It’s past dark in Tokyo but the air is still thick and sticky, the mid-afternoon rain having dispelled none of the day’s awful heat. Instead, the night is soupy. The long road I’m walking down smells of pine sap and engine oil. There are few people around: some taxi drivers reading in their cabs parked alongside the road, a delivery guy napping beside his scooter in the grass, a couple playing badminton under a streetlight in the distance in some park I don’t know the name of. The chewy air hangs under the lamplights like a fog, slightly yellow in the weird halogen glow.

My shirt is already clinging to my skin. This is bad. I’m on my way to have dinner with 20 strangers that I’ll spend the next week with, and for once I’d like to not make a sweaty first impression. I slow my pace, but it’s futile. I need a better plan.

I come to a crossroads near the restaurant where I’ll meet the group in an hour or so, and find a cluster of deeply air-conditioned-looking bars that offer an immediate solution. I walk into the first place I see, which happens to be a rum-and-cigar bar with a live band. In typical Tokyo fashion, it’s a little strange and alienating. The four men sitting at the bar look like they’ve never sat anywhere else. They smoke Churchills with an irritating, effortless cool, they sip from big cups filled with mint and ice, they wear floral shirts under leather jackets, and surely they are part of a popular Japanese subculture I’ve never heard of. So this is the Havana Boys Biker Scene? Never have four people so perfectly fitted their surroundings. When my bourbon-and-tiny-cigar combo arrives, these men raise their glasses to me in unison, a well-rehearsed gesture that fails to put me at ease. Instead, I puff away in uncool contrast to them: hurried, nervous, lame.

It’s not them, it’s me. I am nervous. I check my watch, fogged in the air conditioning. In half an hour or so, I’m going to meet one of my personal heroes, the man that I’ve come to Tokyo for. I’m about to meet Steve McCurry.

Even if you don’t know the name Steve McCurry, you know his work. He’s probably best known for the National Geographic cover shot of a young Afghan refugee girl named Sharbat Gula, who Steve met at a refugee camp in Pakistan in 1984. It’s a gorgeous and subtly haunting photo: her piercing green eyes, her tattered red shawl, this innocent person looking at once scared and curious. It’s technically perfect, too. The contrasting colours are superb, the gaps in her scarf matching the green wall of the dismal tent. She’s startled, she’s temporarily safe, but she’s fundamentally lost. It’s the ideal photograph, and emblematic of Steve’s work. But it’s simply one of many perfect photographs he’s taken.

His career spans five decades and hundreds of thousands of rolls of film. My favourites of his photos are from China and Burma, where he captures a kind of essence that most photographers don’t. Look these images up. Or the ones of animals. Or his post-tsunami Japan photos. The monsoons in India. Any of it, really. He’s undisputedly one of the great photographers.

And as I smoked my cigar and sipped my whisky, he was waiting at a restaurant around the corner to welcome me and other photographers to his inaugural Tokyo photo workshop. We’d spend a week together, sort of, walking around in Tokyo and trying to create some nice images. I had been looking forward to this for years. It also terrified me.

This welcome dinner I was nervously await-avoiding would be my first impression of Steve and the photographer with whom he hosts these excursions, Eolo Perfido, a Roman with his own exceptional talent. I planned to be ever-so-slightly late because I was worried about being the first person there, but the punctuality of the group disarmed me. Five minutes before the dinner, I received panicked texts from the organizers saying, “Where are you?” I stubbed out my cigar, received salutes from the four cool dudes, and hurried the two minutes to the restaurant. I’m pleased to announce that my tactic worked and my shirt had dried.

When I walked into the restaurant—the inspiration for the Crazy 88s fight scene location in Kill Bill—that nervousness disappeared almost instantly. Our group had mostly arrived and were seated upstairs at two large tables in an area of the restaurant where guests are asked to remove their shoes and sit on the floor. Several pitchers of beer were already on the tables, and people were laughing and talking loudly. I quickly introduced myself to someone, who said, “Have you met Steve?” and then without warning I was shaking Steve’s hand and doing small talk with an idol. He was warm and friendly and said, “Let’s have a great week!” or “Glad you could make!” or something. That was it.

I had built that moment up for such a long time, for so many reasons. Rarely do I write anything about travel without mentioning Paul Theroux (undisputedly the great travel writer), whose books always featured photos by Steve McCurry. They travelled together (sort of, I’d learn this week; in my head, at least, they always travelled together). I remember the disbelief I felt when learning that they were connected at all—wait, the Afghan Girl photographer is the one who takes the photos for these books I love? In the same way that I equate Theroux with travel I equate McCurry with journalism. But tonight, he was just a guy having dinner, like the rest of us.

I sat at the end of the other table, across from Eolo’s assistant—by day a page in the Italian Parliament—and a couple from Seattle: Steve, who would be taking the course, and his wife, who was in Tokyo for the first time. Steve was quick to ask about gear and to identify himself as an enthusiastic amateur. To my right was Quin, a triple-retiree in search of Pokemon cards for her grandson, facts she repeated often. Quin had been a general in the US military and a university statistics professor (and a third thing), and she suffered no fools, she often said. Beside her was a young Malaysian guy, Xander, who Quin had adopted as a kind of pan-Asian interpreter. He patiently explained every item of food that came out, which she would then try and declare delicious. Xander lived in Bangkok and worked in tech as a project manager, and had a personality type I identified from my day job: studious and organized, an excellent listener and communicator. He also had a curious mind and a good sense of humour. I liked him immediately. Further down the table sat Ana, a ridiculously talented wedding photographer from Mexico, and Caio, an infuriatingly handsome Brazilian photographer living in Vancouver. I’d grow close to them both over the week. At the table with Steve and Eolo were four Colombian wedding photographers and a few of the spouses of the Italian crew that helped Eolo. The Italians never quite explained what they did, but from time to time would speak up in the WhatsApp group or share their location.

As an introduction to the two famous photographers, the evening was something of an anticlimax. But this was good for my nerves. A casual and low-key dinner ensued, pleasantries were exchanged, and pitchers of cold Japanese beer poured and refilled and poured again. The meal ended early, and we all shook hands and went our separate ways into the heavy night air. Wired and jet-lagged, I trudged back to the cigar bar, nodded with significantly more confidence to the Havana boys, and ordered a Churchill and some bourbon. I felt like I had earned a celebration.

The next morning, the celebrating weighting heavily, I bumped into Xander on the platform at Yotsuya Station. The workshops were in different neighbourhoods every day, so I had decided to stay in Okubo, just north of busy Shinjuku. I was on my second train to get to the kickoff session at the Leica Flagship Store in Ginza, so bumping into Xander was extremely unlikely, bordering on serendipitous.

As I wrote about in the introduction to this story, a previous version of me would have ignored this and waited to randomly see him a third time before assigning any significance to run-in, but 2025 me called out to him and we shared an awkward, sticky half-handshake, half-hug, then rode to Ginza together, talking about what excited us most about the coming week. We agreed that one of the highlights of this entire week would be what awaited us that morning: Steve McCurry walking us through his portfolio.

Both Steve and Eolo are Leica ambassadors, and the workshop had advertised that we’d been in the classroom at various Leica stores around Tokyo. The director of the Ginza branch greeted us in excellent English (he had lived in Rhode Island or a similarly pointless state for 10 years) and ushered us past the vintage cameras on the showroom floor to a classroom upstairs, where 20 uncomfortable but stylish chairs had been arranged in rows facing two armchairs and a screen. Since we had all been acquainted the previous evening, the mood was light and easy. People mingled, chatted comfortably, made bad jokes. The staff all wore black and came and went through sliding panels in the wall. It was all so futuristic and Japanese.

Before long, Steve and Eolo took their seats and the workshop began. Eolo—who would drive all logistics, coordinate daily sessions, and generally project a forlorn and tortured artistic aura—laid out the schedule for the day. We’d look at both Steve’s work and his work and try to grasp what made a street photograph good. We could ask questions at any time. We’d break for lunch, then learn some more. And then, that afternoon, we’d have our first session of shooting, something around Ginza, just to practice the basics.

We started with everyone giving a quick introduction, including a bit of their background as a photographer and the gear they’ve brought. My imposter syndrome immediately flares up. People explain their 20-year professional career, name $12,000 Leica cameras. “I’m a travel writer,” I gulp. “Canon 5D, mostly just a 35mm lens.” There are no follow-up questions; I’m safe.

Steve and Eolo gave a bit of their personal histories. Eolo is a portrait and street photographer who spends 6 hours every morning walking around Rome snapping black-and-white photos. He’ll later show off his portfolio, including his stunning in-studio portrait work, but on the first day of the workshop I have no real awareness of the depth of his talent. Steve tells his story in broad strokes. He studied filmmaking and then just took off to India for a year, where he made a name for himself as a photographer.

Backgrounds established, we move on to the thing I’ve been most excited about: Steve McCurry doing a slideshow. Steve has taken millions of photos, so he begins with a modest presentation of photos he has taken exclusively in Japan. The format is perfect. He just kind of advances through photos at his own pace, telling stories behind the images if something springs to mind. He encourages questions, but it takes us all a while to work up the nerve, pick our jaws up off the floor. His work is uniformly beautiful, but I’m personally surprised by a sense of humour I hadn’t noticed in it before. And a darkness.

Though something of an informal aficionado of Steve’s work, there was a lot here I hadn’t seen before, or even known about. Forget the monkeys who hang out in the hot springs or the girl in the kimono running down the stairs to catch a train: Steve had been in Japan—coincidentally, he says—during the tsunami and nuclear events at Fukushima, and I was seeing these pictures for the first time. There is so much good work, so many compelling photos. My favourite is one of a shipyard, but all of the boats have been lifted up placed back down at horrible angles, and walking amongst them is a person in a hazmat suit and their frail and tiny human body is perfectly placed in the frame between some of the boats, the wreckage, the end of the world, a few pylons toppled over, all that flotsam. This image makes me instantly reflect on my entire output as an amateur photographer. I feel insignificant and untalented. I have never viewed the world so clearly as this man has in a one-off photo, never had the vision or patience to compose a photo that tells this kind of story. But, hey, that’s what we were here to learn.

When the Japan slideshow is over, Steve begins showing some of his other work from around the world. There are so many photos from India, one of which is on the cover of a book from 1985 called The Imperial Way, by Paul Theroux and McCurry. I had found it on sale at an art gallery in Toronto a few weeks before coming to Japan, and felt that my time had finally arrived to ask an intelligent question. As a travel writer, I have only ever worked with a photographer on assignment once. Either I was expected to take photos to accompany a piece, or—more commonly—I would file the story well in advance of the photos being taken, and a local photographer would be dispatched with a list of sites to capture. This latter approach was common with in-flight magazines and the travel sections of newspapers (though more and more Canadian papers asked me to wear both hats and provide photos with any piece I filed). What I had always heard about Theroux and McCurry, on the other hand, was that they travelled together, and this book with a double byline confirmed that rumor. But I wanted to set the record straight, if only to myself.

“When you take photos for someone’s book or a magazine story, do you travel with the writer or do you get an assignment separately?” I feel good about this question. Steve immediately laughs, and I assume it’s a kind of winky laugh, appreciating my insightful question with my inside knowledge of the biz. That’s not quite right.

“Oh god, no,” he starts. He laughs some more. “On this particular book, the writer was Paul Theroux. He was on this trip with his wife and would spend all day writing at the hotel bar while I was lugging all my gear around, climbing up on roofs. Look: as a rule, the writer is always at the hotel bar, and the photographer is always the one doing all the heavy lifting.”

I laugh. Everyone laughs. It’s a great answer, a great moment. He’s so relaxed and unguarded, so casual and confident. He moves on through his slide show, out of India and into Afghanistan, where he spent a lot of time in the 80s. He shows a stunning photo of a remote and ruined village, where a family huddles around a fire in a building without a roof. It’s a very wide shot and a long exposure, and the effect is chilling. More breathtaking images come and go, and eventually he comes to the photo he’s best known for, colloquially called The Afghan Girl.

Everyone in the room nods, and a few hands shoot up. People have been waiting for this moment. “How did you meet her?” is the first question. “What about the controversy?” is the second. “What do you think of this photo?” is the third, and best.

The controversy question wasn’t intentionally broad, but its vagueness ended up being useful. There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the photo, which at its core is that of a vulnerable minor at a temporary refugee settlement. There are claims that Gula was angered by the picture, once she became aware of it in 2002. There are accusations of poverty porn and/or white saviourism, questions around consent, and a fascinating academic discussion around the aesthetics of suffering. The image is taught in university courses on photographic ethics. Not knowing which of these controversies the question referred to gave Steve a chance to spitball an answer that touched on various fronts.

He was reunited with Gula in 2002, after a decade-long search. Steve had made multiple attempts to locate her during the 90s, and it wasn’t until 2002, with a team from National Geographic, that a series of clues led him to her in her hometown in Afghanistan. She was identified through iris recognition technology, because multiple women claimed to be her and multiple men claimed that she was their wife. Gula had of course never seen the photo or known that she had been on the cover of National Geographic. Steve took her photo again and she appeared on the cover for a second time, and they have remained in close contact ever since. He provided financial assistance for her and her family’s Hajj pilgrimage and legal assistance when she was arrested in 2016 in Pakistan for using a forged identity card. In response to her arrest and international attention—the long hand of her National Geographic cover(s) fame—the Afghan government provided her and her family with a home in Kabul. More controversy. Gula has led a long and difficult life, Steve calmly but heartbreakingly explains. As he tells these stories, he has the look of a kind of sad parent, dismayed and devastated by the choices his child has made, desperately but quietly hoping for a better outcome.

Okay, sure, but how does he feel about the photo? This question brightens him up considerably. He explains that he had been in the area for days, aware of the tent being used as a school for girls. He had stopped by previously. One day, he asked the teacher if he could take some photos, which was acceptable with children in a way that it wasn’t with young Afghan women. He was struck by the green eyes and red scarf of Gula, which he liked for their contrast. He liked the light in the tent. He liked the green wall and the green eyes and the red together. He explained that he always looks for contrasting colours, so chose to take her photo for mostly this reasons. Gula kept covering her face, but the teacher coaxed her out of her shyness. Eventually, he had what he thought of as a perfect shot: compositionally perfect, vaguely representative of a time and place. He was a photographer before a journalist, he explained with a laugh. And then he explained, so candidly, something I’ll never forget:

“People have taken this photo to mean so many things. But remember this: she’s a kid. I’m a strange man. She doesn’t know me, we don’t have a common language. I’m sticking a camera in her face while she’s at school, and her teacher is there trying to calm her down. People see things in her eyes. I see a little girl who is confused about a strange man and a camera; I don’t see a person contemplating the fall of a nation, an invasion by a foreign power, the loss of home. I see a confused little kid.”

I love this answer too. I suppose I had never really thought of the girl on the cover of a magazine in the 80s as representing a regime change or repression or anything in particular, but I was a kid too the first time I saw it. What I love especially in the context of this week, geared as it is toward exploration and learning, is the rawness of the answer, of the simple truth it contains. He saw the right colour combination, the right moment, after a week or so of being in the region and not finding the shot. But he knew it was there somewhere, so he kept coming back.

This, I believe, is the secret of his work: time and patience. People say right time, right place—but I think for Steve it’s more about right place, and just allowing for time to pass and pass and pass.

And so eventually we hit the streets of Ginza, inspired and raw. The group has spent the day looking at some of the best street photography ever taken—both Steve’s own work and all of his historical favourites, especially Henri-Luc Besson, at whose apartment Steve would crash whenever he was in Paris for a Magnum meetup—and then we were set free to experiment and explore and feel inadequate. The real photo sessions would start at the famous Shibuya crossing in the morning, so this afternoon was meant to be a low-stakes waddle around what isn’t an especially photogenic district.

We all started as a clump outside of the Leica shop. The brief was simple: get to know your equipment, read the light, try to get some unposed portraits of strangers, and, if you were feeling brave, one posed portrait of a stranger. The idea of the workshop was to have these kinds of daily touchpoints with each other at the start and end of each session, but to shoot alone. This makes sense. It’s hard to be inconspicuous as a group of 20 people with big camera kits, and anyway photography is a solo endeavour, all about how you specifically see the world. Other photographers around are a distraction and an influence, we were told. But on this first afternoon, in test mode, we walked down one of Ginza’s polished streets as a huge gang, unsure of where or how to get started.

It was more of a social event than a photography session, at least at first. I chatted happily with Caio, Ana, and Xander, while we all looked around for some ideal subject. Steve and Eolo were half in host mode, half in photographer mode, Eolo more so. Here was the first practical lesson: neither held their camera in their hand. Steve had his hanging around his neck and Eolo’s was dangling loosely from his wrist. There was no urgency to their movements. They were chatting along with everyone, but their eyes were flitting around constantly, searching. Eolo snapped into action first.

In a garage behind a restaurant, a teenager with a stereotypically Japanese haircut is having his smoke break. He has a kind of chopped bob, very 90s anime, and his white shirt is buttoned all the way up to his throat, but is stained wherever he wiped his hands, which is everywhere. Eolo clocks him before anyone else and immediately zeroes in. The kid is lost in his phone and his cigarette, and Eolo gets right up to him—within 8 inches of his face—and starts snapping away. We knew from earlier in the day that this is his technique and his strategy, to get in before someone notices and then to ask them later for permission. He gets a few shots before the kid even looks up from his phone, then nothing really changes. Eolo says something in English and the kid laughs and goes back to whatever he’s doing, and Eolo keeps going. This is a smooth and easy outcome to his approach, which he insists can always get his subject onside.

Across the street, the rest of us are aghast. I look at Caio, who mouths the word “unbelievable.” Ana says, “He’s fearless,” then laughs her addictive laugh. None of us will admit this, but we don’t yet possess this quality, this fearlessness, and it makes us worse as photographers. We need to learn to be in peoples’ faces. That’s another point of this week. Standing in that uncomfortable knowledge, we instantly disperse. We’re emboldened and feel like a gauntlet has been thrown down, so off we go to get in some faces.

I’m terrible at this. There’s something especially uncomfortable for me about getting into the faces of Japanese people, who I know to be reserved and private. I think part of the reason that Steve and Eolo chose to do this workshop here is because the Japanese are too polite to say no to this style of intrusion, and so it’s very easy to get up close and personal. If people are uncomfortable, they’ll never say so. More or less.

I chicken out on the up-close portraits, at least for the first day. Instead, I spend two hours in the blistering afternoon heat trying out another of the day’s lessons. I find some nice light, some good backgrounds, and compose my shot and wait for someone interesting-looking to walk through it. The results are mixed. Every shot looks lazy or uninspired, and I feel self-conscious and hacky. The people are too far back in all my shots, and it shows how afraid I am to get close.

The area in Ginza close to the Leica shop is small, so everyone in the class keeps bumping into one another. I see Ciao bravely asking a shopkeeper if he can take her portrait. He snaps a few frames and then looks at me and shrugs to say “I haven’t got it yet.” Ana is nearby, sneaking up on two smoking businessmen in front of a bright mural. She sees me and waves warmly, then gets back to work. Later, I see Xander leading Quin back toward the Ginza metro stop, he smiling patiently and she saying loudly, “I have absolutely no idea where I am!” He laughs gently and shoots me a knowing look. It’s all so friendly and sweet.

Eventually, I tire of taking mediocre photos and slide into a stool at a bizarre Basque bar in a little alleyway. The two young Japanese bartenders seem surprised to have a customer, and I order a txakoli and a gilda and forget where I am in the world for a little while. I review the photos I’ve taken for a few minutes before Ana texts what over the week becomes a customary “where are you” message. “Dinner?” she follows up. I walk back toward the main road and find her and Caio, and we wander through a crowded laneway until we find space at an izakaya for a beer and some snacks. Our cameras are all on the table, and we’re chatting while reviewing the day’s shots. When we see something we like, we turn the screen to the others, who offer a live critique and ample praise. And so a routine is established: after every session, we meet nearby to cool off and share our work. I’ve never been surrounded by other photographers like this, shooting and sharing all day, every day. It’s intoxicating.

In this relaxed and encouraged state, I get my first good photo of the trip. A strange man with a floppy briefcase approaches our table, wearing a red shirt and a red spotted tie. His shirt is bulging at the seams and struggling to remain tucked into this belt. He has a kind of curled short perm. This is all quite unusual for Tokyo, but he soon provided an explanation: he popped open his briefcase and took out a deck of cards. Of course. He’s a roaming magician. He hovers over our table for a few minutes, doing card tricks in Japanese/pantomime, and all the while I’m able to take sneaky shots with my 35mm lens. This is my wheelhouse. When he’s done Ana accidentally tips him $50, and soon after we are scolded by the restaurant staff for drinking some mezcal she has brought with her and is pouring generously into our water cups. Before long, we head our separate ways into the steaming night. It’s not too late, and we have an early start the next day at the busiest intersection in the world.

The next morning, our whole group waits sweating in the shade of the only tree at the Shibuya crossing. It’s already 9 a.m. and the day is scorching, the heat unforgiving. Shibuya is one of Tokyo’s largest commercial districts and the pedestrian crossing outside of the train station was made famous by Lost in Translation and has featured in other iconic films like … Sonic the Hedgehog 3. As many as 3,000 people cross the intersection in a single green light, and when it’s raining and nighttime and all those people have transparent plastic umbrellas that bounce up and down as they cross the street, the scene is nothing short of magical. This morning, with the morning rush hour over and the temperature in the high 30s Celcius, Shibuya is unusually quiet. A few campaigners for the upcoming election shout half-hearted appeals to the few passersby, but otherwise the area was sleepy and overheated.

Steve and Eolo gave the morning briefing and offered two options for the next few hours: Steve would head off to some back alleys and Eolo would work the crossing, each with different goals as part of today’s checklist: a posed portrait, a reflection, sometime geometric (preferably triangular), a figure in isolation in a busy world, etc. Eolo points out a rooftop bar with an entrance fee, and Steve mentions something about the light in a couple of hours. And then we disperse.

Even on a quiet morning the crossing is pleasantly chaotic, with people going in all directions from the five streets that meet here. The crossing itself only takes about a minute, and then there’s three or four minutes when everyone lines up for the next light to change. The photographers can be seen on all sides of the crossing, stalking behind an interesting person, readying themselves for the next rush into the street. I enjoy this so much: wandering around in the heat, camera hanging from one hand, looking for someone with a unique outfit, a particular way of standing, a spectacular hat, anything. I’m spoiled for choice, here, with cosplay teens and hungover salary men and hunchbacked women carrying heavy shopping bags, and what’s more is I love this style of shooting. I take most of my pictures underhand, knowing what the lens is seeing from years of taking sneaky portraits. I love the angle and depth of the 35mm lens hanging just below my hip, the sense of movement it creates. It’s how I’ve been taking photos for nearly 20 years, and I’m comfortable with and good at it.

But after an hour, I realize this isn’t the point. I’m not here to be comfortable doing what I’ve always done, so I force myself away from the crossing to try to do my homework. I find some eels languishing in a tank in a department store window and try to compose reflected shots as per the instructions. I look for triangles. I follow lone figures around from a distance, trying to take a photo that shows their loneliness, the scale of the city. After half an hour, I’ve absent-mindedly drifted back to the crossing.

