Stealing Asia (4 page)

‘How far to the
station?’ I asked.

‘Not far,’ he
assured me.

At exactly five
o’clock we pulled up onto a street corner. I could not see any buses. I waited
for the policeman to let me out, but he remained in his seat.

‘Is something
wrong?’ I asked.

‘No. No,’ he
replied. ‘Is good.’

After a minute
or so he finally got out of the car and walked around to open the back door,
but not to let me out. Another Thai man, this one in civilian dress, placed
three carrier bags filled with groceries onto the back seat before getting into
the front with the policeman.

‘This my
brother,’ said the policeman.

The second man
smiled and I suspected that he did not share in his sibling’s command of the
English language. The policeman started the engine and we pulled back onto the
road. It was quarter past five when we finally arrived at the bus station.
There were two coaches parked up. One was clearly out of service as it was
being worked on by a mechanic and the other one was just starting to pull out
of the depot. The policeman accelerated past it and swung his car around to
block its path. As he did so, I was showered with groceries.

The policeman
and I then got out of the car and he spoke briefly with the driver of the bus
he had just stopped. After a few moments he got back in his car and reversed
out of the bus’s way. I expected the driver to open up the luggage compartment
for me. Instead, once the road was clear, he climbed into his coach and pulled
out leaving me stranded by the roadside. The policeman parked up before coming
over to join me.

‘That was
lucky,’ he said. ‘For moment, I thought we miss bus.’

‘We did miss the
bus.’ I told him.

‘No,’ he
replied. ‘That your bus.’

He pointed to
the second coach. The mechanic was still fiddling with the engine. Random
machine parts were strewn across the ground and whilst I watched, this pile
only got bigger.

‘What now?’ I
asked the policeman.

‘Now we get
ticket,’ he replied. ‘Wait here.’

A row of tables
placed on the roadside constituted as the ticket office. Representatives from
several companies had set up shop and ordinarily I would have expected them to
all try to compete against one another for every potential customer. Seeing the
policeman, they were content to accept his choice of whom he did business with.
One of them wrote out a ticket and the policeman brought it over to me.

‘Here you go,’
he said.

I took the slip
of paper from him. This time it was written in English, but the price remained
the same as my original bogus ticket. The destination had merely been reversed;
it was for Hat Yai.

‘Not Hat Yai!’ I
shouted, storming over towards the vendor as I did so. ‘Samui – I want to go to
Koh Samui.’

The man was
clearly shocked by my outburst and looked to the policeman, who shook his head
as if to show that he was disappointed by my attitude. It would not have
surprised me if I was arrested to teach me another lesson. Fortunately, he had
decided that I had received enough of an education for one day. My ticket was
exchanged for one with the correct destination and I was finally able to board
my fully air conditioned coach. The mechanic got the engine working a little
before six and then I was finally on my way. As night fell, I reclined back in
my seat and allowed my mind to take a well earned trip into oblivion.

***

I had no idea how
long I had slept. The bus was now still and the windows revealed only the empty
darkness beyond. None of the other passengers stirred as they remained unmoving
with their veiled heads bowed toward the floor.

‘Is this the
ferry port?’ I asked the lady next to me.

She did not
respond. I was not even sure if I had spoken aloud as I had not felt my lips
move. In fact, my whole body felt numb as I began to float up out of my seat
and over the heads of the passengers. It did not feel like I had any control
over my movement as I struggled to break free of the invisible current that
carried me.

‘This is not my
stop,’ I protested, but again the words went unheard outside of my own inner
comprehension.

The bus had been
parked alongside a vast and empty field, which I soon found myself to be
standing in the middle of. I do not know how I had drifted so far from the
vehicle and my immediate desire was to return to it. I attempted to walk back,
but the bus got smaller and smaller as it slowly shrunk away from me.
Bizarrely, I could see that the vehicle remained stationary and it was I that
was moving further away despite walking towards it.

‘You’re going
the wrong way.’

The voice was
distant, yet close. It was comforting, but resonated with danger.

