihanouk, in exile, made an ally of convenience of a Maoist insurgent group known as the Khmer Rouge. His endorsement lent them popular support and they controlled the country by 1975. Sihanouk was nominally head of state again, although in reality under house arrest. They killed much of his family.

The Khmer Rouge cleared everyone out of the cities – even patients from the hospitals – and sent them to work on the land. The five year-old Luong Ung and her family joined what was, for many, a death march. Her parents and two of her sisters were killed.

S21 was a school when the Khmer Rouge arrived. They closed it down and turned it into a political prison. It is preserved as the Genocide Museum. Two rooms are filled with photographs of some of the victims, mostly Khmers, but a handful of Westerners too: an Englishman, an Australian, a couple of Americans and Frenchmen.

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All were tortured horribly until they signed preposterous accounts of how they had been recruited by the CIA or KGB (the two were much the same to that paranoid regime). Then they were taken away and killed. But not shot. The Khmer Rouge did not want to waste money on bullets. They used anything heavy or sharp which happened to be to hand.

There are no captions at the Genocide Museum. None is needed. The facial expressions of the victims are as eloquent as a page of text. Many betray the terror which all of them must have felt. Some look beaten in spirit; but quite a few look defiant. One even managed to smile.

Further out of town are the Killing Fields, where the victims were forced to dig their own graves. There are still mounds of earth where the bodies are piled. Human bones sometimes wash up in storms. Few, if any, of those killed had done anything wrong. They might have worked for Lon Nol’s government, like Luong Ung’s father. Or been ethnically Thai or Vietnamese. They might have been monks, or intellectuals, or just looked like intellectuals. Wearing glasses was enough.

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The West was wary of getting involved in Southeast Asia after the fall of Saigon; and plenty of Western intellectuals convinced themselves that Pol Pot’s Cambodia was, in fact, a socialist utopia and all the reports were smears. It was, ironically, Communist Vietnam which intervened and toppled the Khmer Rouge in 1979. A quarter of Cambodia’s population was dead, by then.

Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, died peacefully at home in 1998. The Western thinkers who had praised the Khmer Rouge or questioned reports of its atrocities simply stopped talking about Cambodia and it did their careers no harm. At least one is now a rock star of political thought. Sihanouk returned as king in 1993. He reigned until 2004. I was in Phnom Penh in January 2013, between his death and cremation. The country was still in mourning.

© Richard Senior 2015   

The Two Japans

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Tokyo seems never to end. Even from 200 metres up, on the observation deck of the Metropolitan Government Building, all you see stretching out until they blur together are thousands of densely packed office and apartment blocks. Only the nearby National Gardens break the monotony of concrete and glass. Rivers, parks, roads and railways are simply swallowed up.

The city streets are as wide as European motorways. The stations are the size of airports. The crowds expand to fill them. Hurrying salarymen toting briefcases. Bent old ladies with surgical masks and bells on their bags which tinkle like the collars which cats are made to wear to stop them catching birds. Orange-haired teenagers hunched over iPhones as they shuffle down the pavement and into the Metro and onto trains and out at the other end without ever looking up.

When the cherry blossoms come, the crowds descend on the parks and sit in huddles under the trees, laughing and chatting excitedly, or jostle with selfie sticks held at arm’s length. They take the train en masse to Naka-Meguro at the end of the Hibiya Line and clog the streets either side of the canal, stopping for selfies, street snacks, beer or cherry blossom ice cream.

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Searing neon fizzes from every surface. Music explodes from animated billboards. It follows you across the street along overhead wires. More of it pierces out of the sides of trucks as they inch through the middle of town.

The noise from  Vegas-scale pachinko parlours deafens as you pass by the door. Digital birdsong plays in the stairwells in stations. Elevators and escalators chatter away to you. The station cleaner’s rig plays Fur Elise to warn you that it is approaching from behind. The Yankee Doodle Boy heralds platform announcements; a jingle celebrates a train’s departure.

Yet even in the middle of Tokyo, there are pockets of perfect tranquility. Just a block or two back from Ueno Park, where shrieking couples lark in swan boats and tightly-packed groups share bentos on mats spread underneath the cherry trees, the scale shrinks and the noise is muted, the crowds vanish and the neon never intrudes. The alleys are lined with old wooden shophouses and discrete galleries, and temples and shrines, gnarled pines and ancient cedars.