It’s nearing lunch time, and getting busier. I have some hairbrained idea about a shot from above, so find the rooftop and pay the entrance ticket and get the free beer it comes with, then chat with a Canadian couple who are marvelling at the madness below behind a plexiglass partition that ruins all of my photos. I’m only carrying wide-angle lenses, so I run out of shots I can take after about 10 minutes, then head back to street level.

There’s a kind of mania now. It’s properly busy and hundreds of people are queueing on each side to get to some spot for lunch or to the train. I wait at the busiest corner, ready for action. This mostly involves scanning the crowd around me for a new subject every time the light changes, and if there’s no one interesting, scanning the crowds on the other corners. If the person is on the same corner as me, I get ahead of them and walk quickly into the middle of the intersection then turn around and look for them. If they’re on an opposite corner, I walk slowly toward them, waiting for the scene to unfold. I hold my camera up to my eye like a proper photographer instead of trying to take my standard sneaky underhand shots. I look not just for triangles, but at the geometry of everything: the lines of the crosswalk and the towers behind and the arc of an umbrella nearby or the crooked swoosh of a dress in a sudden gust of wind.

It’s probably my favourite session of the week. My style is better suited to this light, to the chaos. A few other people from the workshop are back at the crossing and we’re all kind of using the same technique of chasing people from corner to corner. It’s frantic and hilarious to me. We’re all adult professionals on an expensive holiday trying to closely follow people around a city that they live in, frivolously spending a day trying to show how weirdly a normal person here lives their normal day. It’s preposterous and fun and therefore so, so funny to me.

I see Eolo doing his lazy walk this way and that. He seems mostly unmoved by the scenes but carries on with crossing at every green light, which also cracks me up. He’s so used to creeping along behind strangers that nothing in this crazy place is speaking to him. I see him raise his camera once or twice, but he never shares the photos, so they must not have been very good.

Eventually, the heat saps us all, and the group disperses. I eat some noodles and Ana messages me to tell me she’s along nearby Cat Street with some others, so I wander over to sit in the heat and drink American beers with her and the Colombians while we all charge batteries in a nest of extension cords outside a Texas-style barbecue restaurant. We hand our cameras around to offer a live, in-person review of each other’s work, and this time I’m not really embarrassed. I know I got a few great photos, and take quiet joy when someone says “Wow” and tilts my camera to the person sitting beside them. I say a few wows of my own, all genuine. These people are so good at this. They are professional photographers, after all, specialized in weddings but technically gifted and with such an eye for a scene. Sharing these beers in this heat feels so familiar and comfortable.

When everyone leaves to head back to their hotels for mid-day naps, I carry on along Cat Street, looking for more interesting scenes. I can feel a change already in the way I move along with my camera, which dangles from its strap by my side. I’m no longer hurried. I scan the street for an interesting background and find a few, waiting for someone interesting to go by. I peek into shops to see if anyone looks interesting, I start to ask people if I can take their pictures. I seek good light.

The lessons are starting to sink in, my brain is starting to rewire. The pattern of shoot-rest-share-shoot-rest-share forces so much reflection and self-critique in ways I’m not used to and I’m already getting addicted to it. I can’t wait to find an air conditioned spot to look back on photos, to start to edit. I’m seeing myself get better in real time; another intoxicating feeling. I’m always ready to get back out and shoot more, if only to then want to get back in and review more, share more. It doesn’t feel manic, but rather calm, easy, controlled.

I keep walking northward toward Shinjuku, where we’ll meet for that evening’s session, back in my favourite Golden Gai. I notice that all urgency has drained out of me. Whatever awaits me—that evening, this whole week, the rest of the summer, the rest of the year, whenever, always—will come and will go easily, and I will move toward it and through it just like this, slowly, slowly, slowly.

***

From up here at the very top of the mountain, the staggering size of this neighbourhood becomes clear. A city-within-a-city unfolds beneath me, ramshackle houses stacked on top of each other, spilling down the valley, and the neighbouring valley, and the next, onward toward the rest of Medellin. Most of the houses are simple unpainted rust-coloured brick, the roofs various colours of corrugated metal, many rusted to match the brick. Far below I can see the new school, and farther still the San Javier Metro, the sort-of-centre of the sprawling and chaotic Comuna 13, which was until very recently the most dangerous place on earth.

So claims my guide Juanjo, who was born just beneath where we’re standing, in one of the deep folds of Comuna 13. From the lookout, which is really just a sidewalk beside a few small shops and a house where a woman is hanging wet laundry over the banister of her stairs, Juanjo is pointing out what he considers to be the most interesting things about his district. He is very proud of the aforementioned new school, wary of some of the newer rooftop bars with their gaudy statues for selfie-seekers, but for the most part he talks non-stop about the two most important features of Comuna 13: the mass grave and the escalators.

At the beginning of the tour, somewhere out of sight far below, Juanjo began to weave a narrative that connects the two. We’re standing beside a fenced-in cement futbol pitch in a little gully that forms the intersection of three large sub-districts. In the 90s, when Juanjo was still a young child, the invisible boundaries between those three neighbourhoods were ruthlessly enforced by the three rebel groups that controlled their respective areas. He says that 8-10 people were killed each day in Comuna 13 in the 1990s and early 2000s, many of them right here where the futbol pitch now stands. Today, elderly women stand chatting idly, a taxi lingers waiting for a passenger, and chickens and turkeys roam around a muddy playground strewn with trash. It’s a normal place, if a little run down. But it’s safe. Most, importantly, it’s safe.

Juanjo attributes that safety to the outdoor escalators that connect the highest, steepest parts of this side of the comuna. On the other side of Comuna 13, Medellin’s famous cable car public transit takes commuters from the metro station to the top. But Juanjo is from this side, and he doesn’t care about the cable car. For him, the escalators are a symbol.

The other symbol: a salt mine in the hills far above the district that fell to disuse in the 90s and was used as a place of mass burial for people killed during Comuna 13’s most violent year. In 2002, in an attempt to crack down on guerrilla forces in the area, the Colombian government—with the support of the US, whose shadowy tendrils reach deep into every Colombian crisis of the past 50 years—sent the military into the area, with soldiers promised a bounty of about $100 USD for killing a guerrilla soldier. The accounts of the year that followed are varying and conflicting, with the government claiming as few as four civilian deaths and locals claiming that more than 1,000 bodies were buried in the mass grave. The bodies belongs to average citizens, usually young men, who would be shot and then dressed up in the outfit of the guerrillas and then handed in for a bounty. Juanjo’s family lost two people in this way, and everyone he knows lost someone. Only 50-some of the victims been identified so far. The mine is visible from almost everywhere in Comuna 13, greenish grey and looking down on all these houses, the new school, the escalators, the survivors.

For some reason, the narrative of this tour is rankling me. I can’t put my finger on it, but I’ve spent the first hour feeling slightly annoyed, mildly uncomfortable. Part of me—the intellectually lazy part—booked a tour so I could go to a picturesque neighbourhood and snap some nice photos of local people living local lives, looking photogenic. I pictured graffiti and rooftop parties like Anthony Bourdain found in Comuna 13, impromptu cookouts and everyone getting warmly adopted by the neighbourhood. Instead I’ve found an important history lesson, a survivor of a massacre, darkness. I keep trying to shake off the feeling of discomfort, and keep failing.

We begin walking up from the soccer field, past the small, muddy playground where some chickens and a turkey roam freely. The going is steep, and it’s easy to feel out of breath in the altitude of Medellin. I gaspingly keep up with Juanjo, trying to learn more about his childhood. He tells me how he used to walk to school from the top of the barrio down to near the metro station, but not on the paths we’re standing on now. He took the backroads—though not really roads, more narrow stairways and alleys passing between the houses; there were thousands of these routes up and down Comuna 13—because the direct route skirted too close to that deadly invisible line. We take the direct route going up, and for a brief moment I see a kind of wonder flash across Juanjo’s face as he looks to the right, across that old boundary. How free he seems. He sees me watching and points to some running water, then says, “Our small river! Look, see how those houses there are still made of wood.” He looks behind for the others on the tour. “Is everyone doing okay?”

We stop in a field where locals are walking their dogs, a few kids are playing. There’s a huge grey building, kind of brutalist, with fenced-off staircases where mice are scurrying about. This is the new school. It’s huge, but empty today because of the Christmas break. The walls are plastered with posters in English and Spanish, and Juanjo brings us nearer for a closer look. One says “Todxs sabemos quien dio la orden” (we all know who gave the order). Another: “Todo rio es sagrado” (every river is sacred). “Colombia stop war” in English. And another in English that Juanjo wants to discuss:

“Mariscal Military Operation happened in 2002. But the crimes remain unpunished in Comuna 13. We don’t forget.” Beside this another that says “But the victims continue to resist.” Juanjo stays silent for a minute, his eyes searching our faces for comprehension. He looks up into the distance at the salt mine. “Who wants to see the only outdoor escalators between houses in Latin America?” he asks with renewed enthusiasm. I keep watching the mice run up and down the stairs of the school.

We walk a little further up through wide, paved streets. Medellin’s ubiquitous charming green buses chug up and down the street. The security guard at the school smiles widely and yells a good morning from behind a barred checkpoint. So many people are out walking dogs, many of which are cute, few of which are on leashes. How free they all seem.

Before long we’re in one of the busy, really touristic areas, the end of the roads and the start of the staircases and near-vertical alleys at the top of the district. There’s a kind of long vendor-lined walkway with all the standard tourist fare: Colombian soccer jerseys, magnets with Pablo Escobar’s image, knock-off luxury bags, pot brownies, prints of the local murals and graffiti. We politely decline our way up this alley and then head for some stairs. The lanes get more narrow (though still vendor-lined) until we reach a small opening where 40 or so chairs have been set up in front of a dance troupe. The lead dancer is addressing the audience entirely in English—”We need some energyyyyyyyy!”—and the crowd cheers. The dancers are really, really excellent; it’s a mix of choreographed moves and then break dancing and acrobatics. There’s a guy who can dislocate his shoulders and gets twisted around ridiculously as part of one routine. Everyone is laughing and cheering, and then the hat gets passed around for donations, I give happily.

And then we finally come to the main event: the escalators. Juanjo has been hyping these all day, and pauses one last time to build the tension. “We will take escalators two through six. You should follow the rules of the escalators. No running or even walking. You should stand and let the escalator take you up. Those people in the grey uniforms are there to make sure no one is walking on the escalators. This is for your safety and everyone’s safety. Let’s go!” This last is said with more enthusiasm than I’ve felt for anything in my life. We go.

It’s much like you’d think: standing on an escalator. They move at the normal speed that escalators do, past bars and shops selling T-shirts and drinks. At each landing between escalators, vendors swarm to offer micheladas or hormigos—fried “fat ass ants,” according to one sign that are said to be (according to that same sign) an aphrodisiac. On the third or fourth escalator, I find myself alone with Juanjo. “Have you ever been on an escalator outside that goes between houses?” he asks. He’s beaming. I tell him about the escalators in Hong Kong, how they take commuters up through Central during the day and then back down at night, how the whole thing changes directions. He looks crestfallen, and I feel terrible. I don’t know why I’ve said it.

“But do they go up and down at the same time?” he asks, finally.

“No! They don’t! That’s right.” I reply, and he brightens. “And they don’t go between houses,” I add.

That’s right!” he says. “They don’t go between the houses.” He smiles broadly and looks around, then nods happily. They don’t go between the houses.

We stop for coffee and visit a couple of galleries. We have a frozen fruit thing that is delicious and refreshing. We walk down the tiniest of staircases and end up back at the bottom of the escalators, standing on the patio of a closed empanaderia. Juanjo arranges us in a circle around him, and begins his final speech. “At the start of the tour, I told you I would tell you one big surprise when we finished. Here’s the surprise.” He gestures at the building behind us. “This was my house where I lived. Here, at the bottom of the escalators. But we didn’t have them then.”

This is the moment when it all clicks into place. All day, he had been explaining that the escalators were the reason that the violence ended, and I didn’t understand it. Under that green-grey shadow of the mass grave, the escalators seemed to me trivial. To me, the violence ended and then later the neighbourhood added escalators. And after the escalators, the kind of typical tourist trappings found anywhere in the world. I saw only mundanity and overdevelopment, but failed to understand how significant and life-changing mundanity, with all its calmness and safety, can be. No wonder Juanjo was so transfixed by the idea that these escalators went between houses, including his childhood home. People live here, have survived here, and now they have an easier way of getting around. They aren’t looking over their shoulder at each new sound, or worrying where the lines have been drawn by the men and teenagers with their automatic weapons. How free they all are.

I’ve been here before, and a lot of it feels the same. For one, the feelings are the same. Or the exhaustion-driven emotions are the same. I am bleary eyed and overly warm and I have this strange sense of hurry, a need to make up for the lost time after basically a whole day has been lost to a flight, to the international date line. That feels samesy, too. Is samesy a word? I’m loopy. But wait, the setting is samesy, too, now that I think about it. I’m standing in a long queue at immigration at Haneda International Airport, in Tokyo.

I was the first off the plane, hoping to avoid exactly this situation, and at first the airport seemed vast and empty. Haneda had been renovated and remodelled since I was last here. It feels far grander and better organized than I remembered. The corridors are now decorated in the high Japanese spartan style, meaning there’s no art, just long clean lines and perfect, functional architecture. Every now and then the nothing-cleanliness is interrupted by a poster for a Big Japanese Brand, a Sony or a Honda, but these too are refined: a picture of a bamboo frond in the morning dew and a single, calligraphed, ornamental character in elegant Kanji. Hope, or Peace, probably.

The border is busy, really busy. I remember this too, but something is different about it now. Japan is in the midst of a huge tourism boom. Last year saw the most-ever tourists to the country (nearly 37 million) and 2025 forecasts suggest this number will be easily surpassed. Its popularity as a destination is in part due to the weakened yen but mostly because people seem to have discovered that Japan is safe, comfortable, and a generally easy place to travel. I’ve been coming here for nearly 20 years and my only warnings to friends and family have been that, compared to the rest of Asia, Japan was expensive (which isn’t really true any more) and that almost no one speaks English, so communicating with locals can be tricky if you don’t try to learn a bit of Japanese. This last point is still true.

For example, and finally an understanding of what all this has been about: the immigration line at Haneda airport. On the TVs mounted above the long queue is what amounts to an advertisement for health insurance, though it takes the form of a cautionary tale. It features a traditional woodcut-style drawing of a geisha and a headline that reads, “There are cases in which medical expenses during a trip to Japan can add up to a high amount.” The ad offers a case study: “Collision with a bicycle resulting in traumatic pneumothorax and fractured ribs” then some figures about the estimated costs of a hospital stay (7.5 million yen, or $75,000ish CAD). There’s a heartwarming line about how if you fail to pay hospital bills you won’t ever be allowed back in.

The second real communication in English is even more spectacular. Each immigration desk has a sheet of A4 paper taped to it with a photoshopped image of a dog, a cat, and a hamburger. The poster also has a little map and the following text (I’ve retained the capitalization as it appeared): “Whoever with DOGs, CATs, and/or MEAT products, TURN LEFT after the baggage claim and GO TO the ANIMAL QUARANTINE.”

After the long line and the weird digital immigration kiosks where you scanned a QR code to be told a letter (A, B, C, or D) that you had to remember but that never comes up again, I got my passport stamped and waited by the baggage carousel for my checked bag, which was directly beside the ANIMAL QUARANTINE. Whoever, I thought. Whoever indeed. One wall behind the ANIMAL QUARANTINE desk was covered with an enormous poster with the same DOG and CAT from the A4 sheet, their places reversed this time. It read, quite simply:

“Not INSPECTED yet? DOG CAT Come here”!

Beside that were replicas in several languages of a poster with various meat products and a cartoon dog in police uniform looking disapproving that you might bring said meat products into Japan. In Vietnamese, the poster was missing the cartoon police dog. Perhaps the Vietnamese are sensitive to animals telling them which meat they can or cannot smuggle into Japan. It took a little while for the bags to come out, during which time neither dog nor cat came there.

In many ways, this is the perfect reintroduction to Japan. It’s a place that feels on one hand officious, rule-driven, repressive, and overbearing, while on the other hand whimsical, ridiculous, slapdash, and hilarious. There’s a proper process for everything, but you’re free to ignore it. On my first trip here, two decades ago, that’s exactly what I did: I ignored it. I don’t remember there having been quarantine rules or English signage or anything like this. I was so new to travel then, so bewildered and charmed by everything, that I faintly or faultily remember what arriving was like. But this was certainly a change. What else had changed in Japan?

Well, Since the Covid-delayed Tokyo 2020* Olympics, Japan has made deliberate steps to make it easier to be a visitor. The English signage, for one. The trains announced the stops in a few different languages. Google Maps worked perfectly. In fact, everything felt more simple this time around, more inviting. This is a curious thing that would make a better/more thoughtful piece: this feels like Japan turning us Japanese in a small way, making us comfortable with a vast affordable public transit system, with complicated machinery to buy our train tickets and our lunches. Forget Japanaphilia, this was Japanification from within. Come to our country, learn our ways, then return home and feel badly when waiting an hour for your bus, pal.

This isn’t that story. This one is entirely selfish in its reflections. This is about the ways in which Japan hasn’t really changed at all, and how helpful that is in showing me how I have.

I spent my first evening in Tokyo retracing old paths, having decided before arriving in Japan that these free days before a photography workshop began would be a nostalgia tour. This was my fifth time in Tokyo, and there were things I had missed dearly: the clear plastic umbrellas for sale at every convenience store; the vending machines; the New York Bar at the top of the Park Hyatt hotel, where Lost in Translation had been surreptitiously filmed, where I had sat talking about Anthony Bourdain on the night he ended his life, and where—a few months later—I finally ended a no-good marriage over three excellent cocktails and some light jazz; Yoshinoya; the little streets around Shinjuku station and their bizarre girly bars with women in anime costumes holding laminated menus, enticing lonely men; the even littler streets in the Golden Gai, that neighbourhood of a hundred preposterously hip microbars in Shinjuku. The Golden Gai would be my first stop.

I had last been here in 2018, at a crisis point. I’d been working in China for a year, getting fat and going slowly insane, and my friend and amateur step contest participant Dave (subscribe to his excellent Substack) staged a kind of intervention, demanding I join him in Korea—where we had both taught English a decade earlier—and Japan. I was festering in Hangzhou, on the brink of quitting my terrible, pointless job, so I heartily accepted his invitation/demand. The change of scenery offered a perfect reset, and gave me the courage and resolve to return to China a couple of weeks later to see out my contract and do my damndest to enjoy myself in the strangest of places. Those stories have yet to darken this newsletter, but they will in time.

So I went to meet Dave in Korea, where we spent a few days on our own nostalgia tour around Seoul and Suwon. We ate well, visited the video game market and the goblin market, popped into the palace, strolled around Hongdae and Insadong, walked the Lesser Wall of Suwon, got drunk on soju and Hite, then headed to Japan. We landed in Tokyo with a mission to try as many new whiskies as possible. (Dave had brought a whisky magazine with him on the trip and on the short flight from Seoul to Tokyo we wrote a list of 25 we hoped to find over 10 days in Japan. By the end of the first day, we’d tried 12. Most of these in the bar we stopped at in the Golden Gai.)

The Golden Gai is six tiny laneways squeezed between a municipal office and a shrine at the dodgy edge of Shinjuku. In some way, it represents pre-war Tokyo, pre-fire bombs. It’s all cramped two-story buildings designed for tiny pre-war people. Through some trick of fate, or time, or general entropy, nearly all of the buildings have become bars and restaurants, into which a maximum of eight people can fit—very snuggly. It’s a tiny neighbourhood, so it was easy to find the bar I’d loved six years earlier, right on the corner of the third street beside an American-themed bar that flew a huge American flag and had that picture of the “Only you” guy on the front. I walked past the bar a couple of times, happily idling in the afternoon light, snapping photos. There was an older white guy inside, yapping loudly at the young bartender, who looked bored and a little distraught. I did a few laps of the neighbourhood, hoping he’d tire himself out and leave. On the fourth pass, with him still windbagging, I gave up and went in anyway.

It’s an incredible, tiny place. It whole place is probably only 10 feet wide and has room for six people around the U-shaped bar. It improbably has stairs to a second floor, but you’d have to squat down to climb the stairs. The bartender—who I remembered from the previous visit—is a petite punk Japanese woman, tattooed and distant but polite when called upon. The man, a 62-year-old Swede (one of many details he insisted on repeating), was chatting at her non-stop in rapid, peculiarly accented English that she barely understood, not so much asking questions as streaming his consciousness at her. I folded myself into the bar across from him, the space so small that my back was pressed against the wall and I could feel the bass from the place next-door tickling my spine, and the man’s focus shifted from her to me.

Where was I from? Did they speak real French in Montreal? Can you even swim in the Saint Lawrence River? Sweden was perfect, but too cold. It was his first time in Japan, and it was so cheap and so clean. What did Canadians say when they rented a car, “hire” or “rent”? Why was our English so bad? He was going to Thailand next. He’d been there 15 times, almost always to Pattaya. He had a friend there. Was there even anything in Saskatchewan? Then what was the point of Saskatchewan? Why were there so many homeless people in Vancouver, in Las Vegas? Did this bar have non-alcoholic beer? No? Fine, he’d have an alcoholic beer.

At some point during this monologue, a Japanese couple entered the bar, dripping with sweat and carrying two large suitcases that took up all of the remaining space. His focus shifted to them—Were they actually Japanese? What language did they speak? Where were they from? Where was that? What was the point of it? Had they heard about Saskatchewan?—and I had a brief moment of peace to soak up the glorious bar. I ordered my favourite Japanese summer drink (an umeshu soda) and finished my excellent book and thought about how time changes things, often very little. Here was this bar, totally unbothered by the pandemic and the passing of years, surviving on a few chatty patrons per day. The Japanese couple finished their highballs and left, and the man turned back to me, suddenly solemn.

“I didn’t start to travel until I was old,” he began. “What a waste. I learned too late that travel teaches you things you didn’t already know. I learned you only really know yourself when you see something new that you don’t understand. Now I know I’ve got to keep learning. And travelling. What else is there?”

Without knowing, we read from the same travel scriptures. He was paraphrasing to me a line from Matthew Arnold that had inspired me to start travelling decades earlier. I raised my drink to him, gladly. I had judged him on his brashness, but that was foolish. It was sheer curiosity, a thing to be praised and cherished. At his last, he energized me. I paid my bill and slid out into the sticky Tokyo evening, gorgeously tinted with neon lights, and wandered old roads happily with my camera, trying to see something I’d seen before with slightly different eyes.

Japan has wrongly earned a reputation as a technologically advanced nation. It produces the world’s best cameras and most of its TVs, it used to make a pretty mean VCR, and it has churned out every video game system since the advent of video games, which were advented here. Its cartoons have always portrayed futuristic visions of technopolises where spaceships land on the tops of skyscrapers and robot boys fly around by shooting flames out of their boots. These futuristic visions never quite materialized, though. There are elevated trains in some cities that glow in the night, but that’s about it.