‘Asia?’

There was a
momentary silence as I waited for the wind to carry my words to her.

‘You’re going
the wrong way,’
she repeated.

I turned around
one hundred and eighty degrees and walked into a thick mist that was rising
from the ground like dry ice.

‘Asia, where are
you?’

The fog was
thickening around me, creating a narrow tunnel, which gave me the sensation of
being pushed down it. I no longer felt like I was doing the pursuing. It was as
if somebody was behind me, herding me along.

‘Who’s there?’ I
asked.

In response, the
fog seemed to close in on me more quickly. Not wanting to lose myself
completely to the haze, I started to run faster and faster. I had no idea to
which direction the bus lay, but it mattered not as I had already abandoned any
hope of returning to it. All I wanted was to free myself of the growing mist.

‘Over here,’
I heard Asia say.

I turned to face
the direction from which the voice had come and found myself approaching a
border checkpoint not unlike the one that I had narrowly avoided crossing in
Sungai Kolok. It was manned by the same man who had sold me the bogus ticket in
Hat Yai.

‘Passport,’ he
requested as he held out his hands.

I patted my
pockets, but they were all empty.

‘Passport,’ the
man repeated, more urgently this time.

The Thai people
have the broadest, most welcoming smiles in the world, but when they are not
smiling their features are stern and unreadable. I had no idea if his next move
would be to chastise or to hug me. There were no people waiting behind me, but
I still felt like I had to act with urgency.

‘I seem to have
mislaid it,’ I said, hoping to buy myself more time. ‘It must be in my bag, but
I don’t have it with me.’

He bent down
behind his desk and pulled out a rucksack; my rucksack.

‘Here bag,’ he
urged.

I opened it up
and the first thing that I found inside was a passport. It was just not my
passport. The picture seemed hazy and I was not able to focus on it. The same
could also be said for the name embossed within. Just when I thought that I
could decipher who the document belonged to, the letters would dance around on
the page, confusing and confounding me. With each viewing it was different. I
looked further into the bag and found that it was filled with more of these
mysterious passports. Glancing through them, I had the same difficulty
deciphering the names and photographs. If mine was amongst the pile, I could no
more distinguish it from the others. It was like being in a library where all
of the books had no covers.

‘Passport,’ the
man requested once more.

This time he
attempted to take one of the inexplicable documents from me.

‘These are not
mine,’ I told him.

He brushed my
protest aside with a sharp wave of his hand.

‘It no matter.
Give passport now.’

I handed over
the first one that came to hand and he gratefully took it from me. He then
flicked through it only briefly before typing something on a keyboard in front
of him. There was no computer monitor to go with the device.

‘Is that okay?’
I asked. ‘Am I free to enter?’

‘Yes, yes –
enter.’

I passed through
the gate, which led on to the deck of a large ship. At first I needed to do a
double take as I had not noticed crossing over water, but I was definitely now
on the deck of a large passenger ferry. The checkpoint and the man were no
longer behind me and had been replaced by the bridge of the vessel. I carried
on walking into a cabin and upon doing so the door slammed behind me. I quickly
spun around to find myself confronted with iron bars. The cell started to
shrink around me and I screamed to be let out. I could feel my anxiety levels
rising towards panic and as they did so, the floor beneath me began to vibrate
and my screams were drowned out by the bellow of a foghorn.

And then I was
back on the bus.

Many of the
passengers around me were rousing from their slumber, whilst others gathered
their belongings. There was not a headscarf in sight. Like me; everyone on
board was a tourist or a backpacker. I assumed that many of them had gotten on
the bus whilst I had slept; most probably at Hat Yai. Through the window, I
could make out the silhouette of an approaching ship, its foghorn cutting
through the dead of night like a wrecking ball. I had slept all the way to the
small port town of Donsak, where I was to finally make the crossing to Samui
and then on to Koh Pha Ngan.