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Two hours to the north in Nikkō, there are no high-rise blocks; no neon, no gratuitous music, no bustling salarymen, no teenagers with orange hair. There are just quiet restaurants and antique shops and a mineral-green river which hurtles over boulders and flows under a humped-back bridge.

In the forests in the hills, there are gilded temples with intricately painted eaves and dragons and grotesques and the original monkeys to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. It is as beautiful and as peaceful as anywhere I have been in the world.

To the west, deep in the Japanese Alps, the streets of the old town of Takayama are lined with wooden buildings from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries: inns and craft shops and sake breweries. In the early evening, after the day-trippers have left, an old man potters down the street in pyjamas, and a lady kneels outside her house to pull up weeds, and a couple slowly rolls by on bicycles.

It is hard to comprehend how a single nation can be at once so manic and so sedate, so big, so bright, so loud, yet – at the same time – so quiet and calm; how unspoilt heritage can coexist so closely with ruthless modernity. It is almost as if there are two Japans.

© Richard Senior 2015    

On Planning Trips … and Not Bothering to Plan Trips

/ Richard Senior / 13 Comments

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It was a mixture of idealism and naivety.

I arrived in Bangkok with nothing but a back-of-the-fag-packet list of countries, cities and islands I might want to visit. The plan, such at was, was to book accommodation a night at a time, then decide each day whether to stay on or to go somewhere else. Where to go would depend where the buses, the boats, or the trains might run, and how long it took to get there. I had plenty of time. I was relaxed.

I stayed in Bangkok for longer than I should while I pondered whether to go north to Chiang Mai, south west to Phuket or south east to Ko Samui, and ended up going nowhere.

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Then I found out by chance that I needed to get my Vietnam visa in advance and had to stay even longer while I made some hurried arrangements. The embassy wanted dates, and I had to guess on the spot how long it would take to get through Thailand and Cambodia, and I was too optimistic by several weeks, and wound up having to cut short the journey round the coast and forget about Chiang Mai.

But it worked out okay, because I had time enough left after Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos to see the rest of Thailand.

There were a few times, as well, when I had to move from a guesthouse in which I could have stayed if I had booked two nights in the first place; and times when the trains were all fully booked and I had to wait until the next day, or settle for a long, uncomfortable journey on a bus. But the guesthouses were always clustered together, and there always was a train or a bus I could take without reserving.

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The setbacks were small, and I have rarely felt as free as I did then, in the knowledge that I could, at any time, pack my bags, check out and get on a bus to the next town, the next country. I chanced upon amazing places that I had never heard of and would not have picked out of the guidebook if I had spent days going through it with a highlighter pen and a packet of Post-it notes. It was a lot more fun than working through a detailed itinerary and knowing where I would be every day for the next six months.

It worked all the way through Southeast Asia. But in Australia I had to compromise. I paid several times more than I wanted to pay for the only place I could find in Sydney with vacancies, and trudged round until almost midnight to find a hostel bed in Byron Bay. I was lucky – a friend spent the night on the beach there.

I was still reluctant to book any more than a night at a time, but now booked it online the day before, at the same time as I booked my bus ticket. I got as far up the East Coast as Hervey Bay, then found that the bus to Airlie Beach left at five in the morning and took fourteen hours to get there. It was a discomfort too far for me, so I backtracked to Brisbane and flew. No worries.

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Eventually, though, I ran out of time and never saw Alice Springs or Uluru, nor drove along the Great Ocean Road. This time, there was no chance to catch up later.

I moved on to New Zealand and got stuck in Auckland, puzzling over where to go next. I had not even come with any scribbled down ideas, this time. When I had eventually mapped out a route, I had no time to spare and could leave nothing to chance and had to book all my buses and hostels upfront.

I have never quite managed to get back to the carefree, spontaneous travel of those early months in Southeast Asia. Either I have been too short of time, or the hotels and hostels have been too far apart and booked up too quickly for walk-ins to be at all practical. But I still only book as far ahead as I have to, and try to leave room to plan as I go along.

And I have not yet had to sleep on the beach.

© Richard Senior 2015

Lead image: Photo by Simon Migaj on Unsplash