It’s pleasantly low-tech, in fact. Cash is still widely used, even in 2025. Smart phones are a new thing. (It was only during the pandemic that they took over market share; before 2020, more than half of phone users in Japan preferred flip phones. The ones with Snake.) The subways and trains use paper tickets that you buy from a clunky old machine under a big map with all the stations shown along with the price of the ticket to get from where you are standing to any place on the map. You press a button corresponding to a price (not a place) and then throw some coins into a little slot and it makes nice mechanical sounds while it chucks out your change and prints your ticket. The subway gates are mechanical in the same way, loud and chonking and manual. It’s like a futuristic vision of the 70s imagined by someone in the 50s, and like many things here it hasn’t changed much over the last half century.

This stasis is helpful for me, because it makes it easy to benchmark how time has changed me. It’s been nearly 20 years since I first came to Japan, almost half a lifetime. I keep thinking of the lines my parents used to draw on a door frame to measure mine and my brother and sister’s heights each year, the different colours of pen with our names scrawled beside a date. There are lines like that around Japan for me.

Here’s one. It takes place in Osaka:

I first visited Osaka in the summer of 2007 to get my work permit for Korea. I had been working under the table for months at a dodgy English academy in Ulsan, waiting for my diploma to arrive from Canada so I could submit the paperwork to be a legal employee but not with any real urgency since being an illegal employee was exactly the same except I got paid in cash. The owner of the English school was a creep who hired me the first second he saw me. I was standing outside of his school on a December morning, trying to get cash from an ATM, and he was smoking a nasty cigarette by the front door. He asked where I was from as a way of saying hello and when I said Canada he said, as though it was the natural reply, “You want to work for me?” I said sure. I had been in Korea for 36 hours. He brought me on quickly and I taught preschoolers how to ask to go to the bathroom. Sometimes, inspectors would visit the school I worked at and he would tell me to go home. One time, I hid in the bathroom for half an hour until they left. Okay, so there were a few ways in which being a legal employee was different.

After a few months of this teach-and-hide routine, all of my paperwork was ready and I had to leave Korea to get a visa printed in my passport. The cheapest flight to a city with an embassy was to Osaka. So I went to Osaka for a few days.

I was 25 years old and had no plan. In life, obviously (I had accepted a job from a stranger), but more relevantly, I had no plan in Osaka. I booked a mixed-dorm hostel and took the wrong train several times from Kansai Airport. It took me a whole day to get there. I had curry by a train station, thick and sweet and filled with the kind of veggies you find in a frozen mixed bag. I was carrying an enormous backpack because I wasn’t sure I’d be granted the visa and allowed to go back to Korea. I took a wrong train and I found myself near Osaka Castle and walked around with the burdensome bag for hours, sweating through my clothes. I eventually made it to the hostel, tired and happy. I spent the days going to the embassy and wandering aimlessly. I met another teacher and we became friends. I took a solo trip to Nara and was followed around by 200 hungry deer, then sat alone at the top of a hill overlooking the largest Buddhist shrine in the world—which had been deliberately spared by the US firebombing campaign due to its beauty, which purportedly moved the homicidal crackpot General McArthur to tears—listening to the Shins on my first-generation iPod nano. I felt like me for the first time in years.

Beside that line on the door frame representing Osaka are my trips to Tokyo: the figures by the tracks in the rain, the night Bourdain died, the divorce date, and now this one. And beside those are my other Japan trips: the fat couple by the graves, the mushroom cloud memorial of Nagasaki. The dates are written in funny colours of ink, in different handwriting, and they show me growing and shrinking and then growing again.

Tokyo, 2025, then. This is a trip arranged entirely around education and hero worship. I’ve registered for a photography workshop in which I follow Steve McCurry around Tokyo, more or less. Or rather, in which I meet up at various locations around Tokyo with Steve McCurry and another amazing photographer, Eolo Perfido, and 15 other participants, and then we immediately scatter and walk alone through busy neighbourhoods, trying to create something magical.

This isn’t the story of the workshop either. For now I mention it because it served to move me around a city I thought I knew well, forcing me back to neighbourhoods I had seen years ago. More lines on doorways, more reminders of life coming and going. It took me to unknown places too. It first nudged then dragged me out of my comfort zone as a photographer. I spent the week feeling dizzied by new information, new skills, new friends. It was intoxicating and lovely and therefore deserves its own reflections, which I’ll write about soon. Until then:

I had a couple of full days before the workshop started to adjust to time zones, eat as many onigiri as I could from 7/11 (far superior to any other convenience store onigiri), and go to places not listed on the programme for the week. In theory, that was the plan. In practice, I mostly walked the same route from my strange little hotel north of Shinjuku every morning, finding coffee and jogging lazily through a tiny hilly park before being caught in monsoon rain and sprinting back to the hotel to dry off. I revelled in the sensation of travelling solo: no real schedule, good music playing in my nerdy running headphones, nowhere to be at any given moment and no itinerary beyond what appealed to me most that day: taking photos in the Golden Gai, sampling whiskies, slamming ramen, whatever/anything/all of it. I napped and wrote and smoked shisha and walked and bought notebooks and pens from my favourite stationery store and looked at second-hand camera gear and tried on clothes and went back for seconds of the ramen and the sake. I stayed awake until 10 pm and felt proud of this fact, then had an emergency late-night onigiri from 7/11 and went to sleep.

I checked some favourite foods off of my list and booked two fancy omakase meals from the Michelin guide to Tokyo. I did a sake tasting. This is worth describing.

I had arranged a sake tasting through Airbnb Experiences and planned to take it on the first full day I was in Tokyo. That morning, I got a message from the hosts asking me if I wanted to cancel, as I was the only one enrolled in that day’s session. I loved this, and insisted that we keep the appointment. I was thrilled by the idea of a one-on-one session with an expert, but when I arrived and found there was an American couple who had signed up at the last minute. They looked like any two people I see every day on work calls, young and attractive and rich from a career spent working in tech. They were from San Diego but lived in the Bay Area. It was their first time in Japan. They had two kids. They fancied themselves wine experts, though she winkingly admitted to being something of a tequila expert as well. They were shy at first, but quickly came out of their shells at the hands of our hilarious Japanophile sake teacher, Max.

Max was a former missionary from Colorado and was only in his mid-20s, but was on his second life. He had been obsessed with Japan from a young age and started learning Japanese when he was 11 so he could watch the cartoons and read the comics. When he was 19, he came to Japan on mission and quickly strayed, in his words, to a life of drinking and debauchery. He wore a cross on a chain around his neck and was awkward and earnest. He made bad jokes while he told us everything he knew about sake, which was everything. He explained things calmly and clearly between his jokes, and critically, he poured enormous glasses of 8 sakes and we all got half in the bag. Maybe more than half.

Sake is underrated as a drink, I think, in part because it falls outside of the beer-wine-spirit categorization. It’s usually clear, so it looks like a spirit, but it’s lighter in alcohol and closer to wine in terms of alcohol-by-volume. But it’s brewed like beer and made of rice. Within Japan, obviously, it’s well-understood and often revered. It’s available almost everywhere that food is. Outside of Japan, it’s available served hot at most shitty sushi restaurants, and while warm sake is a real thing in Japan as well, it’s often offered at room temperature or even slightly chilled. There are hundreds of variations of the drink, from cloudy, unpasteurized, and pure sakes to ones that look and smell chemical, like soju, and which have had grain alcohol added after brewing to increase the punch.

Max explained all of this while sharing some of his favourites, asking us to rate each one (and all of the paired snacks) on some paper while he told us stories of his time in Japan. Ever loving a ranking, I took to this task with joy, but the Americans hesitated. Max, the enthusiastic kindergarten teacher, asked us each what we scored the sakes. The man from San Diego crossed his arms briefly, then looked away and sort of sighed. “I don’t rank things,” he explained. “I’m just at a stage of my life now where I’m beyond ranking.” Max smiled and nodded and I said, “Sure, sure” as though he had said the most natural thing in the world and not casually dismissed the concept of liking some things more than other things, or ordering the world around him in some logical way. We looked searchingly at his wife. “I give that one a nine,” she said, and normal life resumed.

By the time we had started the eighth glass of sake, the couple had completely lowered their guard. They began showing me wine tasting videos they made at home with their two adorable kids pretending to describe and then drink the wine. I was a bit sad for the afternoon to come to an end, because I was having one of those rare and comforting moments as a solo traveller: I wanted to spend more time with people I had just met. We had a rapport going, and I liked their nerdy awkwardness and they seemed to like mine. They had a food tour to get to and I had an omakase booked, but I think if any of us had suggested going for another drink somewhere, those previously made plans would have evaporated.

As I get older, my threshold for enjoying these random encounters gets ever-lower. In my earlier life as a traveller, I had been puritanical about talking to or befriending strangers. I even had a rule about it.

Back to Osaka, younger me.

In those days I believed that solo travel demanded and was only informed by loneliness. I liked spending my days alone, walking aimlessly and endlessly, snapping photos and writing down my thoughts in a worn orange notebook. As a social person, I also liked small talk with other travellers, but I believed—genuinely believed—that I needed to meet the same person three times before we could become friends. Once was random, twice was a coincidence, but three times was kismet.

On that visa-run trip to Osaka, my self-imposed rule of threes was tested and then validated by a Canadian named Ryan, who was warm and funny and curious and sitting in the same waiting room of the Korean consulate on the same kind of visa run that I was on. He lived in Gyeongju—not far from where I was living in Ulsan—and had the same story as me, basically: he had shown up on a whim to visit a friend and been offered a job, where he had been working under the table for months while waiting for his paperwork to be approved. We had a friendly chat and then went to the service windows to submit our passports for processing, and when I was done he was still at his window, and that was that. I left to go eat breakfast.

Twenty-four hours later, when I went to collect my passport, he was there again. Again we chatted and exchanged tips and stories and made dumb jokes as though we were old friends, and this time when we were done at the consulate we went outside together. He invited me with him to Osaka Castle, but I had been already and politely declined. We exchanged email addresses (it was 2007, okay?). He went off to the castle and I went to get lost in the underground city. If I ever saw him again, I told myself, we could be friends.

This trip was pre-smartphone and Google Maps, and I always enjoyed testing my sense of direction in new places by taking random turns on random streets and trusting I’d find my way back to wherever I was staying. With no set schedule, I took great joy in creating a maze out of the walkways and food courts and kiosks beneath downtown Osaka, a network of subway stations and pedestrian tunnels with confusing signage and arrows pointing to landmarks I had never heard of. I walked for hours underground, truly lost. I stopped for bad coffees and ramen and read my book and fired up the ol’ iPod nano and listened to Iron and Wine probably, and eventually decided I was ready to surface and figure out how to get back to my hostel. I didn’t recognize the names of any of the exits in the underground city, and chose a staircase at random and ascended to the street level. It was early afternoon, and the bright sun surprised me after hours in the fluorescent underground. I squinted and fished around in my bag for my sunglasses.

“Drew!” shouted a happy, familiar voice. “Drew! What the hell?!”

It was Ryan, returning from the castle. I had no idea where he was staying and didn’t know where I was. He laughed at my confused look, then gave me a giant hug. “How weird!” he yelled. “Want a beer?”

What followed was one of my most fun and memorable days of travel. Those beers came from a convenience store, and we drank them in a tiny city park, marvelling at the coincidence of our third collision. We walked through the incredible plastic food model manufacturing districts with their lifelike versions of every meal available in Japan and then through the even-more-incredible old electronics districts with their endless video games and stacks of scat porn and old laser discs of Free Willy 2. We met a group of high-school students training for soccer by running up and down an enormous staircase and challenged them to a race that Ryan won and I lost happily, collapsed in laughter halfway up the stairs after being pushed playfully to the ground by one of the Japanese boys who shouted what I assumed were obscenities at me. We had curry katsu for dinner and sang karaoke poorly and we ended the night in an Irish bar, and life just felt so easy, so smooth.

This was the reason for the rule of threes, I rationalized. It would filter out the people not worth spending quality time with and the best ones would reveal themselves.

I now know that this is total nonsense, of course. I now know that the odds of meeting someone even once when travelling are astronomical, and that those moments should be treasured and cherished. But I was in my 20s and thought everything needed a heightened, special meaning, in order for it to mean anything.

It doesn’t. Sometimes you can meet people and think, simply, “They seem like the good kind of people. It would be nice to keep having fun with them until we can’t any more.” As the sake tasting wound down, I thought about asking the Californian couple if they wanted to join me for dinner. They mentioned in passing that they were about to start a food tour, so the connection was severed, but we had a nice goodbye the afternoon rain and I went back to my hotel to change for dinner.

As I worked my way across the city to my first-ever omakase in Japan—a delicious sushi tasting menu with sake pairings and only two other guests, neither of whom spoke until the end of the meal—I felt warmed and at ease. This was in part down to the new ease that Japan was radiating. Things were so straightforward and the quality of everything so high that it was difficult to feel any other way. But there was something changing in me too, or at least a new and sudden awareness of some previous change that had been slow to reveal itself.

I felt the old travel rules softening, if not falling away entirely. I was starting to learn the lessons that the photography workshop would reinforce all week: move slowly, be patient, wait for the right moments, because they will always come.

***

Read my three previous stories about Japan, all from the Faulty Memory Series:

She will not break eye contact, not ever. The hotel—I have no idea what it was called; I’m not sure I even knew then—is on a road closed to traffic, but a road still somehow muddy and rutted. There’s a huge window at the front of the hotel, and from outside it’s easy to see the reception desk and this long boardroom table that’s been set up in the lobby, where I’m sitting for an orientation session of sorts. I was the first to arrive, and chose to face outward, with a view of the street. Within a few minutes of my sitting down, she walked by, her baby hanging off an exposed breast, and she turned casually as she passed to look into the hotel and saw me. She met my gaze. She still hasn’t broken it. It’s been hours.

Around me at the table are 10 or 15 tourists, mostly from the United States and Canada, and our guide Vikram is giving a long overview of the upcoming trip. I’m in Delhi. I’m 25 or something. I’ve just finished a year of teaching English in Ulsan, South Korea, and I’m spending a little bit of the money I earned on a three-week group tour of India’s Golden Triangle. I’m trying so hard to listen, to keep my eye on Vikram, but my glance keeps flitting to the street, to this woman who won’t stop staring at me.

After a couple of hours, she changes her tactic slightly, adds flourish. With her free hand she begins to express herself. She clenches her fingers together and holds them to her mouth in the universal gesture of hunger. She beckons, curling her arm in the universal gesture of come outside and give me some money. She holds up her sleeping baby, her crying baby, her nursing baby, the universal gesture for “I have a baby.” She stares, and she seems to not need to blink. Every time I look, she’s watching. Soon, I can’t stop looking. I’m transfixed, curious, helpless.

The orientation session comes to a close eventually and I’ve learned very little. I know I’m in India, and have been told about the things that we’ll do. We’ll see the smog-tarnished Taj Mahal and wander the ashy streets of Varanasi, try to see a tiger in the wild and visit the Kama Sutra temples. We’ll go to some pink city. Or maybe blue. We’ll see fortresses and temples and take long uncomfortable trains and we’ll see Diwali fireworks and get sick and get better. Something like that.

At the end of the session, Vikram starts collecting cash, a fee payable on arrival, and while I hand over a stack of rupees I glance outside and the woman’s eyes are wide and wild. She’s seen.

Vikram announces that we’re heading for dinner somewhere close by. Watch your wallets, he says. Keep your hands in your pockets. Don’t give anyone money. I want to tell him about the woman, ask what to do. Instead, I keep a cluster of rupees balled up in one hand, obeying only two-thirds of the guidelines. The group stands up, people stretch, awkward jokes are told, and we head toward the front door of the hotel.

She’s on me in a flash. That free hand is on me, poking and tapping. She doesn’t really speak, I don’t think. She murmurs. She prods me, my pocket, my chest, her fingers stabbing me to say I know you have more than me. And she’s right, so I take the balled-up hand out of my pocket and unfold it and her fingers peck at my palm and the money is gone and Vikram is suddenly there, shouting at her and shooing her away and I’m pleading halfheartedly that it’s fine, but I’m so confused and then she’s gone, hurrying down the muddy street toward the main road.

Vikram turns to me and sighs. “Sorry,” he says. For Delhi, I guess. For India? For poverty? He doesn’t elaborate.

“That’s okay,” I say. “She needed it.” I don’t say “more than I did.”

“That’s not the point,” he says, smiling but with an obscure melancholy, a faraway look.

“What’s the point?” I’m new to this and don’t know what questions to ask.

He hesitates. It’s our first night, after all. I can see whole worlds flash across his eyes. He slaps me on the back, then squeezes my shoulder. “Let’s go eat!” he says. Someone in the group cheers. No one has really noticed the interaction with the woman.

“Let’s eat,” I agree, and the tension disappears for a moment.

When we reach the main road, I see the woman and her child. She isn’t looking at me, but is holding the baby over the curb, where it empties its bowels into the open gutter. Vikram doesn’t notice. No one seems to. And so, we go to dinner.

A week or two later, I’m slapped in the face with a giant beetle. By now, I’m a different person, seeped in India, and things simply don’t surprise me the same way. The beetle, fist-sized and solid-shelled, startles me. Sure. It is not gentle. It flaps into me like a baseball moving in slow motion but with all the same hardness. It hurts a little bit. But it doesn’t really shock me in any way. I’m simply a man who has been hit in the face with a giant beetle.

Other things have changed too. I left Delhi via Agra and Jaipur and have been awed and wowed and delayed and harassed. I’ve learned to feel the rhythm of each day, to be insistent when required and patient when faced with no alternative. I’ve eaten glorious food and sipped a million cups of chai. I’ve been warned about bandits. I’ve slept in a 16th Century palace and a dodgy motel with stains on every surface. I’m getting used to the place.

The beetle comes to me in a small town whose name I’ve forgotten that sits at the edge of a dense jungle home to wild tigers: the reason we’re here. It’s little more than a strip of restaurants and some basic hotels and outfitting shops, all camo gear and hats with strings on them and binoculars and sunscreen. A service town for jungle tourism, for the tigers.

It’s dusk. Around town, these super-powered streetlights come on, fluorescent and horrible, that kind of cheap municipal fix to a problem that didn’t exist. They look like something around a major league ball diamond and totally out of place in this rural setting. The streetlights disorient the jungle wildlife, especially the bugs. Thousands of insects swarm around the lights, forming clouds so thick that the lights look like they’re fading and the street below is covered in weird jumpy shadows. One by one, restaurants on the main strip turn on their gas-powered generators for the evening dinner rush. Their sputtering drowns out the howling of monkeys and the shrieking of birds off in the jungle. In turn, shutters are raised on the row of restaurants and tourists emerge from their hotels.

Our group is led to one of these jungle-front restaurants and sits around a long table, chattering happily. The restaurants fills with our low, excited chat. It was a long drive to get here, but tomorrow we might see tigers. We’re all buzzing. Bowls of beautiful-smelling soup are brought out with piles of roti, and we dig in eagerly.

Outside, the streetlights, those false moons, are now totally covered by crawling insects and only the feeblest of light sneaks through. The restaurants have become the only source of light, and any insect not crawling on the streetlights—of which there are surely millions—start to be drawn here. The small, speedy ones arrive first, flapping or buzzing around the long fluorescent tubes hung from the ceiling. A few land on the walls and are ignored. A few land on the table and are casually brushed away onto the floor.

Then the slower flyers arrive. Like the big, fat, hard beetles.

Maybe it was trying to land on me; maybe it didn’t know I was there. I don’t take it personally. It hits me in the face and then—confused; more confused than me, surely—it falls, splashing into my bowl in a ridiculous way because it’s so big that it takes up most of the bowl. If flops around, upside down and struggling. “There’s something in your soup,” someone wisecracks, which was a funny enough joke a few days ago. It still brings little laughs and a little smile from me. There is something in my soup, to be fair. I use my spoon to fish it out and put it right-side-up on the table, where it sits stunned for a while. I push my bowl away and continue chatting. After a while the beetle is dried out enough to first walk and then fly away, back into the streetlight night. More soup is brought out but no one thinks to change my spoon.

As a group, we have—bad jokes aside—stopped paying attention to the bugs, to the heat, to the traffic jams, to the trains not arriving at the platform, to the constant humming of the lights and the rattling of the struggling air conditioners. There is a requirement to give in here, to give up a little. Some things are easy, many are not. Time carries on, you adapt quickly. This is just another minor inconvenience, another bowl of soup to be taken off the table.

I’ve never written about this trip to India before, for good and bad reasons. Good reason: like other trips from this era, the photos are long gone. (This is a shame, because India is so beautiful and colourful and friendly and is therefore a highly photogenic place, and also because I’ll depend on stock images for things like the tiger we did indeed see and the still mornings on the Ganges and the breadlines at the Sikh temple and the touching moment in a little town square when Vikram taught a stranger how to tie a turban and a thousand other lovely missing scenes.) Good reason: there is no single story of India, no unifying narrative that is often the goal of a travel story, and it has taken me a long time to see this is not necessary. Bad reason: fear. Fear of oversimplifying, of broadly generalizing, of condensing too much, of stereotyping—these are true in all acts of memory. But any writing that starts with fears and failures in mind can drift too easily into them, so I have parked those fears, if not dismissed them entirely, and will simply attempt to remember the feelings and sounds and smells of this startling trip taken so long ago to have now obtained the golden hue it deserves.

This was my first hard trip, my first culture shock, my first bout of extreme heat stroke and/or extreme food poisoning. My first true adventure. The first time I experienced, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold badly, a place that was so opposite anything I knew. This Faulty Memory series will aim to chronicle my shift from a new, wound up, and nervous traveller to young man happy when hit in the face with a giant bug.

Back to Delhi, then, to the start. It’s the second day of the trip and it’s early in the morning and it’s very quiet inside the grand mosque. The stones of its vast courtyard have been polished to shining by centuries of softly padding bare feet and are warm and comforting. Even at this early hour, the day has an irrepressible heat. Men lounge in the shady borders of the courtyard, fanning themselves with newspapers, bored and happy-looking. The tour group idles close together, a symptom of early India travel, that fear of breaking from the pack. We’re still adapting.

The walk to the mosque had been a bit harrowing. As with the previous day, leaving the hotel meant running a gauntlet where people would approach, fingers pinched in front of their mouths to show want, need, the other hand grabbing at your arm or shoulder. “Don’t make eye contact. Don’t give money. Don’t pay attention.” This was Vikram, still gently scolding me from my failed first attempt to ignore a plea for money. I found this very difficult, as did the others in the group. There was something about the physical touch that made ignoring impossible. The desperation, the panic, the hope: these too were hard to ignore. But the touch was so urgent, immediate.

Arriving anywhere after that gauntlet always required a bit of a reset. I stood quietly, feeling the warmth of the stones, growing calm and slowly starting to take in my surroundings. I’d never been to a mosque before, I don’t think. I don’t know when I would have. At this point, I had only been to Japan, Korea, and China. It just hadn’t come up.