Chapter 4

The port at Koh
Samui was packed to capacity as the ferry docked shortly after sunrise. The
welcoming committee was composed solely of hungry taxi drivers with one eye on
their fare and the other on a healthy commission from whichever guesthouse that
they chose to boost the population of. Rather than ask them to recommend a
place to stay, it would be simpler to cut through the pretence and just ask who
was paying their wages.

I shrugged off
their advances and pushed my way out of the crowd to try and find a less
competitive form of transport. Another traveller noticed my apprehension around
the taxis and he directed me toward the closest thing that the island had to a
public bus service, which was a network of small open backed jeeps that the
locals called sawngthaews. A few other backpackers had the same idea and along
with the helpful stranger, I joined them on the back.

The seating on
the vehicle consisted of two wooden planks running parallel along the sides. No
seatbelts were provided and the only thing to hold onto was an overhead guard
rail. As the driver accelerated sharply, I was soon forced into putting the
rail to use. Luckily, the road ahead was straight, lessening the odds of my
being prematurely dropped off on the dusty jungle trail.

‘You are going
to Ko Pha Ngan - yes?’ asked the man who had helped me.

He had dark skin
and his accent, though slight, was recognisably Spanish.

‘Maybe, if we
survive this drive,’ I joked.

He offered me
his hand.

‘I am Esteban
Cruz.’

His grip was
firm, but reassuringly, not aggressively so.

‘Benjamin
Travis, but you can just call me Ben.’

‘Ben it is then.
So tell me, Ben, are you going to the full moon party tonight, by any chance?’

‘Me and about
twenty thousand others. I’m hoping to meet a girl there.’

‘After a few
drinks, every guy will be looking for a girl, I think. You may have competition.’

I moved my
hands, but had to quickly return them to the handrail as the driver took a
ninety degree turn without even dropping a gear. The road was unsealed and I
decided it best not to let go again.

‘It’s not like
that,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for one girl in particular. We spent some time
together in Malaysia and I’m hoping that we can pick up where we left off.’

I used my free
hand to take out my digital camera. I showed Esteban a photograph of Asia that
I had taken shortly before she left for the airport. He seemed impressed. The
way that Asia looked, this reaction was only to be expected.

‘She is a
beautiful girl; does she know that you are coming to meet her?’

‘Of course,’ I
replied. ‘I’ve not known her long, but it was her idea for us to meet up.’

‘How long
have
you known this girl?’

The tone in his
voice had changed ever so slightly. He did not sound suspicious or patronising,
but I got the feeling that he seemed more interested than appropriate for
casual small talk between strangers. The answer to his question was just a few
days, but I saw no harm in telling a white lie.

‘A few weeks,
but you know how it is when you’re away from home. Travel years pass like dog
years.’

He nodded.

‘How did the two
of you meet?’

Again, the
question seemed a little off somehow, but I was still carrying residual
paranoia from the nightmare trip I had endured getting this far and decided not
to read too much into it.

‘She was walking
back to her guesthouse alone one night when some guy jumped her. I was in the wrong
place at the right time and managed to fend off the attacker. Afterwards, she
was adamant that I was her protector and it kind of snowballed from there.’

The story worked
much better when I left out the part about the hit and run. I went on to tell him
about my unexpected detour. He did not seem alarmed or surprised by the way in
which I had been scammed and I wondered if maybe I had blown it all up a bit in
my head. Esteban was remarkably adept at extracting information. I felt like I
could have told him anything.

Whilst we
talked, the sawngthaew slowed down to pick up a couple more passengers. They
were both locals and did not ask any of the backpackers to move up to create
space for them; they just clambered onto the back and remained standing whilst
holding onto the railings. They possessed a reckless ease, which left only
centrifugal momentum to keep them from plunging to their deaths. I was not
entirely sure that the laws of physics were on their side.

‘Do you have a
place to stay on the island or are you relying on this girl of yours?’ asked
Esteban.

‘Probably just
the girl,’ I replied. ‘How about you?’

‘I am not too
concerned about finding a bed. When you party until dawn it is not necessary.’