But what a mosque to start at, the Jama Masjid. Built in that Mughal style of intricate dark stonework and playful, bulbous domes, the Jama Masjid is a pretty great representation of some of India’s 17th century architectural mastery. It’s in the same style and of the same era as Delhi’s Red Fort and, of course, of the Taj Mahal, that old number. But unlike the Taj—which during my visit was the worst kind of museum, dull and grey and too officious and orderly—the Jama Masjid is a functioning place, a part of daily life in Delhi. It was at the time home to India’s largest Friday prayer, with around 25,000 people attending.

On this quiet morning, between prayer times, it was impossible to imagine that many people squeezed into the square—yet their presence was plainly visible in the gentle grooves worn into the stone courtyard, in the unevenness of the ground, in the way the lower parts of the surrounding walls were shinier from so many centuries of bodies rubbing up against them. Above the human-smoothed courtyard, the minarets rose out of the front corners of the mosque, skinny and tall and possible to climb if you are a 17th-Century mullah or a child, but not if you’re a 21st Century Canadian. No one on the tour even tried.

We hung around the edges of the place for a while, cooling off or gathering courage or both. We were too raw, too flustered, to enjoy or understand anything. That would change within hours, but we didn’t know yet. I think we went inside the mosque and poked around a bit. We should have, if we didn’t. All I can remember was the warm stones and the safety of the fringes.

This was the first stop on a planned Trilogy of Religions Tour that day. We began at the mosque, then drifted a few streets over—dodging fingertips, a little more confident navigating the streets—to the enormous Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, a Sikh temple. Vikram had done a respectable job of explaining the tenets of Islam in our 45-minute tour of the wall of the grand mosque, but here he was in his community, his element. He was greeted by everyone, silver bracelets jangling with every handshake and hug. Our tour through the temple took hours, for this and many other good reasons.

In addition to being a place of worship, the temple was a community center and a library and a restaurant. Our tour began in the kitchen, where I lingered happily for a long while. Every day, the kitchen prepares free meals for about 10,000 people, an effort that requires dozens of volunteers. Vikram didn’t ask anyone from the group to volunteer, but the sheer joy emanating from the kitchen ensured that most of us did. I chose to work at the chapati station, sitting cross-legged with five or six others, slapping flatbreads into shape and then dusting them in mounds of flour and passing them to someone to put onto the conveyor belt of an industrial oven, where the bread would be quickly toasted to puffy perfection. Others volunteered at the curry stations, where people stood on stepladders and stirred six-foot pots with a wooden contraption that looked like a pizza board but might have, in fact, been an enormous spoon.

When all the cooking was done, the group went to the temple’s dining room, a vast space with long lines of people holding shiny tin trays. Everyone found space on the floor and was given a steaming pile of rice and a ladleful of curry and one of the chapatis I had slapped around earlier. There was a constant ruckus of clinking trays and a thousand conversations and deep booming laugher and everyone in our group was scattered and dispersed for the first time to sit amongst the friendly locals and be swallowed whole.

We stayed in the dining room for a long time after the daily eaters had emptied out, everyone in the group eventually finding Vikram by his pink turban and joining him on the floor in the center of the room. Chai was served, smiles were plastered to faces.

This was a remarkable place, we were beginning to realize. This temple, with its kitchen that runs around-the-clock to feed those in need. This city, with its pluralism and its desperation and its generosity. This country, with its billion people improbably trying to exist all at the same time.

One of the leaders of the temple came to sit with us and chat, via Vikram, about the sheer volume of work required to feed so many people every day. He spoke about the tenets of Sikhism, about the bracelet reminding devotees to act with honour each time they reached out their hands, about the bears and turbans required of men, and about the swords. The swords! Vikram, who had an eye on an acting career and a penchant for an exaggerated story and a dramatic outburst, revelled in explaining the reason that Sikhs carry swords. He was also a poor interpreter. The temple leader said a few words—two sentences at most—and Vikram translated them more-or-less as follows:

“Okay, so it goes like this. We respect everyone, as Sikhs, but many people don’t respect us. Not in India only, but all over the world. And we have our kara [the silver bracelet] to remind us not to do evil, but why do we have our swords?” (He wasn’t wearing a sword.) “We think of our swords as our last resort. That’s the best way to think of it. Do you know the expression ‘Turn the other cheek’? Well, we think like this too. If you slap my cheek, I’ll turn the other cheek. And then you can slap my other cheek, and I’ve got two cheeks so that’s fine. But what happens next? Well, I’m out of cheeks,” he said. He paused for the perfect amount of time, the high-drama amount. He pointed at the sword of the temple leader, then continued. “I’m out of cheeks, but I do have this fucking sword!”

He burst out laughing, and the rest of us followed. No one thought to ask a follow-up question, and I’ve never bothered to fact check this story. Do Sikhs indeed carry a sword as a reminder that violence awaits those who push the limits of tolerance? It would be a shame to learn otherwise, so I’ve let that knowledge take hold in my brain for nearly 20 years, where I hope it remains forever unshaken by new facts or alternative information.

When the tea was finished, the temple leader walked with me to the door of the temple, his hand resting always on my elbow. He pointed to paintings and decorations along the way and describing them to me in another language. I smiled along, nodded, laughed when he laughed, and generally ingratiated myself to him. Near the door, there was a wooden box with the silver karas that every Sikh man wore. I picked a few up and looked at them, ran my fingers over them. The man locked eyes with me, then held up a kara. “For you,” he said in English. I politely shook my head no thanks and laughed and waved the gift away. He wouldn’t be swayed, and grabbed my right hand (the do-only-good hand) firmly and started to slide the bracelet over my fingers. “That’s okay, thank you!” I said, and his grip tightened slightly. The bracelet was stuck on my pesky thumb, which he was now folding in beneath my index finger. He smiled at me and with a final push the bracelet was on my wrist. He was shaking my hand, giggling slightly. It was hard to be angry about this.

We stayed too long in the Sikh temple to make it to the final stop on the Trilogy of Religions Tour TM, a Hindu temple in the same neighbourhood. There would be other Hindu temples, Vikram promised, and instead lead us to a nearby bar for shots of Old Monk rum, an anti-food poisoning strategy he swore to. Any food made with bare hands and no running water required one to two shots of Old Monk to kill any bacteria. We performed this ablution daily.

And so, between temples and food and shots of Old Monk, a few days passed pleasantly in Delhi, a city that gets under your skin. I grew as accustomed to the constant overload of sounds and smells as it seemed possible after a few short days, and began to wander out alone, away from the group, to take photos that are now lost. I shed the fear of being a foreigner here, but never the guilt of having more. As often happens with travel in overwhelming places, just as I was starting to get used to the place, I had to leave.

***

This Faulty Memory series will be published throughout the summer and will rely on stock images because the narrator/photographer has lost all of the photos he took on this trip. New, original photography coming soon.

Every restaurant in town is closed, for one reason or another: the weekend, low season, the time of day, the global pandemic, some combination of those. It’s midafternoon and the sun has come out and the streets are glistening with the memory of noontime drizzle. The sign of the Restaurante Tipico reflecting in the shiny surface of the road is both tantalizing and cruel.

My hotel is closed too, it seems. I’ve just arrived in the small town Sabrosa from Porto—a lovely riverside drive followed by a brief, breathtaking, and sometimes terrifying drive up the N323 road from gorgeous Pinhão—where I was carb-loading on francesinhas and bifanas for a week. I had been staying with good friends that I met in Istanbul qyears earlier, cuddling with their hilarious/deranged/non-genius Sri Lankan street dog Stevie, and re-entering the social world as a functioning human adult the first Covid shutdown. It had been a weird few months.

Remember Covid? That was a strange time, huh? Maybe one day I’ll write a Covid anti-travel story and recount the four months living in my mom’s basement in Caraquet, New Brunswick, or the game of Covid Policy Roulette I played for months, trying to find out which European countries allowed Canadians to stick around a bit, but for now the key Covid-era memory is that first strange summer in which the world breathed its collective sigh of relief and decided that the pandemic was over.

That August (of 2020), Europe was open for tourists from most countries after a brief hiatus. The same day the news of a travel thaw was announced, I bought a one-way ticket to Portugal, determined to live week-to-week and to generally wing it with my plans. I landed in Lisbon, hung around for a couple of weeks, then rented a car for a month and took off, first along the coast to Nazare and then to Porto, to close friends and cheap beers and sunshine and adventure.

“You’ve got to see the Douro,” said either Mark or Hayley one night over dinner. “Get up there. Poke about.” They’re English; this is the way they talk. I booked a hotel for the next week in Sabrosa, a pretty old ghost of a place called Casa dos Barros. It’s since been renamed the “Casa dos Barros Winery Lodge by Vintage Theory,” which is too bad. It was neither a winery nor in possession of a theory when I first visited. Nor open.

Sabrosa, like most villages in the Douro, is neither especially old-looking nor new-looking. It has a kind of utilitarian beauty to its outskirts, with little workshops and factories and smiling farmers, and then toward the centre has charming buildings that could be either 30 or 300 years old. It has tourist shops and a little café-bar and a few restaurants that were are all perfectly acceptable when they were open, which they weren’t. These towns, depending on tourism as much as agriculture, suffered bitterly during the pandemic.

This was pre-vaccine, pre-PCR tests, pre-rational thinking. This was post-first-wave lockdown in Canada, social distancing and grocery-delivery washing and mask wearing. This was that weird “We Did It!” summer before the “Oh No, We Didn’t!” fall and winter and subsequent year of more lockdowns and PCR tests for taking a flight and vaccine certificates standing in line at a coffee shop. Summer and early fall are the Douro’s peak tourist seasons. No one had come. No one who lived here really knew what to do.

I had booked the Casa dos Barros through booking.com and had been messaging with someone through the website to coordinate my arrival. The check-in method was “Call when you get there” but Sabrosa was an Internet black hole and I couldn’t get reception. I knocked on the door of the hotel. I got back in my car and drove back down the hairpin road until my phone flashed a signal, then pulled over in a too-small layby and tried calling again. No answer. I messaged through booking.com, then got out of the car and stood around.

The Douro Valley is all spaghetti roads tossed over the hills, and stone walls and old bridges. The highway that runs through here is called the N323, a two-lane highway with a posted speed limit of 90 km/h. I averaged about 50 km/h in the sporty little Seat Ibiza I had rented. This two-lane highway had one shoulder comprising the aforementioned stone wall, on the other side of which was a sheer drop into terraced vineyards and the Douro River far, far below. Driving here is difficult, both due to the improbable road but also due to the stunning views, the desire to always be craning your neck, to be stealing a glance when you should be taking a curve.

Parked in the layby, staring out at the folds of the hills and letting the pungent smells of ripened grapes and olives and figs wash over me as they floated up from the lower parts of the valley, I felt deeply contented. I sat on the roof of the car and soaked it up. Time passed. The sun roasted my little car and me. The olive smell became intoxicating. My phone dinged: I could check in now.

I drove the few kilometres back to Sabrosa and found the door to the hotel slightly ajar. A cleaner was busying himself setting a table in the darkened dining room, and a middle-aged man was standing behind a small desk, waiting for a computer to boot up.

“We don’t have many guests,” he deadpanned, gesturing to the empty, silent lobby. He laughed. “It’s been quiet.” When the computer had loaded, he scanned my passport and took my details and checked me in. He handed me a metal key on a huge keychain. It must have weighed 5 pounds; when I put it in my pocket, I walked with a limp.

“There are two other guests,” he said, leading me to my room. “An American couple. They’re in the room beside you.” (I never saw them, but how funny that we were side-by-side in this vast empty hotel.) He helped me with my suitcase and rolled it into a beautiful room that was costing me just $60 a night. He showed me how things worked, which is the way they always work—the light switches are here, the taps have both hot and cold, this is a towel rack, etc. And as he turned to leave, a thought dawned on him. He had one final question for me:

“Are you here for the wine or for the Magellan?”

I was there for the wine. Harvest season in the Douro had been on my travel bucket list for days, ever since Mark and Hayley had said the word “Douro” back in Porto. In truth, like everything in that year of Covid-time travel, this was a happy accident. Right time, right place, and all that. I discovered that it was the harvest by showing up in the valley. I discovered a company that operated wine-based hikes by Googling “stuff to do in Douro” when already in Sabrosa. And I discovered that Magellan was from Sabrosa by opening the windows of my hotel room and looking straight at his house.

For someone who is fairly obsessed with travel, with stories of adventure and the Age of Exploration and the Silk Roads, with the obscure corners of the earth and those who first mapped them, I knew (know) precious little about Ferdinand Magellan. He was the first to circumnavigate Earth, sort of. I knew (parts of) that. In truth, he wasn’t very good at circumnavigating. It took him three years to sail from Spain back to Spain, and he contrived to die halfway through. Of the five ships and 270 sailors who left Spain in 1519 to faff about on the high seas, only one ship and 18 sailors returned in 1522. But along the way they discovered the aptly-named Strait of Magellan, which may be the world’s worst shortcut.

Like all celebrities, Magellan’s early years have been retrospectively scrutinized, and the house across from the Casa dos Barros has been determined to be his birth place. Or a place he lived as a kid. Or somewhere he stopped off once on a walk to somewhere else, or something. You better believe there’s a plaque out front and that I did not read it. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because the plaque would have claimed more than was true about his relationship to the house, which was clearly from the 20th Century and not the 15th. This is always the way. The Cathedral in Sevilla has the Tomb of Colombus, who is buried in the Dominican Republic.

These historical sites often have a tenuous link (at best) to the life of the person being memorialized. History creeps backwards conveniently, and the claimed association is often some momentarily political whim. For the Portuguese, the obsession with their colonial past and their explorers and their naval greatness is like a disease. Look no further than the national obsession with fado, which is essentially old sea shanties sung mournfully by pretty ladies in dark bars. It’s haunting and gorgeous and it longs for the time when Portugal was a powerful naval empire.

Over-educated young people with masters degrees and PhDs were told in the 2010s to leave Portugal and work abroad, and one study from around that time showed that nearly 70% of graduates had plans to leave the country. Those who stayed often found work in the tourist industry, their excellent English proving useful for explaining which tap was hot and which one was cold, but they were unsatisfied. How could they not be? Many young, chatty hotel workers and waiters told me they wished Portugal was still an empire, that Salazar had never died, that things used to be better. Before they were born, they meant. Hundreds of years ago, even. I don’t know—or haven’t discovered—an equivalent in another culture, that mourning for a brighter past.

No wonder the hotel manager was asking if I was there for Magellan, then: the hero not just of his age, but of Portugal’s brightest age. And perhaps Sabrosa was his birthplace. That was important here. People seemed to take strength and pride from it being so. Who was I to question it?

Besides, I was there for the wine.

My first morning in Sabrosa: I wake early and hungry. Dinner the night before had been some bread and cheese from a supermarket in Vila Real, half an hour away, and a pack (or two/three) of Haribo gummies. None of the restaurants in any of the villages around here were open, so my meal was furnished by Lidl. Normally, finding food in Portugal is easy—everything is delicious and cheap and the country has the Iberian love of a hearty meal—but the pandemic changed opening hours, reduced staff, closed restaurants, the works. In my week in the Douro, I never ate at a restaurant; all were shuttered, temporarily or permanently.

My hotel, on the other hand, offered breakfast. This was a tremendous boon. It was basic (short staff and all) but it was served in the lovely garden with views out across the surrounding vine-covered hills. Breakfast closely resembled my home-made dinner: a tasty bun, cold cuts with pre-sliced cheese. But it had the flourish of some tiny jars of jam and a giant carafe of good coffee, which I nursed for hours (I asked for seconds) while I listened to the birds singing as the sun began to bake those vine-covered hills. Then I set out on my first winey walk.

The Quinta do Portal is one of the Douro’s most famous wineries. It’s an architectural gem, this stunning building with cork walls (cork!) that produces wonderful wines. It was only a few kilometres from Sabrosa, so I looked for ways to walk to it without trudging along the paved shoulder of the twisty highway. Hiking trails in the region are well-signed and not especially difficult. Most of the trails around Sabrosa were on old stone roads that had been used by the wine producers for decades, if not centuries.

To walk through the fields and old stone roads would only take an hour and a half if you hurried, but I found hurrying impossible. The day was warm-bordering-on-hot, the light up here soft and pretty, and the smells heavy and gorgeous. Those ripe grapes, the pungent olives, those scents that had wafted up from the valley the day before were now all around me. There’s nothing like it, a countryside in full bloom like this. The old roads snaked between different parcels of land, a tumbling rock wall on either side of the road and trees drooping over these walls, beautiful ancient olive trees with their stubby gnarled trunks and their silver-green leaves weighed down with ripe fruit. I was carrying my camera and trying to take pictures that would somehow capture the combination of filtering light and heavy smells, and routinely failed. I dallied along these roads, and eventually came to a small ruined-looking church at the edge of a vineyard. I sat on its ruined-looking wall, snacking on some bread and cheese I had grabbed from the hotel breakfast, enjoying the heat on the rocks and feeling happily alone in this lovely place.

Suddenly, the church bell began to chime, rupturing the quiet field like a thunderclap, or a gunshot. Birds startled to the sky. A sheep made some noise somewhere. I jumped slightly with the sudden sounds, then laughed quietly at my embarrassment at being scared by some bells and a distant bleating. I brushed the breadcrumbs from my legs and set off again, down into the dry valley beyond the church.

On the other side of the valley, the trail narrowed and became for the briefest of moments hike-like, a steep sandy path rising sharply out of the dry creek bed at the bottom of the valley. After a few minutes, it widened out into another dirt track and then a paved road and suddenly I was on the main road, starting at the crossroads between two other small towns. The Quinta do Portal was just down the road, but directly beside me was a smaller producer called the Quinta do Beijo. A dump truck rumbled up the little road that crossed the main road here, overloaded with juicy red grapes, and bumped its way into the Quinta do Beijo. I filed this information away for later and headed up the road to the main attraction, the Quinta do Portal.

I walked up the beautiful manicured driveway, mysteriously empty of cars, toward the huge front door. I leaned in as I pushed, as it looked heavy. It didn’t budge. Of course, I thought. How stupid. I pulled the massive handle instead, bracing my feet against the weight. It didn’t budge. I realized, sheepishly, that I must have been at the wrong door, then walked around the side of the building, where there was no door. This was weird. I went back to the main door and looked for posted hours—maybe I was catching them during their siesta, though it was still early for that. Nothing. I knocked on the door. Nothing. I banged on the door. Nothing.

I opened useless Google Maps and looked up the hours. It said the winery was open, but this was Portugal and this was Covid, so these details meant little. I tried calling, and got a voicemail recording in perfect English: “Our winery will be closed until further notice due to the Covid-19 global pandemic.” The curse of aftersight. Still on Google Maps, I tapped on the Quinta do Beijo, which at the time had very few reviews, maybe one. Google claimed it was open, but now I knew better. They had a phone number listed, so I called. A friendly voice answered in Portuguese.

“Do you speak English?” I asked sheepishly.

“Of course!” the voice said. “How can I help you?”

“Are you … open?” I asked.

“Ummm… kind of! Sure! We can be open,” he said. “What are you looking for?”

“Wine?” I said, and he laughed. “No, I was hoping I could take a tour,” I continued. I was winging it. “I’m a travel writer and I’m nearby and want to learn about wine production in the Douro.” I was really winging it.

“Oh, amazing!” he said. “We’d love to show you around! When are you available? When will you arrive in Douro?”

“I’m here now,” I said with tremendous understatement.

“Here where?” he asked.

“Here in Douro. I’m staying in Sabrosa. But I’m here… here. I’m across the road,” I explained.

He laughed again, a warm and happy laugh, a laugh without barriers. I already liked him.

“Okay, can you give us, like, 15 minutes? We have to turn on the lights and get some sausage.” This seemed fair to me. “See you soon,” he said, and hung up.

An hour later, I was sitting at a plastic table in front of the Quinta do Beijo, snacking on a sausage and cheese with a half-dozen very tired people and a half-dozen bottles of very excellent wine. I’d just finished my impromptu tour of the winery, led by João Monteiro, the friendly voice from the phone, and his sister Catarina and her young son. Like he had said, they were only kind-of open for tours. Joao and Catarina spoke excellent English and we moved slowly around the winery, chatting and joking.

Their showroom was partly under construction, some of their huge, century-old barrels were being cleaned, many of the bottles were unlabelled. But the quinta was in full production mode. Truckfuls of grapes kept arriving and being dumped into a huge crusher in front that was connected underground to stone tanks inside, where the grapes would macerate for a few days before being strained and processed and put into barrels. I had been to wineries before, but it only occurred to me when I walked into that tank room that I had never really been around wine being made. The smell of it is heavenly, yeasty and juicy, at once fresh and not fresh. Wine had been made in this room for ages, and its smell lived on in the cracks between the tiles and in the old wood of the doors. That day, it was overwhelming, the skins and stems floating at the top of tank giving off the most mouth-watering aromas. It made me instantly hungry to stand there, breathing deep grapey gulps of air.

We moved on to a room with hundreds of barrels, some maturing port and others holding table wines. Something like 80% of all grapes produced in Portugal must be sold to the Port producers, and most of that gets exported through the main seven or eight labels: Taylor’s Sandeman, Graham’s, etc. Small producers who had met their quotas are then permitted to use their remaining grapes for their own private label wines and ports, most of which are not exported, or not exported in huge numbers.

João explained all of this as we meandered through the barrels. We had collected a little retinue by now, his nephew dribbling a soccer ball along behind us, his sister running back and forth to get glasses, and a few of the winemakers and farmhands tagging along to try to listen in to the tour. It had been a while, João explained, since they had given a tour. Excitement was building in our small group. One of the other workers suddenly got excited and said something in Portuguese, and João’s face lit up. “He says we need to try this one,” he said, stopped beside one barrel in particular. Glasses materialized in hands, and someone handed João what looked like a huge eye dropper. João popped the cork out of the top of the barrel and inserted the dropper, then pulled it out and squirted a big taste into each person’s glass. This was a ruby port, not quite ten years old, lacking the defined sweetness that it would later take on. It was fresh and juicy and delicious. Everyone made approving sounds. We clinked our glasses and drank to its promise, some excellence they all knew was coming but that I couldn’t fully grasp.

Someone else said something and tapped on another barrel. Its cork was removed, the dropper inserted, fresh glasses brought out, the dropper emptied. This was an even older port, rich and sweet and smooth. Another barrel was opened. There were explanations for each one, but I was starting to lose the thread on the specifics and getting caught up in the sheer joy everyone took in being here, the love for having guests.

We took our glasses outside and sat at the plastic table, watching more trucks arrive with more grapes. We passed around a delicious oaked white wine and snacked on cheese and salamis. João was telling stories about the wines, the specific grapes, the method of production, but he was also revealing something special about Portuguese wine without really meaning to, planting a seed in my brain that would take the rest of the week to grow. There was passion and expertise everywhere here, in every fold of these hills.

Eventually, reluctantly, I said my goodbyes, leaving behind six bottles of wine that I’d come back for with the car the next day. I walked back to Sabrosa the long, wobbly way, down through the gulley and past the maybe-abandoned church and up the stone paths to the hotel across from Magellan’s house.

I met Antonio Henriques in the town square of Ervedosa Do Douro, on the opposite side of the Douro Valley from my hotel. This meant descending to river on the winding N323 to Pinhão and then ascending up an even windier section of the N323 back the other side. I had checked out of the hotel in Sabrosa early to meet Antonio, skipping breakfast. I had optimistically stopped strategically in Pinhão to find a coffee, but nothing had been open.

“Oh, yeah,” Antonio half-sympathized when I told him about this caffeine-related tragedy. “Pinhão has had a lot of trouble lately.” He was waiting for me as I pulled up to park the car by the small church in the town center, wearing jeans and a sporty shirt and hiking boots, with a small backpack and a baseball cap. He was casual and easy going and shook hands firmly. “We’ve all had a bit of a slow time this year. Let’s have a coffee at my house and I can explain.”

We had been in touch for the past few days over email. Alongside his wife Sylvia, Antonio runs Douro Walks, which operates what he calls a hiking excursions and which I call a boozy treks. We had agreed to go for a long walk around the surrounding hills—“Nothing too demanding,” Antonio promised—and take in some views, maybe go check out the vines that his in-laws, Sylvia’s parents, managed nearby.

The first stop on our wine hike was Antonio’s house—where I’d be staying for the night—just up from the town square. Ervedosa Do Douro is a lot like Sabrosa, vaguely pretty in places and totally functional and bland in others. Like most small Douro Valley towns, it had a community olive press near the center, which on this September morning was in operation, filling the town with that bittersweet, fleshy smell of raw olive oil. Antonio explained to me that these communal presses functioned with a 10% surcharge, which was payable only in olive oil. Anyone could bring their olives here to be pressed, but would have to agree to give a portion to the community to sell in its agricultural shop. Most towns in rural regions around Portugal and Spain have these kinds of shops selling oil and local honey and jams and cured meats, but I hadn’t known about this pay-in-oil arrangement. I loved it.

Antonio had a natural gift for explaining. He was a former schoolteacher who had moved from Maderia with Sylvia and their kids back to her home town here in the Douro. They had bought an ancient house on the main street of Ervedosa, with a huge wooden gate that swung inward majestically from the narrow road to reveal a courtyard and a sprawling house rising on both sides. We dropped my bags in the guestroom that Antonio and Sylvia usually rented on Airbnb. They hadn’t had a guest since March, Antonio told me. He hadn’t had anyone come for a hike in those six months either. He had taken up temporary work on the tourist boats that cruised the river starting from Pinhão, but there were so few tourists that those weren’t really running either.

Over coffee, he told me about the valley in better times, with its hundreds of good wines and its full river boats and its pretty tourist train. The excellent restaurants at the vineyards and the squares bursting with life. “You’ll have to come back when things are more open,” he demanded. His excitement was palpable and catching and before we had even set out on the hike, I had promised that I would return.

The hike was as advertised, really—not too demanding, especially at first. We wound our way upwards out of Ervedosa, past the tidy school and some big houses that suggested a prosperity belied by this weird, quiet year. We walked on paved roads for a while, our view growing ever more magnificent as the valley spread out beneath us, its steeper parts far in the distance a dark green, the river shimmering northward until it disappeared around a bend. After an hour or so we turned away from the river valley, and the trail rose and fell more dramatically with the folds of the land. We saw wild pigs seeking acorns and sheep roaming around. We saw juicy figs and apples exploded on the paths where they had fallen overripe to earth from overwhelmed trees. Antonio pointed out wineries here and there that were featured on his longer circuits. We wouldn’t be stopping at any of these today. He had other plans for me; he was going to put me to work.

I never found out how old Antonio’s father-in-law Sebastião and mother-in-law Maria Augusta were. It seemed rude to ask, even though my question was motivated by awe, even though it contained what I thought of as a kind of compliment. They had the dark, sun-wrinkled skin of those who are always outdoors and the white hair of those who don’t care about appearing old, but they had a fierce strength, too, a rural hardness, an energy and work ethic belonging to someone far younger.

They work a steep and small parcel of land above Ervedosa, which Antonio and I arrived at the longest-way round, having walked for four hours to go just up the road from the village. The vines were full to bursting, and I was told as we arrived that it was harvest day and asked if I would like to see how the grapes were picked and maybe help a little. This thrilled me.

These terraced vineyards make modern harvesting methods next to impossible. The vineyard is too steep and crowded for big farm equipment to move around, so most of the nurturing and harvesting is done manually, with simple tools or by hand. It’s difficult work, this clambering around in the bushes with pruning shears and a plastic bucket, but Sebastião and Maria Augusta wore it well.

They greeted us warmly, but in that non-fussed way of the farmer: a wave and a smile and a beckoning to make oneself useful. Antonio introduced me to the other farm workers, then ignored the call to work and lead us to a small room in one of the nearby buildings. Maria Augusta soon arrived with a huge pot of rice with tomatoes and chickpeas and Tupperware full of pasteis do bacalau—cod fritters heavy with sticky cheese, ideal protein balls for manual labour—and a stone jug of sweet red wine. Antonio poured two huge glasses and we gulped these down alongside bottles of water. We rested for a few moments, Antonio poured two more glasses of wine, and we sat in the shady room picking at cod cakes, avoiding work. I had never felt more Portuguese.

Soon enough we were among the vines, gathering ancestral grapes from some 100-year-old plants. The red grapes grown here are small and dark, almost purple, almost black, and somehow always hidden amongst the leaves. At each vine, I would stop and lift some of the lower branches to see if this plant had produced fruit this year, and if it had and the grapes were large enough, would snip them off with my shears and add them to the bucket I was half-carrying, half-scooting along the steep ground with me. When the bucket was full, I’d have to shout “Ola!” and wave and one of the more experienced/stronger workers would bring me an empty one and carry the heavy, stained, delicious-looking pail off to be added to bigger pails of grapes being loaded on an ancient pickup truck.

It was pleasant, tiring work. I loved being up here above the world, working with my hands, helping these kind people tend to their land. This was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an industrial production. These were people gathering grapes planted by some long-dead family member in a little pocket in the hills in a quiet part of a quiet country. I worked near Antonio, but pleasantly apart too. We focussed on the grapes. After a couple of hours, we’d picked the hillside clean. The grapes were all loaded on the truck, and the afternoon sun hung hot and high above. Sebastião came by to pat us on the back and offer swigs from a communal bottle of something sweet and warm, and through Antonio asked me if I had enjoyed myself. I told him I had, and asked what I thought was a simple question: how could he tell when the grapes were ready to harvest?

“By the alcohol content,” he answered through his son-in-law. “I just taste them.”

I didn’t really understand, so he offered a demonstration. We walked a couple of rows of vines up the hill, where he lifted the leaves on a few plants. He gestured at one in particular, and Antonio and I came closer. Sebastião pulled his shears out and snipped of a fat, juicy bunch of Moscato grapes. He held them up to his nose and breathed deeply, then passed them in front of my face, then Antonio’s. We inhaled deeply too, breathing yeast and sugar and soil. The grapes smelled deeply sweet, a little funky. Sebastião pinched one between his thumb and finger and smelled it again, then popped a few in his mouth. His expression changed. He handed some to me, and they tasted like, well, wine. My expression remained the same. He handed some to Antonio, who understood immediately what had happened.

“They’re ready,” Sebastião explained. “Today. These are probably around 14.5% alcohol already.” He munched a few more. So did I. So did Antonio. So did I, again. They were delicious. And I was trying to fit in. Sebastião explained a few things to Antonio, who instead of translating to me responded. They chatted for a couple of minutes, all the while I was pop, pop, popping the little wine sacks. This was living. In time, Antonio turned to me and translated the conversation—like we were in a badly dubbed movie—as, “We need to get back to work.”

“Was that all he said?” I asked. I’d had enough grapes to find this very funny.

“More or less,” Antonio replied, handing me back my bucket and shears. “Now we have to get all the white grapes, too.”

I got a head start by putting the rest of the bunch in my bucket.

Then, as instructed, I got back to work, moving more slowly than while picking the red grapes, mostly due to a long day trudging up and down the slopes. Despite the exhaustion and the wine legs kicking it, it remained deeply pleasant work. We were encouraged to snack freely as we worked, and the sun was warm and the world was still apart from the shuffling of our shoes on the rocky soil as we moved from row to row. How remarkable this all was, how earthen and old and beautiful. The intuition involved in it moved me. Sebastião could smell and taste the alcohol percentage, he could sense the readiness of a plant to be harvested and turned into something different and better. That knowledge was imprinted on him by this place, by a life lived on these slopes. His son in law had some of it, his daughter surely. Perhaps his grandkids too had this feeling in their skin, this sixth sense, too? Maybe they all did.

There were far fewer white grapes clinging to the ancestral plants than there had been red grapes. We were done in about an hour and a half, during which time we had all freely eaten the equivalent of a bottle of wine. Maria Augusta passed around cod cakes to soak some of it up, while Sebastião made some calculations. We had only picked about four crates (big rubber garbage pails) of white, which wouldn’t be enough. Antonio and I loaded into the cab of his funny little farm truck, and Sebastião drove with one hand while the other worked an old flip phone the whole way down the hill into Ervedosa, calling other farmers he knew. By the time we had pulled up at his house in the center of town, there was another truck waiting with 10 more crates of kind-of similar grapes. White, ripe, and close enough.

I never saw the upstairs of the house, because all the action was in the basement garage, where the family had a stone tank and an old manual press for crushing the grapes. This was another magnificent place, not in the grand way of the hilly vineyard and its forever views, but in the sensible organized way of a darkroom where the world’s best photographs get developed. Two walls were bare cement, one was a rolling garage door, and the fourth was a brick wine rack with hundreds of dusty, unlabelled bottles with little pieces of paper stuck to the bricks to mark vintages. Two large barrels were raised off the floor on wooden stands, and like everywhere else in the Douro, it all smelled incredible.

Sebastião leaned his head into the stairwell and shouted upward, and his grandkids dutifully appeared to help. One carried a cat, which was her way of helping. Another climbed up onto the stone tub in the corner, which stood shoulder height, and turned the hand crank on the grape crusher while the rest of us took turns lifting one of the huge trash cans to dump out the grapes. When the boy got tired, Sebastião himself climbed into place and crushed the rest of the grapes. All told, it took no more than two hours from the moment we left the farm until all of the grapes we had picked (and those of a neighbour) has been processed.

Sebastião had one friendly point to prove, and dipped a funny-looking glass vial into the fresh wine. He then dropped what looked to be a 200-year old thermometer into the vial, which bobbed around until it floated more or less in one spot. He turned the vial so I could see it; a series of numbers and lines, floating at exactly 14.5. This was the alcohol content of this new wine. He had been right to the exact degree. He laughed and squeezed my shoulder. Now we could drink.

He grabbed a bottle from one of the recesses in the wall, and Antonio got excited. “This is special!” he said, grabbing my arm a little. “This is exciting. We don’t usually drink these.” Glasses were shouted for and a corkscrew procured and an old cork doggedly extracted and cups poured immediately. The Portuguese and the Spanish don’t believe in letting it breathe—wine like this is consumed as soon as the bottle is opened. Everyone assembled (which included the neighbours who had sold Sebastião some grapes, some relatives I missed the names of, myself, Antonio, the grandkids, the cat) made pleased sounds at the excellence of the wine. For his next trick, Sebastião opened one of the barrels and decanted some port into an empty bottle. He poured a few glasses. He passed these around and as I took my first sip, time just … sort of … stopped.

It was the best port I had ever tasted. (It remains so to this day.) I couldn’t understand it. It was like a sherry, almost, an oloroso or a palo cortado: it wasn’t overly sweet but had its sugary notes. It was slightly charred tasting. It was round and full and it lingered a long, long time. There was a flavour I couldn’t place. I took another sip to try again, and failed.

Sebastião saw my face and looked pleased. He tapped the barrel and said something quietly. “Chestnut,” Antonio whispered, not wanting to break the spell on the room. We stood there in silence for a while, sipping away, appreciating a masterpiece. At some point, the cat squirmed out of the girl’s hands and meowed, and we all drifted back into the room from wherever the port had transported us. Everyone resumed some sort of movement except me; I just wanted to keep sipping this perfect drink.

Sebastião’s movement was to go to the corner of the room near the wine tank. He rinsed the port bottle there and then dipped his glass into the raw wine at the top of the tank. He smelled it and tasted it, seemed pleased. Then he opened the tap at the bottom of the tank and filled the bottle he had used for the port more-or-less to the same level. He removed the cork in the top of the barrel and put a funnel in place, then poured the new wine from the bottle into the funnel. He gave me and Antonio a little wink and said something in Portuguese, which was translated as, “Some out, some in.”

And with that, the glass of port still in my hand became something new. It became unique. It became irreplaceable. What was in the barrel was no longer the same as what was in my glass, and never would be again. This was how it worked, I learned: some in, some out. The port was always generally port, but it was never the same thing twice. Melancholy swelled within me briefly, but was quickly replaced with something else. A feeling of pride, maybe, a sense of being lucky to have this little taste of a perfect thing in my hands, and a knowledge of exactly how long it would last. I tipped the glass back and finished it off.

“Please tell him it’s perfect,” I said quietly to Antonio. He did, and Sebastião, suddenly shy, nodded his head in thanks. “Does he sell it?” I asked. Not really, no, was the answer. That was fine, I reasoned. Life was for living in those perfect little moments. It was getting late, anyway. Sylvia was waiting at home for us with dinner, dessert, and more wine.

I left the Douro the next day. Antonio walked me through the quiet town to my car, seeming no worse for wear from the night before. I was fuzzyheaded but enthralled, still buzzing from it all. As a thank you present (in addition to refusing payment for the bedroom for the night and the tour and any of the food), Antonio had a surprise for me. He handed me a huge plastic jug—five litres, maybe more—wrapped in plastic.

“Sebastião wanted you to have this,” he said. The port. My port. Or a slightly different version of it, refreshed with new wine after our glasses had been taken out. I was deeply touched. This port now had grapes I had picked in it too. There was no better gift, this one-of-a-kind thing. I hugged Antonio, and told him to pass it on. I doubted, slightly, that he would.

Driving south on the arid backroads to the Algarve, where I was meeting Mark and Hayley and two of their friends for a couple days of planned beachbumming and hiking around Lagos, my thoughts kept turning to the jug of port sloshing around on the floor of the back seat. What had been poured into my jug would have been topped up with something else again. Some out, some in.

That night in Lagos went as the first night anywhere goes with Mark and Hayley. Beer, wine, gin, port, wine, beer, a multi-day hangover. The next morning’s run didn’t materialize, nor the next day’s hike, nor the hike the day after that. I didn’t see them until the day I was leaving, heading back to Lisbon to fly to Turkey. The port was still in the back seat of the car. I called Mark and we met for breakfast, and I told him the story of the wine hike and Sebastião and I poured my heart out to him about the perfect port and changeability of life and the fleeting moments and how nothing stays the same. Then he walked me to my car and gave me a characteristic, “Safe travels, Drewski,” and I gave him the port. “Take this home and cherish it,” I begged him. He said he would.

I drove away. I went to Turkey. Covid returned. Borders began to close. I wasn’t allowed to board a flight back to Lisbon from Turkey because the Netherlands, where I’d transit and enter Schengen, was now closed to Canadians. I barely made it back at all, flying through Munich the next day before Schengen closed completely. I spent time in Lisbon, a month in the Algarve, and when I eventually went back to Porto to dog sit Stevie, the pandemic and the daily rule changes took up everyone’s mental energy. I had forgotten about the port.

A couple of years later, I was back in Porto, sharing a port with Mark in a sunny square. He was asking about wine tourism and the Douro and looking for tips for a trip they were planning. I remembered the port. I imagined it tucked away safely at home, that it had been saved for me until this moment, this happy reunion.

“Oh right!” Mark said, flashing his cheeky grin. “We had that in Lagos. Finished it off on the last night. Good stuff, that. Thanks again, Drewski!”

Some out, some in.

This is one of my favourite pieces of my writing, for a lot of different reasons, some of which I think are worth sharing. I have been travelling for almost 20 years and writing for even longer, but this piece marks a shift in style, a sort of finding-of-voice, that has remained with me since. In 20 years of being a writer and especially in the decade-plus of being a travel writer, the most telling absence in my writing was truth. Emotional truth in particular.

As a journalist invited on media trips on the Eastern and Oriental Express or to review a luxury hotel that had just been renovated in rural Scotland, I was spoiled and blessed and overawed and charmed and wrote dishonestly because of this. That train passed through a civil war zone. Its passengers were ensconced in a gilded, softly-lit bubble, fed caviar and poured champagne, while somewhere in the dark jungle outside people buried landmines in the muddy fields. That hotel with its hedge maze and its falconry classes and its own train stop and its golf courses was nothing more than the long, bejewelled arm of the royal family keeping a hold on Scotland. Or something. You know. Something other than what I wrote.

I didn’t write about those experiences honestly because I was afraid of offending my hosts or of not being invited back. Or losing my seat at the table. But when I wrote the first sections of the story that follows, sitting at a little bar away from the loud parts of Sevilla, something felt different. There was a truth that had never been present before, an integrity. Something had changed, and has remained changed. I’m deeply grateful for this.

Here, then, is The Holy Week, once again.

There are thousands of people squeezed into the Plaza del Salvador in the center of Sevilla, and the balconies and rooftops lining the square are likewise packed. It’s nearly dusk, and the city is muggy and caked with bright-yellow dirt, the leftovers from a sandstorm blown northward from the Sahara that mixed with the unseasonable rain earlier in the afternoon. The sky has lost some of the ungodly, menacing hue it once held, but we bear the marks of the foul weather: everyone has dusty splotches on the shoulders of their fine suits, of their pretty dresses.  

I’ve lost track of my friends in the sheer mass of well-dressed and attractive people. The men all kind of look the same here, the Andalusian Standard Male Sunday Best outfit consisting of a dark suit, a light blue shirt, and a colourful tie. Many have a cardigan (brown or blue) tied around their waist. Many have a puffy vest under the jacket due to the rainy weather, which is seen as a symbol of winter in Sevilla. The women have a certain sameness too, wearing heels with elegant pantsuits or long dresses, all in similar bright tones.

Being separated from my friends is not distressing, since none of us can move anyway. They were somewhere close by, even if I can’t pick them out of the crowd. Everyone, the whole crowded mass, is swaying happily and chatting and snacking and waiting, so I sway and wait too, and wish I had a snack. Across the plaza, the procession Borraquito is arriving back to the Iglesia Colegial del Divino Salvador.

Two rows of nazarenos (penitents) in long white tunics and tall pointy hats carry candles slowly toward the church gate. Music can be heard somewhere off in the distance through Sevilla’s narrow streets, a signifier that one of the procession’s pasos is nearing. Each procession has one or two of these pasos, enormous and heavy displays like parade floats, always depicting either Christ in some stage of his final days or the Virgin Mary in her various states of distress—or of her ultimate, serene acceptance. These pasos are hoisted and carried step-by-step around a procession route by about 50 men called porteros (and they are always men). The procession routes are all different. Every procession begins and ends at its patron church and is required to pass along a few hundred meteres of a central path to Sevilla’s remarkable, but the rest of the route depends on where the patron church is. In each procession, the pasos are immediately preceded by people carrying incense and standards and immediately followed by marching bands of varying size and ability. A single procession can last for more than 12 hours, depending on the length of the route and the number of nazarenos. The longest ones—with over 2,000 nazarenos—take as long as two hours to pass by a single spot.

The smoke from the incense bearers has begun to waft from the opposite corner of the Plaza del Salvador. A low drumbeat bounces off some faraway wall. This signals to the entire crowd that the paso is about to enter, and thousands of people begin shushing one another. (North American readers will imaging a kind of “shhhhhhhh” sound, but the Sevilla shush is like a tsking, a sound from behind clenched teeth, like you’re telling a cat to stop clawing you.) The shushing quickly gives way to a startling silence, the whole square having been shushed into quiet submission. Any attempt to talk is met with several dozen sharp tsks, and within a few seconds, it is utterly still.

The paso shuffles into view across the square, this one probably a “Cristo” (an image of Christ, but it’s hard for the uninitiated to tell from across a vast plaza) but moving with the familiar gorgeous rhythm of all pasos, that sheer human will to move a big thing somewhere other than where it currently is. Behind the paso, the band begins to play, nothing somber or sad but a full spectacular march with swelling horns and drums and in contrast to the silence of the square moments earlier, the sound is devastating and beautiful.

Then the music suddenly dies and another silence takes hold. The men under the paso navigate a tricky corner and carry the float for a dozen meters toward a ramp leading up to the church. This is the home stretch, and the paso wobbles onward and ever-so-slightly upward, every breath in the plaza held. A few wobbles more and it’s gone, completely inside the church. The square erupts with applause and the band starts up a triumphant, horn-filled tune. When the band stops playing again, the square is already starting to clear, the sky having once again grown menacing. The band takes a smoke break. Tired porteros collapse in the church, the job done for another year. The bars around Sevilla fill with exhausted watchers, everyone smiling and laughing and looking nervously at the clouds. So goes Semana Santa, the holy week.

The entirety of holy week reminds me of one of my favourite songs, which begins like this: “There are times that walk from you, like some passing afternoon.” It’s an old Iron and Wine song, and it’s mostly about the slow life in Georgia and the way that traditions are handed down across the generations, and about the obligation to religion in traditional places (“And she’s chosen to believe in the hymns her mother sings” and “Sunday pulls the children from their piles of fallen leaves”). There’s an inescapability to the lyrics that always felt equal parts melancholic and sweet to me, that ever-presence of religion, the oppression of traditions.

These are things I’ve never experienced firsthand, a child of an agnostic and an atheist or something similar. We never talked about religion at home, but were sent to bible camp religiously each summer because my town had a by-donation/pay-what-you-can summer camp run by Baptists. My parents decided to pay zero dollars, and we lived in a cachement area that allowed us to go twice per summer, equaling four weeks of free childcare. Camp was mostly sports and singing children’s hymns and catchy Christian songs. There was a really great tuck shop, and we’d each get a dollar every day to take with our lunches so we could buy candy. There was an hour of chapel in the mornings (mostly singing) and random prizes taped to the bottoms of the plastic chairs that filled this small rural church. One time per camp we’d go on a day-long canoe trip to this place on the lake called Slippery Rock, and we’d spend the afternoon sliding down a slimy angular rock into the dark waters of Graphite Lake and laugh and scream and it was pure Ontario summer glory. “Is this what god does?” I’d wondered. Splashing around with your friends in cold lake on a hot summer day, the sky dotted with big puffy clouds—surely this is the definition of divinity. Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention in the bible classes.

Sometimes, the camp counsellors—mostly troubled youths from around town who I’m sure were doing some sort of court-mandated community service in this role as youth leaders—would ask us halfheartedly if we wanted to accept the Jesus Christ as our personal lord and savior. When I said no, they always looked slightly relieved.