We were dropped
at the base of the most rickety pier I had ever seen. It looked like the last
surviving remnant of a typhoon. Many of the boards were missing, but I got the
impression that they had never been there to begin with. It shook with the
weight of a hundred fully laden backpackers and I feared that it would give way
when it was my turn to walk the plank. I am usually fine with heights, but
always wary around water.

‘Relax,’ urged
Esteban. ‘It’s structurally sound or we wouldn’t be on it. If you’re really
worried, just try and step on the nails, because they’ll be the strongest
points.’

I followed his
advice, but it did not make it any easier. Due to the large gaps in the
boardwalk, I had no choice but to stare down directly into what could have been
a potential burial at sea. Sure, I could swim, but the sixty litre bag I bore
on my back might as well have been a concrete overcoat.

‘Just keep
thinking of this girl of yours,’ said Esteban. ‘There are only half a dozen
more boards to go and you’re there.’

The pier led
onto a small metal platform, which the boat crew had used to bridge the gap to
the vessel. Seeing this as safer, more solid ground, I was eager to get onto it
and my last stride off of the wooden gangway was more of a leap. I came
crashing down hard onto the metal bridge and my weight was enough to dislodge
it from its unstable mooring, causing it to give way under my feet.

I heard the
platform make a splash as it hit the water below, but I was still suspended in
midair, my legs flailing hopelessly on the wind. Instinctively, when I had
begun to fall, I had grabbed onto the straps of my backpack just to hold onto
something. With the bag attached this should have been a futile gesture, but I
soon felt the pull of the straps as I was being winched upwards, back onto the
pier.

‘You could try
and be a little more co-operative,’ said a strained voice from just above me.
‘After all, I am in the process of saving your life.’

I craned my head
and saw Esteban standing over me with the balled fist of his right hand
clutching the top of my bag and his left hand clamped firmly onto a supporting
pole of the flimsy pier. I immediately reached out for whatever I could to ease
his burden. Luckily, there were plenty of other travellers there who soon
grabbed onto me and helped hoist me back to safety. The Thai boat crew had been
more concerned about retrieving their boarding platform and did not join in
with the rescue effort.

‘You must think
that I am a complete fool,’ I said to Esteban.

I received pats
on the back from other amused travellers, but he was not smiling.

‘Do not beat
yourself up,’ he replied. ‘It is unlikely that you are the first person who has
lost his footing here; look.’

He pointed over
the gap between the boat and the pier to where the crew were hoisting up the
metal platform using a rope, which had been attached for such an eventuality.
None of them looked particularly surprised or worried about what had just
happened.

‘Thanks, all the
same,’ I said. ‘You just saved my life.’

This time he did
smile.

‘Think nothing
of it, my friend. You already told me how you saved the life of this girl of
yours, so you have no reason to feel indebted to me. Think of it as a karmic
pay off.’

‘It’s hardly the
same thing,’ I began, but then stopped myself.

The crew soon
had the platform back in position and they walked across the bridge several
times themselves to prove to the nervous travellers that it was now properly
secured into position. This time I crossed without incident.

Once we were
safely on the boat and seated, an attendant walked down the aisle dispensing
maps of the island. Our arrival point was a stone’s throw from Hat Rin where
the full moon party would be. When we got there, the pier was just as crowded
with taxi drivers fighting for custom as its counterpart on the first island,
so Esteban and I decided to bypass the initial melee and stuck around the port
to grab some lunch.

I was feeling a
little anxious now that my journey was almost complete and needed some food to
settle my stomach. Whether the nerves had been brought on by the thought of
seeing Asia again or the worry that I may not find her at all, I could not
tell. Having Esteban around did at least make things easier.

Any doubts I
might have had about him evaporated after he had saved my life. The incident in
Hat Yai had made me wary of trusting strangers, but I thought Esteban had more
than proved himself. If the policeman in Sungai Kolok was right and somebody
did want to stop me from seeing Asia again, I now had back-up. It was time for
me to go and find my girl.