Beyond those weeks at bible camp, religion was always a kind of low-level background noise to my life in rural Ontario. Our elementary school had more than its fair share of evangelical teachers—my fifth grade teacher was also a reverend in a small Baptist parish church—but only the most fervent of these risked crossing the line between Church and State. My fourth grade teacher was a preacher’s wife and would read from the New Testament around Christmas (and all year long our spelling tests would contain the names of biblical places, which is how I am still able to spell Bethlehem and Nazareth and Gomorrah with ease). My most significant Christian trauma also happened in fourth grade. 

My best friend one day asked me if I believed in god, maybe out of the blue or maybe because we had been quizzing each other on the spelling of Galilee. We mostly talked about hockey or soccer or the Ninja Turtles, so this was a departure. I had no idea what to say in response, so he kindly asked me if I wanted to try praying with him. I said sure, of course, I’d love to, because I knew as a young boy that you shouldn’t deliberately hurt someone’s feelings, and also another part of me really wanted to try it, in earnest. It was winter, and during one school recess (the short one in the morning), he and I went to a remote part of the schoolyard and got on our knees and clasped our mittened hands together in front, just like you’d see on TV. He said some words, which I repeated with whatever solemnity I could imitate. I closed my eyes so tightly in case he was looking at me, and there in the cold field I hoped desperately to feel something. When we were finished, he said, “Did you feel something?” and I told him the truth: I didn’t think so. We went back inside to do our 30 minutes of French homework.

I went home that night entirely devastated. It’s one of the earliest feelings of disappointment that I can remember in my life: a search for a bigger thing, a call unanswered. I struggled to find the words then to describe to my parents why I was upset, and today have no clearer understanding about it. Was I sad that I couldn’t feel anything? Or was I just a kid who wanted to share something with another kid and felt left out?

Thirty years on, I know. I felt left out. Standing in the dust-caked square in Sevilla, I still felt no connection to god or Jesus or whoever, and knew that everyone around me did. But that didn’t matter; I was still profoundly moved by the spectacle, by the shared experience with those who probably did believe in god or Jesus, in saints and miracles, in the whole godly thing.

After the Borraquito’s paso had entered the church, the rain began to fall in earnest. People hurried from the square, desperate to squeeze into a bar to wait for news of either another procession or the cancellation of the rest of the day’s events. Each day during Semana Santa involves at least 12 hours of processions, and only a handful of these begin before noon. The last arrives back to its home church well past midnight. Devout Sevillianos, or at least passionate ones like my host Antonio, live in a kind of on-off frenzy throughout each day. They intersect a procession at a particular location to see the pasos, then squeeze through the crowds to find a place for a drink and a snack, then rush to the next spot on the map to see the next procession.

On the Plaza del Salvador, one bar has room for our group, which starts with four people and ends with about 20. This bar has no chairs. No bar has chairs. During Semana Santa, they’re all tucked into storage to make room for more exhausted people, none of whom get to sit down. I guess this encourages people to move around between locations, spending money quickly and leaving to find somewhere to rest. It works. The bars are constantly packed, people scarfing down tiny sandwiches and chugging Sevilla’s hilarious tiny beers.

(A quick note that serves as actual, real-world travel information! In Sevilla, when you order a beer, it is assumed that you want a caña, which is about 200ml of beer usually served in pint glass, of which fills up about one third of the cup. Supposedly, this is so that the beer will be cold for the entire time you’re drinking, which is about 11 seconds. A pint would get too warm, the logic goes. Let me try, I say. A larger beer exists in the form of a cortado, which is supposedly a double but which is really about 300ml. Still, the glass looks more full and feels more satisfying to hold, and my beer has never once gotten hot while drinking it. It’s considered in bad taste to order these larger beers, and unspeakable if you’re a local, hence most people drink 2-3 teensy tiny beers in quick succession and move on to another bar.)

The group I was with showed no interest in braving the rain to find another location, and news was spreading that the rest of the day’s processions had been cancelled, so we stayed put and discovered a loophole in the Semana Santa system: if you keep ordering food and drinks, you can remain at the same bar for hours. If you’re lucky, they may even let you lean on the wall. Chairs be damned!

By midnight, with our legs tired from standing, our bellies full, and our livers earning their keep, everyone went home. I felt exhausted, less from the frenetic religiosity and the crowds than by being on my feet for 10 hours. The next day, the frenetic religiosity and the crowds would prove they could exhaust me too.

Sunday, then. The big one. Saturday’s rained-out processions had left a whole city craving more god. We get a late start, pacing ourselves. We don’t leave to see the first procession until almost 4 p.m, half-running across the city to make sure we’re in a particular plaza at a particular moment. Antonio knows Sevilla’s old city perfectly, its millennia-old Moorish map imprinted on his brain. It’s a cool but sunny day, and the streets throb with excited families waiting along the procession routes. The air hums with a now-familiar excitement. It’s happy and busy and sweet, and it makes getting around extremely annoying.

We seem to always be moving against traffic, by which I of course mean against 5,000 people heading toward the Cathedral. But I trust Antonio, and follow as closely as is possible. Like a strict father with his wayward child, he’s constantly looking over his shoulder for me as I try to take a photo of some kid playing with a ball of wax or a spectator stuffing their face with Cheetos. His friend has joined us too, a handsome farmer who looks like Walton Goggins with a deeper tan, and who shares Antonio’s urgency. Antonio’s pregnant wife shares my irritation at being needlessly rushed, clicking her tongue and sighing at every insistence to hurry up.

Why did we leave the house only 30 minutes before the parade, I want to ask? We had spent the day lazing around, nursing hangovers, having lunch, having a cheeky hangover-helping beer or three. If we’d given ourselves even 15 more minutes, there would be no rush.

No matter, we soon arrive at the plaza to join a few thousand people who had exactly the same idea. We’re at the back of the crowd, near a bakery, and press our backs against its windows into the only remaining space available. The nazarenos are already passing and somewhere out of sight I can hear the music that follows the paso, which means it’s close. Which means I’ll only be pressed into this glass for at least 20 more minutes. I’m sweating, due more to a hangover and having 15 people squeezed up against me than from the outside temperature. It’s incredibly uncomfortable. I hate god, I decide.

But then that same familiar magic descends on the square. The paso jiggles into view, the horns behind it start to swell, the crowd goes silent and watches with its single held breath to see how far the paso will make it. It shuffles and jostles—its candles and virgin shaking and flopping around on top of 50 pairs of shoulders—halfway across the square, then stops.

The stopping is also a kind of magic: the plaza explodes with applause, whoops, shouts. The band takes a breather too, and the sounds of the music are replaced with a thousand excited conversations. Que rico, que bueno, que magnifico, que so on. The break lasts about five minutes, during which the exhausted porteros are passed huge jugs of water. The bottom of each paso is covered with a large curtain or sheet, so that only the socked feet of the carriers can be seen, except in these breaks. Then, one or two of the porteros flops on the ground, the sheet lifted to let some air in. The men underneath are dressed identically (classic Sevilla), in dark pants and white shirts, a coloured towel wrapped around their neck. Most are in tank tops, but those with sleeves have their sleeves rolled up to hold their cigarettes. They are drenched in sweat, which I appreciate. They take turns gulping water.

The end of the break is signaled with a wooden knocker on the paso. A processional leader bangs it once, and the curtain drops while everyone beneath shifts into position. People in the crowd begin shushing. A second knock and you see the paso jostle slightly as the men step up with their shoulders into the bars, ready to lift. More shushing. The third knock is answered with a communal grunt and the paso shoots upward, sending candles and decorations tumbling. The crowd cheers. Then the paso starts its slow shuffle forward once more, and the band starts to play.

Another pattern reveals itself: no sooner has the paso left the plaza than the entire crowd does too. There’s another procession to get to a few blocks away, so we push through to get to a quieter side street to rush to the best spot to stand still and wait for it to go past. In this one, the nazarenos wear fantastic moody purple hoods to go with their white cloaks. The sun is already starting to set, and the dimming light casts long shadows and cranks the spookiness up to 11. (That’s when I thought the Spooky Scale only went to 10, and that 11 was an exaggeration. The scale would be expanded several times more that day.)

We are, if anything, slightly early for this one, and I get to enjoy a few pleasant minutes just mulling about on a not-entirely-jam-packed sidewalk. The purple procession quickly loses its air of spookiness under closer inspection. The nazarenos are carrying huge white candles, six feet tall, and cupping their hands tenderly around the flame to keep it lit. A man walks up and down between them, lighting those candles that have gone out. And all around the street, children swarm with balls of wax.

There’s so much to explain about Semana Santa and its many rituals that that my gracious hosts had forgotten to mention this one, its most charming. In addition to being handed candy from the nazarenos, children collect drops of wax throughout the week from these long candles. The ball of wax starts as a little cork ball when a child is just four or five years old, and grows to the size of a softball over the years. I’m standing by two or three families with young kids, which you can tell because their balls of wax aren’t that big. It’s like rings on a tree. The kids wander freely in the procession, tugging on the white sleeve of a pilgrim and holding out their wax balls. Most nazarenos say no with a shake of the hood, but one in every 10 that passes by will lower their candle and the kid will hold up their ball of wax and one or two drops will fall and that’s it. Very little is said in these moments, deliberately I suppose. It’s all meant to be solemn, but it reads as overwhelmingly sweet, almost cute. Maybe this god character is alright.

It’s more than half an hour until the purple procession’s paso passes (that was unavoidable, sorry), and this half hour is the most pleasant I spend during Semana Santa. The light is wonderful, the photos excellent, the mood friendly, the personal space respected. It’s the most subdued procession we see that day, and I feel like I’m starting to get this whole thing. Christian or not, believer in god or not, that doesn’t especially matter here. This is a family—no, a community—no, a whole-city!—event, a way of coming together and sharing a space, of tolerating busyness, overcrowding, and dust storms altogether. Against the backdrop of the KKK-style hoods (these inspired those, one hopes), it’s jarring and strange but generally just … nice. It’s just really, really nice.

But this procession is over, as far as we’re concerned. Antonio is signaling to me that it’s time to go. There’s more to see. We switch back into hustle mode and head toward the main square, within spitting distance of the Cathedral. This is Holy Ground Zero. Every procession must pass along the same specific route into and out of the Cathedral, in the heart of Sevilla’s old city. On either side of this route, a kilometer on either side of the Cathedral, temporary bleachers have been erected as seats for certain well-connected or wealthy families. Or old people. It’s a bit unclear how someone gets one of these seats. I’m not destined for one in my lifetime, so they serve only a single function: obstructing half of the walkable area. Practically speaking, this has a huge impact on the next two hours of my life.

Antonio has earmarked one of his favourite processions (of the day) as a must-see (one of seven of the day), but it’s across the main procession route from where we watched the purple one. There are two ways to get to the square: walk around the entire old city, or queue to cross the street. We choose the later, and wait between metal barriers for 20 minutes to be allowed to cross, then funnel into a plaza too full to allow us entry. We squish. More squish behind us. The world comes to its now-familiar standstill as off across the plaza a paso enters, horns blare, etc. Applause, shushing, applause. It’s probably beautiful. I can’t see a thing. When it’s over, we turn around and cross the street again, waiting 30 minutes this time. We catch another procession accidentally while waiting to cross, and then after some sweating and pushing emerge into the open night air on a dark street.

Processions come and go. There are at least three more that night. There are drinks to be had along the way, some desperate leaning on door frames or the outer walls of the bar. Feet start to ache, then calves and thighs and lower backs. Standing and walking all day, drinking only booze—it gets tiring. We eat something along the way, or we must have? Sandwiches, I bet. They eat a lot of sandwiches in Sevilla, and cod in its ten thousand Spanish forms, all mediocre. At one bar, we spot a huge ball of wax—years of work—left behind on a table. A few minutes later a child of about 10 or 11 comes bursting through the door, eyes wet, darting from table to table. Antonio hands him the ball, the child screams sweet relief and runs back out into the night.

By now it’s nearly midnight. In the dim streetlights the processions are even spookier, but they’ve got nothing on what’s about to come. We’ve had our last drink of the night at a tiny corner bar and head towards a main street to catch the final procession of Palm Sunday. Antonio now tells us that this is his favourite, but he’s at the stage of the night and level of alcohol in which he starts dancing like a bullfighter and constantly clapping out the beat to a flamenco only he can hear, so I take this with the grain of salt it deserves. We find a perch/learning spot against a restaurant we had leaned inside of earlier that day. Nazarenos dressed entirely in black are slowly marching past, carrying long black candles. As they pass, the city becomes utterly silent, a silence deeper than any that have come before. Even Antonio’s clapping trails off.

Then, as soon as the procession turns a corner onto a main street, all of the streetlights are turned off at once. The only light is the faint glow of the candles and in the near-pitch darkness sounds are weirdly amplified and the loudest thing is the soft shuffling of robes and the gentle padding of feet on the wax-covered street. The paso silently slides into view and drops for a break. Nothing stirs. Moments pass in this near-total darkness and almost-total quiet, and then the knocker sounds one, two, three—low grunt—and the procession moves quietly on. But then—then!—the music from the band rises out of the shrouded street. Soft and melancholy, it hangs in the smoky air longer than usual. But eventually it too is gone, and the city and its waxed old streets finally go to bed.

Semana Santa is exhausting. We arrived home around 3 in the morning the night of the spookiest darkest procession, and Antonio and his wife were both awake and taking calls for work at 9 a.m. The pace at which life is lived here is something to behold, full-throttled until it isn’t, calm until it’s time to go go go.

That pattern exists at all times in Sevilla, but is heightened during Semana Santa. That is to say, Sevilla is always a little bit exhausting, with its endless options for eating and drinking and dancing and singing and walking and just enjoying a happy and fulfilling life. Every time I visit, I’m entranced and energized for the first few days and then, somewhere around day four, when I start to pickle and the lack of sleep is making me see double, I am desperate to escape. Then a few days later I’m telling anyone who will listen how much I love and want to be back in Sevilla, but how I’d never live there because of how exhausting it is. And though this is how I always feel about Sevilla, I’ve never felt it to the extremes that I did during Semana Santa.

And impossibly, there are many more days of this planned. It’s a holy week, after all. The next morning Antonio is laying out the schedule for more processions and atheist me is starting to pray for some divine intervention.

The weather remains grey and grim in Sevilla, and then turns a corner to become fully miserable. Processions begin to be cancelled for the final afternoon and evening I’m in town. My heart swells, and I feel badly about this, but only slightly. I head to the airport in the evening against a backdrop of rain on the Andalusian plain, and I’m gone. The rain in Sevilla doesn’t let up. A couple of days of processions are cancelled outright. This is viewed by the majority as a tragedy. It makes the national news, the distressed faces of priests and penitents alike expressing abject disappointment.

I wonder if the cancellation comes as something of a relief to some people? Not the nazarenos or the porteros, for whom the procession is a distinct right of passage. Not the churches or the makers of the pasos, who have spent months preparing. Perhaps not even the children with their balls of wax on that high shelf in their bedroom. But surely, some of the exhausted watchers must welcome a day to rest their feet and not be pressed into a square with a thousand other hot and tired people waiting for a few brief flashes of a holy thing. Surely they would welcome a breather?

Semana Santa has its detractors, of course. Not everyone I spoke to was planning their days around the processions, and friends even talked about distant cousins and mere acquaintances who actively fled Sevilla during the festival. This meant that some folks were—if not strongly opposed to—not enthralled by the whole thing. But for those who stayed in Sevilla during Semana Santa, that communal suffering seemed to be part of the appeal. Let’s push this way to see that, they say. Let’s jam into this too-small space. Let’s stay up too late, be a bit too tipsy, they say. They say it wearily, but with one voice.  

The smell is always the first thing I notice about Bangkok, and it’s the thing I love most about the city. It’s salty, fruity, herbaceous. It’s hot, wet pavement and lemongrass and standing water and dust, dust, dust. It smells warm because it always is warm here, but it’s the kind of trapped-heat smell that lives in the pavement and the roof tiles and the walls. Nearer the river there’s a liveliness to the air, an almost-lightness—the exhaling of the long strands of water lilies that float pointlessly up and down depending on the tide—sometimes interrupted by the two-stroke engine oil sputter of the longtail boats that crisscross the Chao Phraya. In the knotted alleys of the quieter neighbourhoods, the smell is cooking oils and damp laundry struggling to dry on plastic clotheslines. And always, everywhere, a hint of kefir lime.

The second thing is the light. Bangkok has its own special hues. In the morning the city wakes to the softest orange light and to long shadows being dragged behind yawning street dogs. But its sunsets are ferocious, bordering on violent, the city’s dense smog adding red menace to twilight. But when the sun goes all the way down, the place becomes a ludicrous neon-lit frontier town, the elevated roads and trains all underlit by the flashing lights of the tuk tuks, by thousands of red brake lights, and everyone’s faces cast in a pinky-reddish glare. And in some little open-front shops—my favourite places in Bangkok—where an old woman is selling a few bags of chips or a bottle of water, where the walls have turned black and oily from the exhaust of the passing cars, a single bare lightbulb hangs over her smiling face and she appears as though in a spotlight, or a halo.

There’s also the ubiquitous excellence of the food and the tremendous friendliness and the specific badness of the traffic. There are also a million things in between those poles that exist in every city anywhere in the world: scams and crime and boredom and all the rest. But the goal of this exceedingly short—by this blog’s standards—piece will be to highlight some of the subtler charms of one of the world’s great cities. Or just to casually remember some stuff that I like about a place without writing 10,000 words about it.

The first time I came to Bangkok was in 2007. I had a stack of cash after a year of working irregularly in South Korea as an English teacher. I haven’t written about this yet, but the first six months that I taught in Korea I did so under-the-table, the promise of a degree in the mail good enough for my then-boss. There’s not a lot interesting in the story of teaching children to say “May I go to the bathroom please?” except for the funny detail that due to illegality I was paid in cash every month. At the time, I made a whopping 2.1 million won. At the time, that was about $2,000 Canadian dollars. At the time, the largest denomination bill in Korea was the 10,000 won note, meaning I was paid in hundreds of bills each month. The whole point is that my finances were entirely tactile, and I entered the world of Southeast Asian travel with only hard cash; no credit cards were offered to me; hell, I struggled to get a bank card. In 2007, as an irregular, unbanked individual, hotels needed to be booked upon arrival, by showing up with (sweet, sweet wads of) cash in hand.

So I stayed on Khao San Road, like everyone else. In those days, you’d always be sure of finding a bed. Khao San was deserving of its reputation for filth and transience, but for the first-time visitor to Bangkok, it’s the easiest of places to land. Khao San Road was enduring a special period of awfulness around the time I first visited. It became known not so much as a place with a single flop house as a whole neighbourhood of repulsive flop. It’s the kind of place you wake up and wonder what went wrong, and the answer is never great.

A friend told me a story recently about his first trip to Bangkok. He stayed on Khao San Road, where he met a British man selling tickets to ping pong shows or Muay Thai fights or both. The man had gotten drunk and missed his flight back to England and had also run out of money, so this was his plan: he’d sell these tickets, making less than a dollar per head he lured onto a bus. I’m told he looked in very rough shape: injuries, a bad cough. It was as though he’d been struggling on the fringes of Thai society for years. He’d been there a few weeks. These are the kinds of people you meet on Khao San Road.

It’s cleaned up now, or at least it seems to have. It’s all hip hostels and nicer restaurants and a cute cooking school or two, and it’s close to all of the things you need to see the first time you go to Bangkok: Wat Pho and the Royal Palace, these gold-clad masterpieces of Siamese architecture. It’s near Chinatown and its wonderful night market. It’s close to the river and its ferries and malls and the spectacular Wat Arun temple, on the opposite bank of the river from Wat Pho.

Like most travellers, my knowledge of Bangkok began along Khao San Road and began to slowly flower outward. On subsequent trips I started staying in Sukhumvit, which has chain hotels with good value and some nice restaurants and party streets and strings of dodgy massage parlours beside non-dodgy massage parlors. Then I stayed even further from the center, in hipster Thong Lor with its Top 50 Bars in the World bars and little Japanese shops and dodgy alleys and non-dodgy alleys. To save a few bucks one trip I stayed in Rama 9. Don’t do this. On a recent trip I found Sathon—the embassy district—to be lovely and calm, and on my last trip a couple of weeks ago I stayed right along the river, where semi-luxury hotels have sprung up in recent years beside full-luxury hotels, but where the surrounding streets are still small and pleasant.

I’ve decided that all of these are good neighbourhoods. In most places in Bangkok, you can find that happy mixture of high- and low-end, fine restaurants and street stalls, cool bars and people drinking Chang from the 7-11. Some are more local feeling than others, have more labyrinthine alleyways and more blaring scooters, but Bangkok’s low-level charm is pervasive in all of them.

By design, Notes from the Edge of the Earth posts are usually long and rambly, whereas this one is deliberately short and accidentally rambly. I wrote a few thousands words—these little vignettes of what makes Bangkok Bangkok—but it all rang a little silly, a little hollow. It is a place that needs to be experienced, felt, smelled, seen. It is describable, but it is also stupendously photogenic.

When I began this project, it was an attempt to resuscitate an old travel blog by the same name that focussed as much on photography as on long-form writing. In the future, there will be more posts like this, light on words and heavy on images. There will be stories about trips where the photos are long, long lost, like the next Faulty Memory Series (India), which will come out next month. For now, let’s recall that a picture is worth a thousand words and content ourselves with this 20,000-word essay.

Sometime during the night, a thick layer of ice had formed on the inside of the windows. I was asleep in a narrow single bed, wearing every item of clothing I had with me, tucked into my sleeping bag with a pile of blankets on top. Toque on my head, scarf wrapped around my neck. Each breath visible and hanging around in the air for too long. The frozen-over toilet was making funny noises, a low rattle and a kind of gasping sound, but the funniest sound of all was coming from outside.

“MISTER DAREWWW. MIIIIIIISTEEEEEER DAAAARRRREEEEEUUUUWWWWW. WAKE UP! WAKE UP!! LOOOOOK!”

I smiled, my beard making a soft crunching sound and the ice slushed around on my face. I laughed. What a disaster this had all been so far.

The voice was from a man who called himself Frank, but who certainly wasn’t really called Frank.

“Look! Look!” he screamed again. “Loooooooooooooook Mister Drew!”

His voice was coming from outside of the icy window. I started peeling off layers of blankets, wormed out of the sleeping bag, and shuffled toward the window. Through the ice, the faintest pink light could be seen desperately peeking out of the distant darkness. With some effort, I began twisting the handle on the window, shaving ice with each attempt, until finally the latch was free. The window wouldn’t budge at first, but a couple of sharp yanks on the handle sent shards of ice flying and let a blast of cold morning air into the room.

I pulled the second half of the window open and stuck my head out into the morning air. Frank was standing a floor below in his heavy coat, which was unzipped. His head and hands were bare and he puffed big white breaths as he waved and shouted good morning. He exuded both warmth and cold, stomping his feet and smiling his smile and laughing loudly. “Look!” he shouted again. “Come down!”

Surely the whole village would wake to his racket, I thought. But when Frank stopped shouting, all was still. The snow from the previous afternoon hadn’t settled, but everything was coating in a layer of glittering frost—all the windows of all the simple teahouses, all the corrugated metal on the roofs, every blade of grass in the tiny clearing where Frank was standing—a frozen scene in a little town at the top of the world.

And behind that frozen scene, the most stunning sight in the world: the crown of the Annapurna range of the Himalayas, snow-capped and reaching for—no, having reached to—the heavens, slowly being set ablaze with the rising sun. First the tallest peaks catch the reflecting orange and red, and then as the sun comes up a little more, some of the lower peaks follow, become lit, become fire and snow for a breathtaking moment. One by one, seven of the ten tallest mountains in the world revealed themselves to the day, to my gaping and uncomprehending and dumbly smiling face as I hung out of the window on the second floor of the teahouse in Ghorepani, Nepal.

I thought it would be difficult to arrive in a place like Ghorepani with as little preparation and research as I had done. I had come to Nepal for a lot of different reasons, trekking the least of them. I had to leave Lebanon to renew my visa, and one of the cheapest flight options had been—improbably—to Kathmandu (via Sharjah, on Air Arabia). This discovery prompted hasty googling, which revealed that a couple of weeks in Nepal would be cheaper than a week somewhere in Europe. It was Christmas, and travelling during Christmas in Asia always thrilled me.

My original itinerary didn’t really suit a trek. I had planned to spend a week or so in Kathmandu, the mere whisper of the name evoking mystery and magic. I wanted to wander the narrow streets, drift around pagodas and stupas, soak up the ancientness, take (now lost) photos, devour curries. I’d also previously been in contact with some animal rescue organizations who had vaguely said things like, “If you’re ever in Nepal, let us know.” I had put out some feelers about a story on working elephants in the jungly border region with India, so had set aside a few days to travel to the Chitwan area to play around with elephants. The schedule was loose, but pretty full.

Besides, most treks take a long time. The overdone and troubled Everest Base Camp trek takes two weeks. The Annapurna Base Camp trek takes about 10 days. The full Annapurna Circuit is even longer—three weeks or so—depending on how badly the altitude batters you and on how the weather cooperates in the high passes. And besides, trekking takes training. It’s intense. It’s uphill a lot of the time, and then it’s downhill—often in equal proportion to how uphill it was. And besides! There are few rewarding short treks in Nepal, most of the one-or-two days trips being described as fairly urban, or difficult to get to, or ugly, or some combination of these things. And so, I only planned for a trek in the sense of “if there was time after the elephant story for a couple of days of hiking, I might go hiking. Not trekking.” I packed running shoes and one pair of long pants and one hoodie. No jacket. No gear at all.

Then, the elephant story turned out not to take too long after all, and I found myself with a free week. I was sitting in Chitwan, sipping thick, sweet chai and writing notes, and realized I was less than a day’s terrifying bus journey to Pokhara, the sleepy town at the base of the Annapurna range from where all expeditions start. I hopped the bus the next morning, found a cheap hotel for that night, and outfitted myself on the fly for one of the world’s great treks.

I had thought this would be difficult; it wasn’t. Pokhara’s main street comprised of hotels, restaurants, and outfitters. In front of every shop stands someone purporting to be a guide or a porter. Inside every shop is someone selling the park pass and entry permit required for the trek, and offering rental everything. Within two hour of arriving, I had rented a cheap pack that would later save my life with its cheapness, a sleeping bag, a warm jacket, a windbreaker, a toque, a scarf, a flashlight, a headlamp, and more. I had also hired Frank, who was loitering around outside of the shop where I rented all of my gear.

Oh, Frank.

Frank was a porter. He was not a guide. He was very clear about this. Annapurna has strict rules on this: porters can be hired to carry your stuff but not to lead you on a trek, guides can be hired to lead you on a trek but cannot carry your stuff. The idea is to create two jobs in a high-demand industry, but I’m not convinced it works. Most people I met on the trek had only hired a porter, and Frank—despite his protestations—proved a pretty handy guide once we were on the trial. He organized all of the accommodation, found restaurants and suggested meals, and would often point at things along the way and say, “Look!” When I’d ask what I was looking at, he would repeat, “Look!”, this perhaps being the moment he was not allowed to guide.

Frank was married and had three kids under the age of nine. He was a sherpa and had worked the Everest routes for many years, but when his children we born he moved to Pokhara to work treks on the far-less-dangerous Annapurna Circuit. He had summited Everest countless times, one of the thousands of sherpas who do so without boasting, making nothing of the feat. He described it like he was heading out to the supermarket or walking the dog, not scaling the world’s tallest mountain. His English was shaky but charming, and though I only understood a quarter of what he said I found his company pleasant and reassuring. We spent four days walking together, sometimes in silence but mostly in that kind of staccato chat that happens on hikes, when most of what you are saying is to the back of someone as they clamber up a trail ahead of you. We ate all of our meals together, and he tried to show me how much easier it was to have curry and rice with your bare hands than with a spoon, a trick I never mastered.

At the time of my trip (2014), it was a requirement of the Annapurna park pass that you hire a guide or porter, or both. Some trekkers found a way around the rule and were going it alone, some mark of bravery or independence that is totally unnecessary. These treks are not so difficult as to require help. I could have carried my own sleeping bag, probably. The requirement is there to boost the local economy and to provide specifically skilled people with work opportunities. But for me that’s not the point, either. Sherpas are synonymous with Nepal, and experiencing any part of its Himalayan culture while pretending they don’t exist, while scorning their services or knowledge, is simply foolish. I chose sensibly to enrich my experience by speaking into the back of Frank, and he repaid the gesture in kind, speaking into the back of me for four hilarious days.

There are two trailheads for the Annapurna Circuit, one of which is Nayapul, about 40 kilometers from Pokhara. The outfitters who had sold me my park pass and connected me with Frank (by pointing outside and saying, “Hire him!”) arranged a car to take us to the gate of Annapurna Conservation Area, where permits are collected and maps distributed. Frank arranged the permits and spread a map out on the ground, where we squatted and he showed me our route.

We planned to walk five or six hours this first day to one of the low-lying villages. It was, Frank explained, a bit too late in the day to tackle Ulleri, a small town at the base of the first real ascent. Frank recommended the town of Tikhedhunga, and we set out for there casually.

I had left my suitcase at the hotel in Pokhara and was carrying only a small backpack with my camera and a couple of days’ worth of clothes. I insisted on bringing my tripod for early-morning or late-night shots, imagining the stars spread out across the sky in the thin air, bright and perfectly framed by jagged peaks. The tripod was attached to one side of the rental backpack with some bungee-type fasteners that were impossible to completely tighten, so the tripod would bounce slightly with every step. It took all of 15 minutes for this to become annoying. Frank would sometimes point at the bouncing tripod and say, “No good!” and laugh in my face. It felt good to feel seen.

The trail begins as a wide dirt road and is very flat for the first two hours as you meander away from Nayapul. It was a warm December afternoon, and I felt too hot in pants and a long-sleeved shirt, and was soon walking in a t-shirt, comfortable and happy. Frank was being careful not to overstep his role as porter and offering very little by way of guiding, apart from leading the way. Not that there was much to look at in these lower sections of the trek. At this altitude, Nepal wasn’t especially pretty nor especially interesting. These were the service towns of the Annapurna region, and looked the part: low cement buildings with heaps of construction equipment laying around, food stores and tourist shops selling the same souvenirs as in Kathmandu, as in Ghorepani, as in Pokhara. Tourist shops on a trekking route baffle me—they obviously have enough business to survive, but who is buying a t-shirt or a penis-shaped bottle opener labeled “Himalayas” here, at the start of a days-long trek?

After a quick-but-late lunch of curry and rice at a little riverside restaurant (the river being mostly dry) the trail began to rise, and we wound our way gently upwards, toward the Himalayas. Across the valley, we could see the beginnings of steep green slopes, but there were few signs yet of the mountains proper, those snowy peaks scratching at the heavens. The hills were home to terraced farms growing what I assumed were rice and tea (unverified by Frank), half of which were already in deep shadow and half of which were in bright sunshine, a peculiarity of the folds of the landscape. The path narrowed pleasantly and became tree-lined and then totally tree-covered, the temperature dropped.

Here on the narrow dirt trail, we began to be overtaken by local couriers. Before the 2010s, there were no roads here at all. When I visited, the oft-maligned road to Mustang, at the crest of the circuit, had not been totally finished, and its impact was not yet fully felt. The guidebooks and trekking websites talked about it as a shortcut for the end of the trek, an unpleasant descent of dust and noise. But at the time of my visit, everything needed in the towns along the trail was still being carried in by hand. Everything in the villages had to be walked in.

This is one of the most startling and charming aspects of Annapurna: young and youngish men carrying stuff. That beer at dinner? The case was carried here by someone. The chickpeas in your curry? Carried. The lights hanging low over the table: carried. The generator that powered the lights. The beds on which you sleep. The tables and chairs. The bricks in the walls. The corrugated metal sheeting that makes up the roof. Carried, carried, carried.

I could barely wrap my head around it then, and now in the easy convenience of our lazy age, it seems even more preposterous. I was being overtaken in the afternoon breeze by men with toilets strapped to their backs. One had an entire plastic cistern on his shoulders like a backpack, with yellow rope securing it around his shoulders and a strap on his forehead helping him stay upright. It was five times his size, yet he bounded up the trail ahead of us and was soon lost to sight.

The couriers didn’t always go it alone. Every so often, a soft jingle of a bell could be heard above or below on the trail, and anyone within earshot would push to the side of the trail and yell, “Donkeys!” Sure enough, before long, donkeys laden with packs and tied together in a long train would lumber past, neither slowing nor stopping for anyone along the paths. In these moments, it was essential to push as far off the trial as possible. The consequences of failing to do so, or of trying to take a photo of the passing donkey train, could be severe. Foreshadowing!

It felt like no time had passed since we picked up the park permits and began the trek when suddenly we entered a little town and Frank turned around to porter/guide me. “Wait here one kind moment,” he said, his English often falling into these sorts of adorable expressions. I sat on a stone wall (was each stone carried here?) for a few kind moments while Frank went to negotiate a room for the night.

Here's another exceptionally charming part of trekking in Nepal. In 2014, there was no such thing as an advanced booking, because there weren’t really any hotels along the route, or internet here. Or phone reception. Accommodation could be found mostly in teahouses, restaurants with rooms tacked on. You just showed up, knocked on doors (really, had Frank knock on doors), and slept in simple rooms in single beds. Prices ranged from “order your food here and you can have a room” to about $8 USD a night, then. Some teahouse rooms had private bathrooms, but in winter running water was determined by the outside temperature, and what water was running was often freezing cold. The teahouses always had a huge common room with a woodstove and a kettle of chai, hot food, and a few hikers and their relaxed guides or porters. Each day on the trek would end by flopping into these warm places, dazed and happy, to wait for that hot meal and idle chat with people who had exactly the same day as you.

Frank was only gone a few minutes, then emerged without the bags to lead me to a restaurant where the owner greeted us warmly. We arranged ourselves by the woodstove, and I felt calm, unexhausted. There weren’t many other people here, so Frank and I passed an hour or two eating and chatting. I asked him about his family and his past. He asked me what Canada was like. We shared some beer. We misunderstood one another often, laughed, and when, at one point he pantomimed a version of me walking with my tripod bouncing ridiculously, I felt like I had made an unlikely friend.

By noon the next day, I considered Frank an enemy. At no point in our conversation the night before had he really explained what was waiting for us that morning. We had deliberately stopped short of Ulleri because it was “very up,” as per Frank. He didn’t think I could make it on the first day after that little ramble from Nayapul. I still don’t know if he was right.

Ulleri, like so many things in Annapurna, is a baffling place. Ulleri is the name of a town, but it’s used synonymously on the trial to mean “that place with all the fucking stairs.” Exact numbers vary, but the most precise count I could find online is 3,767. Three thousand, seven hundred, and sixty-seven stairs: all laid down by hand, all that stone and effort. The stairs begin just below the town and extended well above it. Over the course of those thousands of stairs, the trial gains nearly a kilometer in altitude. Frank was right. It’s very up indeed.

(The CN Tower has a mere 1,776 steps, which is just embarrassing, really.)

The climb takes about two hours, and there’s a little rest stop restaurant half way where you are encouraged to break for chai and pet the stray dogs, an offer I never decline anywhere in the world. Someone is selling souvenirs. It’s incredible, all this crap hauled all the way up here to be placed on a stone wall and passed over by people like me. The first half of the climb hasn’t been too bad, really. It’s not especially steep going through the town, and it’s only as the halfway point nears that my calves start to remind me I’ve been walking upstairs for an hour. It would be harder, more tedious, if the scenery were different. But as we climb, the first views of the Annapurna peaks begin to emerge above the dark green hills of the forested valley.

The first peak to appear is Annapurna South. It’s over 7 kilometers tall, a geological fact that my brain cannot grasp. Ulleri is at about 2,000 meters elevation, meaning this mountain is somehow a further 5,000 meters up. How does anyone ever climb up it? Why do they even bother? It’s just so tall.

I struggle throughout the trek to grasp the scale of these mountains, but that’s what mountains are for. It’s healthy to put ourselves in shockingly huge places, to feel humbled and made small by the world. I’ve felt the same comforting smallness in the Sahara, or out at sea, where our insignificance is most starkly realized. There’s something both calming and terrifying about these places, or maybe something calming about being terrified of them. It was in Ulleri that this tremendous sense of calm settled in, a feeling that would linger well beyond this trek. More or less.

The first test of that serenity came a few minutes later, on the second half of the steps. Away from the village, the stairs narrowed and grew steeper. They were unevenly spaced, some quite deep and others only allowing for half a shoe. We climbed slowly, turning around often to take in the view behind us, but still overtook other trekkers.

Because there are so few towns along the trail and limited places to sleep, you tend to run into the same people day after day. You wind up in the same restaurants at lunch and the same teahouses in the evenings, and overtake and pass each other often throughout the day. My favourites were a group of six or seven teenagers from Malaysia who were here on a high school graduation trip. They were even less prepared than I was, some of them walking in flipflops and shorts. I had seen them that morning at breakfast in the teahouse and caught them here in the upper sections of the stairs, sitting at the side of the trail joking and laughing. They clapped as we passed, and I did a silly little bow to greater applause. A cap was dothed. They asked Frank how much farther it was to the top, and he just smiled mischievously and carried on. When I saw them later that evening in Ghorepani, they looked cold and exhausted, but bewilderingly happy.

I almost didn’t make it to Ghorepani.

Somewhere near the top of the Ulleri stairs, we heard the now-familiar jingling of the bells on one of the donkey trains. The sound was coming from somewhere up the trail, beyond the stairs. We were in an especially narrow section, only a couple of meters across, with an earthen wall on one side of the stairs and a low wall and precipitous drop on the other. The bells grew louder and hikers ahead of us yelled “DONKEYS!” as per the custom.

Frank looked momentarily nervous, then ushered me across to the non-exposed side of the stairs, where he leaned heavily on the earthen wall, trying to make himself smaller. I mimicked him, leaning on my right shoulder and pressing myself into the wall just as the man leading the donkey train came half-running, half-hopping down the stairs. The donkeys followed, moving quickly, laden with recycling and trash bags, not especially heavy things but bulky.

The donkey trains were always a bit hilarious, because it was impossible to predict what would be on them. You’d hear the bells, hear the shout, and then they’d come flopping into view, plastic barrels shaking around on top or piles of blankets or massive bags of rice or tea or whatever. I always wanted a slightly closer look. This was not always a good idea.

I leaned ever-so-slightly away from the wall and something on one of the donkey’s packs connected with something on my ever-jostling tripod, strapped as ever to the side of my rented pack. I was instantly dragged backwards, moving with the donkey down the stairs. I somehow kept my feet and it’s only by sheer luck that I didn’t fall over backwards, or get dragged under the hooves of the 20 animals rushing down the hill. No, not luck. It’s only by the sheer cheapness of the bungee cord on a cheaply made rental pack that I wasn’t badly injured at the top of the Ulleri stairs. After only a few awkward backwards downhill steps, the cord snapped, my tripod went flying into the path where it was repeatedly kicked and trampled and smashed, and I was able to press myself back against the wall and not suffer a similar fate.

Frank had gone completely white. He’d somehow managed to turn himself around so he was facing down to where I was standing, breathless and not quite clocking how dangerous that had been. We didn’t speak while the rest of the donkeys stomped past. When they were gone, he let out a low whistle and smiled.

“Lucky,” he said. “Very lucky.” Then he laughed his reassuring Frankish laugh, and we set to work picking up the 47 pieces of my tripod.

It was with a new lease on life that, several hours later, I arrived in Ghorepani. A light snow had started to fall and the air had acquired a genuine chill. Frank had a specific teahouse in mind for the night, along with every other guide and porter on the trip. The dining hall was packed, the fire roared, and the steam rising off the momos all created such tremendous, misleading warmth.

An hour later, I was freezing. I don’t remember having ever felt as cold as that night in Ghorepani. The first night in the lowlands had been so misleading: I’d slept with the sleeping bag on the floor beside my bed, the blanket that the teahouse provided was more than enough. But here, with multiple blankets and the sleeping bag and everything else, I lay in the teeth-chattering room, shaking myself awake over and over. My breath froze into my beard, then thawed when I stuffed my head into the sleeping bag, then froze again, and so on all night. In desperation in the middle of the night I tried to have a shower, turning the tap to full hot and waiting and waiting for the water to approach warm, not realizing that most of the pipes were frozen and that the hot water was solar heated. I stood in the freeing bathroom fully clothed until these facts dawned, then trudged damply back to bed.

Frank’s shout of “MISTER DAREWWW,” when it came, was a lifeline. Being awake and moving around would be warming, and I set about it quickly.

When I tucked my dumb smiling head back inside the teahouse room to go join Frank, I was already starting to feel warmer. I went downstairs and before the sun had fully risen was standing in little clearing behind the teahouse, where I tried and failed to capture any excellent photos. The early morning light called for a tripod and longer exposures, but I was reduced to attempting hand-held landscape photos that didn’t turn out. I laboured and became frustrated with the camera, with my cold and trembling hands, and soon did the sensible thing and gave up. I was wasting value minutes of this spectacular view trying to record it, and admitting defeat was freeing.

Instead of trying to capture the moment, I did a thing I’ve since partly forgotten how to do: I simply stood around and took it in. I looked, and my god, what I saw. I watched as the sun rose and saw the changing light on the snowcaps, watched as it flushed out of its subtle pinks to a fabulous red and then to nothing, to normal daylight, peak by peak across the range.

It was stunning. I had never before and have never since seen something to rival the sheer natural beauty of the shifting hues on these tallest of mountains. Whenever asked, I list this as the prettiest place I’ve ever been, but in truth it’s not pretty especially, but something far grander, sublime and ridiculous and comprehension-defying.

These experiences leave a mark on you, the traveller. I stood in that little clearing changed somehow. More fundamentally calm, maybe? More aware of breathtaking beauty, but also aware of its fleetingness, of its here-and-gone-ness. Aware too that the most special things are not always ours to hold on to, that they warm our face for only the briefest of moments and then are gone, probably never to be repeated. At a certain point we must accept this and leave the clearing.

So, I left the clearing. I had a chai and some eggs for breakfast at the long tables of the teahouse, and I felt warm and elated. I had seen the magnificent.

An hour or so later I was on the way out of Ghorepani, hiking the steep trail up to the ridiculously named Poon Hill, the highest point on this short trek. The view was magnificent—of course it was—and we all lined up to take our photos of the distant crown of peaks, but I felt wild and protective of the scene I had witnessed that morning. These were the same mountains, but unadorned now with their gorgeous dyes. I urged Frank to leave a bit ahead of the other groups so we could be first along the trail, and he gladly obliged. As we descended Poon Hill—a string of words I never thought I’d type—we passed the Malaysian schoolboys climbing the other way, flipflops sliding around on the icy ground, all smiles and puffs of visible, icy breath. “Fucking hell, man!” they said with their giant smiles. “This is pretty slippery, huh?!” Then they slipped on up the trail.

The weather had by this point started to truly turn, the blue cold skies growing dark and menacing. Snow fell in earnest then, and the walk along the ridge between Ghorepani and Tadapani—where we’d spend our last night—was icy and tricky in spots. As the first on the trail, I had long stretches with no footprints in the snow to walk into, which was eerie and beautiful. Frank pointed out monkeys in the rhododendrons, jumping from branch to branch and shaking snow to the jungle floor, a spectacular and ludicrous sight. I didn’t catch the type of monkey and didn’t care to find out. That’s the kind of journalist I have always been, one not that into monkeys.

We made short work of the day’s trek and arrived early to the teahouse in Tadapani. The water was working, and I took tremendous joy in a hot shower, and then joined Frank in the dining room, where he was gathered with the other porters and guides. They were talking about football, and I mentioned being a Liverpool fan and that there was a game that night I was a bit sad to miss. (I have a peculiar obsession with not missing a match, and haven’t in now almost 20 years.) Instantly, the table stood up and the men ushered me into the kitchen, where the staff of the teahouse were squeezed around a round table in front of an old TV. I had found the Tadapani Liverpool Supporter’s Club, and was half-dragged, half-pushed to the center of the circular bench, the best seat in the house. Beer was sourced from somewhere, the huge bottles of Nepalese pilsner that had to be carried up here by someone, probably those murderous donkeys, and I spent a lovely two hours shouting and cheering and drinking beer while Liverpool dispatched Norwich City easily. The world felt so big and so very small.

The final part of the trip passed quickly, a short and easy downhill walk from Tadapani to Ghandruk. Frank dallied in each small village we passed through, seeking out things to point to and say “Look!” A precariously placed football field. A small house with a dozen mewing lambs, born only hours ago, that wandered with us for a while and tried to nurse at my pants, thereby preventing me eating lamb for many years. A temple here, a temple there. Prayer flags. A funny sign. Was he sad that trip was ending, and he’d have to go back to his normal life? Or was he just in love with these places, the football field and the lambs and the temples and the falling snow?

No matter. He pressed bravely downward, and within a couple of hours were in a parking lot-slash-river outside of Ghandruk, where the world’s least-reliable looking taxis were waiting eagerly. Frank waved to one in particular, all smiles again, and threw his and my bags into the back of a jacked-up Lada (or similar, don’t quote me). We drove down a winding dirt road, fording the river where it flooded the turns in the road—water up to the doors—and the air grew warmer and the surroundings greener and lusher. We turned at some point onto a paved road and rumbled toward Pokhara, the mighty Himalayas growing smaller in the car’s lone wing mirror.

***

Read other Faulty Memory stories.

For a place with so many monkeys, the Soviet Space Monkey Museum was a little hard to find. It sits a little outside of the center of Sokhumi, in the low wooded hills to the north. On the map, it looks close, but my hotel insists on calling a taxi. “Hill,” is offered as an explanation.

It’s not really called the Soviet Space Monkey Museum, of course. On Google Maps it’s labelled The Monkey Nursery, a name that will be shown to be both accurate and cruel, but it’s officially called the “Research Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy in Abkhazia” yet I refer to it as the Soviet Space Monkey Museum because this is where monkeys were trained to be sent into space. This is not hearsay. This is, at least according to one sad exhibit at said Soviet Space Monkey Museum, historical fact.

I decline the hotel’s offer of a taxi and decide to walk. It’s a fresh summer morning, the trees still heavy with last night’s rain. The damp road up to the nursery/zoo/museum glistened in the early sun. It’s a peaceful stroll, and easy to forget that a sort-of city lies nearby. There are few buildings, few cars, few people—just leafy trees jostling gently in the breeze.

Such is the tranquility that it doesn’t take long for me to assume I’m going the wrong way. I don’t hear any monkeys, which feels like a clue. The road rises and then makes a hairpin turn, doubling back on top of itself. I try to check a map on my phone, but it’s pointless here. I just keep walking, trying to read the few signs on the road, but my shaky ability to read Cyrillic characters by slowly and foolishly sounding them out only serves to make the journey longer. I look for clues in the letters, but it’s pointless: I don’t know the word for monkey anyway. I can really only read the names of some cities and the word “restaurant.”

But I carry on upward, confident in the smallness of Sokhumi and how little time it would take to backtrack, and before long I spot some souvenir stands covered in monkey paraphernalia and I know I’m in the right place. Well, a place.

A set up stairs leads up between the souvenir stands, the walls on either side of the stairs covered in photos of monkeys. Perhaps famous monkeys. No explanations are offered, in Russian or otherwise. There are pictures of various apes in various states of captivity, some lounging on furniture or standing in a field, others peering out between bars. There’s a picture of a little monkey in a little space suit, with a sad little helmet.

The Soviet Union was not famed for its treatment of animals, especially its space-bound research animals. Laika, the poor stray dog sent to her death in low orbit in 1957, is the most famous of these animals, but the Soviet Space Monkey Museum is a relic of that same long hand of cruelty. Here, other animals were “trained” for their space journeys, which essentially just meant being kept in cages until called up for certain death and unspeakable suffering.

It’s home to other terrifying legends too, like a human-ape cross-breeding program. Again, information is hard to come by on all things Abkhazia, but the sole English-language website that describes the Monkey Nursery quotes a scientist from the nursery telling The Guardian that she had read about these types of experiments being carried out in the 1930s in an effort to create a kind of brainless superstrong farmer/soldier/citizen. There’s predictably little evidence to support this claim, but no smoke without fire and all that.

These urban legends, and the very real photo of a monkey in a space suit, added an air of menace to an already depressing place. The nursery has become something of a pathetic zoo, the monkeys despairing in cages around a small forested area. The cages and larger enclosures had a distinctly Abkhazian air to them, everything in that now-familiar state of advanced disrepair. In some cages an attempt at a habitat had been lazily made, with a log placed here or there for the monkeys to climb, but most of them had only bare cement floors and chain link fencing, with little doors at the back surely leading to some grimmer, more terrible place.

There was a ticket booth charging a nominal fee for entry, and a few local tourists gathered to gawk at the monkeys, to read the plaques, to enjoy the summer sun. I even saw one of the football teams from the World Cup of Unrecognized Countries, all in matching track suits, looking uncomfortable in the bizarre central area of the nursery. Here, the cages were all facing center, where a huge ape statue looked formidably out toward the sea, a stony king surrounding by his unwilling subjects.

I dutifully visited every sad enclosure and tried to make eye contact with every forlorn monkey. This is not a thing monkeys really do, but I was desperate for a moment of connection in this weird place and the research monkeys had a kind of expression of defeated bewilderment that was the most honest I’d seen in Abkhazia. “We’re done,” they were admitting. “This is the hand we were dealt, and we’ll eat as much of this dry-looking grass as it takes to pass the time until we die here. But, hey, at least we have that statue of the god monkey to look at!”

Visiting all of the monkeys only took about 15 minutes, at which point my eyes began to wander from the cages in search of something. These were the days in which I still possessed a journalistic instinct, a nose for a story or at the very least a half-tuned ear for one. That instinct manifested as a kind of weird itchy sensation, a tingling of the scalp. You’ve probably felt some form of it. Through the trees I kept spotting one building with a very suspicious characteristic here: windows. Something wasn’t right. I had to investigate.

Ever the excellent actor, I asked the person at the ticket booth where the bathrooms were. When she pointed down the stairs, I pointed up the stairs to the building and said, “Okay, there! Great.” She blinked and said nothing, and with that I had permission to explore.

Upon closer inspection, the building had glass in place across more than 90% of its windows, which raised a few alarm bells. The doors were unlocked, which put some of the alarm bells right back down. I walked in, still under the pretense of looking for a bathroom. There was a kind of reception area like in a small-town hospital, tucked to one side of the hall and unsurprisingly deserted. It had an ancient-looking computer and a very dusty telephone and it was covered in papers that looked, like many things here, to have simply been left behind in a hurry. The hallway was long and had no doors on either side, just a long corridor leading to a set of stairs at the end. So the choice was made for me. I headed for the stairs, walking slowly as though I was trying to hide my footfalls, which squeaked on the linoleum floor and echoed loudly in the empty hall.

The first floor of the building had another hallway, this one lined with doors, all closed and windowless, some bearing plaques in Russian. At the end of the hallway was a pair of swinging metal doors, tiny windows covered with mesh rather than glass. The doors were flapping slightly, as though someone had just walked through. This was both an invitation and a warning to me. There was someone else here.

What would happen if I was caught trespassing here? Was I even trespassing? I had bought a ticket to this place, sort of. There were no locked doors. I was here as a guest. Normally I would have no hesitation in this kind of situation, but I was shaken by the hundreds of languishing monkeys and those pictures of that one in its little space suit. This wasn’t a normal place, where nice people did kind things. Would I be captured and tortured? Visions of huge needles flashed in my imagination, of straightjackets and bald men with clipboards taking note of my reaction to different periods of time without oxygen. I briefly wondered if they had a monkeynaut helmet in my size—I was quite a bit bigger than that monkey in the photo. How embarrassing it would be to die here in a too-small space suit, with the buttons and buckles not quite closed.

But I had come all this way: across the ruined bridge, through the dead towns. I had walked along the haunted skeleton coast of Sokhumi. I’d watched the worst football match of all time. I had paid my dues, damn it. Besides, one of my travel rules is to always try to find out what’s on the other side of the door. So, I opened the swinging doors.

Behind these lay another apparent ruin of Abkhazia. There were hospital beds lying around in no particular order, some near windows and medical machines that were turned off and unplugged, some just kind of pushed into one corner. There were metal countertops covered in glassware and surgical equipment. There was a framed portrait of an old white guy over a desk in the corner, where the most shocking sight of all was waiting: a heavy-set woman in her 40s or early 50s, her brown hair neatly arranged in a tight bun atop her head, green glasses lowered to the tip of her long nose. She was wearing a white lab coat. On the desk in front of her was a clipboard. She was sleeping. Or dead. I admit that I assumed the latter because it suited the place better, but then she shifted slightly and started snoring softly. I froze, but in the new silence without my footfalls she stirred, pushed her glasses back up her nose, and immediately spotted me. She let out a little shriek and sat up, wiping drool from her lip. She mumbled something in Russian, then picked up a cell phone from her desk and began rubbing idly, completely ignoring me. I heard the clicking of heels in the hallway and the door swung open, another woman in a white lab coat entering and saying something to the one seated at the desk. The desk lady grunted and nodded in my direction, and the new arrival turned to give me a once-over. She said something in Russian, and I said hello in English.

“You are here for what?” she then says in English. She also had her hair pulled into a tight bun, also wore glasses. Reassuringly, she didn’t have a clipboard.

“Tourism!” I beam, willfully misunderstanding the question.

“No, not tourism,” she says, kind of smiling but also kind of visibly annoyed. “Here.” She pointed at the floor. “Here. What?”

“Ohhhhhh! Here?” I chew on this for a minute, ever-smiling.

“Camera?” she asks, pointing at my camera, a big SLR that I carry everywhere. “Why camera?”

“Yes, camera!” This is usually an escape. I turned on the camera and began showing her photos I had taken that day: the monkeys in cages, the monkey statue, my breakfast at the hotel. Soon we’re in the previous day’s photos: the seafront, the stadium, some wide shots of the football match. She clapped briefly, that patriotism flaring up.

“Game good,” she says. “We win.”

A moment passes in a kind of happy silence, me taking in the room and both women staring at me awkwardly. The woman at the desk says something that I took to mean, “What were you talking about?” and a conversation ensues between them that includes some more clapping from the one at the desk, presumably when recapping the football game the night before. More moments pass, and I feel I’ve gotten away with one and say, “Thank you. Bye.”

The air in the room changes. It becomes charged.

“Moment,” says the English-speaking one. “Moment. Wait.” She reaches out to touch my arm, a semi-polite you’re-not-going-anywhere touch. “You here … why?” She hasn’t abandoned her original question, and I haven’t answered it. I hear more footsteps outside in the hall, and the door sings open once more. A bald man in a white lab coat enters, carrying a clipboard, making the number of clipboards and lab coats too high. I quickly try to decide if I could overpower all these people in a fight, but I’d never been in a fight.

The man locks eyes with me. He then looks to the two women, who suddenly seem on edge, their postures tense. In that moment, I realize that I don’t have a will and that I haven’t bequeathed my savings to my dog, and am filled with regret. Hey, at least I’d get some free bananas and would get to go to space for a couple of hours!

“You,” says the man. “Why are you in here?” His English is unsettlingly confident.

“Isn’t the part of the museum?” I ask.

“What museum?” he asks back.

“The monkey one?”

“This isn’t a museum.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s a research facility.” He says this with a distinct lack of irony.

“Oh, is it? What kind of research?” Always see what’s on the other side of the door, right?

He thought for a moment, maybe searching for the word, maybe measuring me for my space suit. Then he took a tired breath.

“Biology.”

I nodded. I no longer thought I was going to die. This man just seems like everyone else here: vaguely well-meaning but mostly exhausted and defeated. It was then up to me to break the weird silence.

“The person at the ticket booth said there was a bathroom in here?”

“Bathroom?” he says in English. Then he repeats something in Russian, and the two women echo the word. They all say it once or twice more, whatever it is, then burst out laughing. These are the first smiles I’ve seen in Abkhazia. “Bathroom!” he shouts, then slaps my back. “Of course. Let me show you.”

The bridge is empty except for a mule-drawn carriage bumping slowly northward. It’s been so long since this was used as a road, yet a few pieces of tarmac still cling stubbornly to the surface. Most of the old highway has been worn down to dirt, and much of that dirt has been worn down to potholes from the dozens of winters since a car last passed this way. The bridge is low, spanning a broad, dry riverbed that’s just dusty grass and splotchy wildflowers blowing in the noon breeze. The mule cart gets stuck momentarily in a deep pothole, and the suitcase strapped to the back falls lazily into the dirt road, its dull thud failing to produce an echo.

I jump down from the carriage to grab the suitcase and tuck it back into the strap behind the seat, disregarding the futility of the act. This is ridiculous. We’ve been jostling across this bridge for 15 minutes already, and have lost this case about 10 times. Behind us, another traveller has arrived on the bridge. He’s carrying a big wheely suitcase with one arm, but closes the ground quickly. We trundle on. Soon, he’s upon us, smiling and waving. He says something friendly as he easily overtakes us, but I don’t understand the words. I don’t even know what language he’s speaking. Here, it could be one of a few.

My bag falls off a few more times but before an hour has passed, we’ve managed the 800 meters and reached the other side of the bridge. The driver grins a big toothless grin and gestures toward a bend in the road ahead. “There,” he probably says. It’s very slushy, and again might not be in English. It’s hard to say. He laughs and slaps my back. It’s the last human warmth I’ll experience for a few days, the end of Georgian hospitality and the beginning of something far, far stranger.

I grab my suitcase and duffel bag and attempt that weird wave where you have both hands full and just kind of flap your arms low by your sides, then turn and walk toward the bend in the road. Walking is so much faster than the mule cart, even with the bags, but I’m uneasy. There’s a kind of heaviness in the air, like a storm forming. Soon, I’m at the bend in the road, and my uneasiness finds its source. Before me lies a tall barbed-wire fence, many chunky green military vehicles, some German shepherds, and people in headscarves and heavy coats waiting in a long line at a truly bizarre frontier.

Here lies the border of Abkhazia, one of the world’s unrecognized nations.

Abkhazia has an old history, but most of it is really boring. I’ll attempt a quick recap.

It was a vassal state under the Byzantines and later became part of Georgia and then part of the Ottoman empire. Ugh. See what I mean?

Byzantine, Georgian, Ottoman. That covers almost 2,000 years of history until things get interesting as the Soviet Union starts to crumble. Georgia declared its independence in early 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, and by 1992 Abkhazia is at war with Georgia. A staggering 30,000 people are killed in this conflict, which lasts almost two years. Many Georgians are expelled, leaving Abkhazia with a population of around 250,000. In 1994 a ceasefire begins, with Russian troops forming the majority of the peacekeeping force. You can probably see where this is going.

Russian troops never leave Abkhazia, and in 1999, Abkhazia declares its independence from Georgia. Georgia ignores this. In fact, most countries in the world have ignored this, with only Russia (who didn’t even recognize Abkhazia as an independent nation until it was strategically beneficial to do so in 2008, as South Ossetia was also forcefully trying to leave Georgia) recognizing its independence. Most of the jurisdictions that recognize Abkhazia are themselves newly formed micronations of dubious provenance, and Venezuela and Nicaragua.

This is not really going to be a treatise on statehood and identity. This context is the bare minimum required to really get down to business at hand: trying to explain the deep weirdness and peculiarities of this little country that doesn’t quite exist.

Before the rutted bridge and the dry riverbed, at the north-western point of Georgia, there’s a tidy little town called Zugdidi. I only went to Zugdidi to wait for approval to enter Abkhazia, but it’s a pleasant place to pass the time. Georgian food is rich with cheese and butter, and it has what I think of as the best dumplings in the world—massive khinkhali, stuffed with lamb or veggies and always served steaming hot and aromatic and with thick yogurt and black pepper as condiments. Georgian wine is cheap and delicious, and the weather was nice. I could wait in little Zugdidi for days. I nearly had to.

How do you get a visa for a place that doesn’t have international relations? You send a Word document to a Gmail account, of course. A few days or weeks later, you get an email back completely in Russian with some PDFs attached, and with that you have your clearance to enter. This is less than half the battle. The rest of the battle comes up the road from Zugdidi.

For travellers, the only real entrance to Abkhazia is from Georgia. Entering from Russian in the north is complicated, because Russia recognizes this border and few other places do. This means that your passport gets a Russian exit stamp, but that you’re then in a place that only has two roads out: one back to Russia, where your visa might now be expired.

The only real way to enter Abkhazia is the not-at-all-real border in the south, the one with the wildflowers and the Russian army. Georgia doesn’t consider this a border, because it considers Abkhazia one of its provinces. But to arrive at this non-border, you must have a printout of your Abkhazia-issued travel permit and present yourself and your passport at what looks like a toll booth with two uniformed Georgians in shouting distance of the donkey cart drivers. And then you must follow a kind of script when you hand over your papers.

“BORDER” GUARD [in passable English]: Good morning! Where are you off to on this fine day?

YOU [nervously]: Greetings, sir or madam! I am heading up the road to Abkhazia.

“BORDER” GUARD [curiously]: How curious! What takes you to Abkhazia, if I may inquire?

YOU [nervously, but reading from a script]: I would like to see every part of Georgia.

“BORDER” GUARD [smiling now]: Wonderful! You will see that Georgia is a beautiful and unified nation, where everyone of course speaks Georgian and where no one is a teen parent.

YOU [gratefully receiving your passport]: Thank you. Have a great day.

“BORDER” GUARD [smiling more broadly now, probably taking a sip of some orange wine beneath the desk, cursing his luck at being stationed here, at doing this pantomime dozens of times per day]: And you, friend. Safe travels to this other part of Georgia.

With that, you’re free to overpay to go slowly across the bridge, and before long you arrive at a very different border. This one feels significant. Giant men in fatigues eye you from a long way away, other giant men with guns are perched on towers above the fences. It would all feel terrifying if the other people waiting, locals who make this journey daily, were panicked. But they’re not, of course. Their chubby serene faces—is everyone missing teeth here?—are reassuring, and the queue moves quickly. It’s all orderly and polite, and the guard—who is without a doubt a member of the Russian military—checks the visa printout quickly and does his best impression of a smile then says, “Welcome to Abkhazia.”

Growing up in Canada, my concept of a border was always a bit wonky. Until after I graduated university, you didn’t even need a passport to go the United States, just any kind of government-issued ID. And crossing the land borders into the US was always underwhelming. Everything was the same, except the metric system was suddenly gone. People spoke English in the same familiar ways, the buildings looked the same, and there were no changes in the landscape. Niagara Falls, Ontario and Niagara Falls, New York: they’re both shit, you know?

Everywhere else in the world, borders as a theory make a little bit more sense. This river or that mountain range forms a line, on either side of which language or religion are sufficiently different to require a little demarcation. In 20 years of travel, one of my favourite things has become crossing a border over land.

And the world is full of funny little crossings. At the border from Zimbabwe into Botswana, I was asked to walk through a shallow trough filled with neon fluid that smelled like Windex, splashing my shoes theatrically as directed to prevent the spread of hoof-and-mouth disease. Another time, following a Google Maps shortcut, I ended up on a narrow wooden suspension bridge in a deep wooded gorge that marked the end of Montenegro and the beginning of Bosnia. At one border crossing between Georgia and Armenia, you’re simply asked to pop out of your car to go pay the visa fee for Armenia. You can have a quick glass of brandy for a few cents and continue your journey.

In all of those cases, the sense of being in a different county dawned gradually. Botswana seemed friendlier and richer than Zimbabwe, but just as remote and unpopulated. Bosnia’s forests seemed very much like Montenegro’s, but then the sight of tall droopy haystacks and men selling honey beside the road told of being somewhere else. In Armenia, the landscape inched toward the more dramatic, the roads improved.

Crossing into Abkhazia was something else entirely. First of all, there was the giant fence. Second, there were a lot of guns, those armed soldiers looking serious and purposeful. There was suddenly quite a lot of pavement and official-looking cars, all dark windows and menace. There was a general hustle about the place that can be explained in two ways: one, there’s nothing around and everyone is in a hurry to move on to the towns and cities further up the coast; two, the busyness and bureaucracy of this non-country is simply attempting to confer legitimacy on a place that has very little of its own to offer. It kind of works, so harsh is the juxtaposition with Zugdidi and the final few kilometers of Georgia.

Maybe this is a real place, a real country, I started to think.

But no, it isn’t.

It took all of 15 minutes for the mirage to start to fade. I spent those 15 minutes waiting in a parking lot that slowly emptied of its parked cars. Those official-looking all-black sedans had difficulty starting and when they drove away, black smoke sputtered from beneath the sunken rear end, weighed down by the six people squeezed into the back seat. A soldier wandered by and put down his gun and smoked lazily on the grass, looking bored and lonely. Even the birds sounded tired of being here.

I was waiting for a car that the hotel in Sokhumi was maybe sending to collect me, but there was no way to contact either driver or hotel. Cell reception didn’t exist at this particular frontier (and was at the time very limited in Abkhazia in general) and so I had messaged the hotel that morning from Georgia and gave a best guess for when I’d be across the border. They had said something along the lines of “Driver will go” and gave no further information. Another 15 minutes passed, then 30, then an hour. I sat on the curb and read a book, putting my faith in “Driver will go.”

Eventually, an official-looking black sedan drifted into the parking lot, creaking as it took a corner. It honed in on me and—even though it was moving slowly—managed to screech to a stop in front of me. Something thudded in the trunk. A scrawny man in with a half-smoked but unlit cigarette dangling from his lip leaned out of the rolled-down window and looked at me. He chewed the cigarette for a minute, then said something in Russian.

“I’m Drew,” I offered. He furrowed his brows.

“You hotel?” he asked.

“Drew,” I repeated. Surely that would clarify things.

“Hotel. Sokhumi?” he asked. Nice. We were getting somewhere.

I made a quick calculation. I added up the number of other people waiting in this parking lot (1), divided that by the number of cars that had arrived with a driver saying the name of the city I was going to and the world “hotel” (1), subtracted my net worth at the time (null), and decided that the math all checked out. I picked up my bags and gestured at the trunk, and the driver just shook his head. So, I opened the back door and threw the bags in there, then took the front seat beside him. The car reeked of cigarette smoke and something in the seat seemed to squirm beneath me when I sat down, but this is sometimes what adventure feels like.

Soon, we were away from the border area and sputtering across the lowlands of Abkhazia, heading northwest to Sokhumi along the coast road/only road. Abkhazia is wedged between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea, so most of its towns and its one kind-of city are nestled near the coast. They are towns in the sense they are marked on maps, and that they have buildings and some streets and some people live in some of them.

But nothing about them felt real. Half of the buildings—churches, schools, government buildings, apartment blocks, houses, shops, everything—in some places were empty and forlorn, moss or ivy laying their lazy claims to the windowless facades. The first town I passed through (Gali, a few kilometers from the checkpoint) had the look of a place that has been hastily abandoned.

Maybe it had been. Finding information on anything in Abkhazia is exceedingly difficult, even today. Part of this is a language issue, but there’s also a real scarcity of information. Ever the lazy writer, I resorted entirely to Google Maps for information on the place. This had been an exercise in futility and a source of high-grade found entertainment for Abkhazia. Towns and villages have few noted landmarks, and those that appear on the maps are labelled simply: Hotel. Hospital. Park. Clicking on these often reveal photos of an empty place that someone had to upload to Google, which is hilarious, because it means someone went to that place expecting something, took photos of the different thing, and then uploaded those as part of a Google review of hotel, hospital, park. And thank god they did, because it helps the rest of us know that it’s best to avoid Hotel and Hospital, but to stop by Cemetery, the only place in town that doesn’t look abandoned.

Before long, the Black Sea can be seen through gaps in the trees, glittering and ambivalent in the afternoon sun. We pass a small seaside town called Ochamchire (Google Maps confirms this to be abandoned-looking too). We pass the Sukhum Babushara Airport (abandoned; Google Maps has pictures of a car on an old runway, a decaying helicopter, and some horses grazing in a field by the sea). Then we’re heading north along the coast and through what must be the suburbs of Sokhumi, because things start to change. Humans appear. Not exactly in droves, but here and there a person can be seen getting out of a car or opening the door to a building with its windows still intact. Signs in Russian for restaurants and hotels become, if not exactly numerous, at least visible. There are still scores of empty-looking buildings, but they’re mixed with semi-inhabited-looking places, and before long something like a city sprouts up around us.

The driver, who had grunted through his cigarette throughout the drive and dutifully pointed out the odd important landmark by grunting louder and mumbling something (“Park” maybe, or “Hospital”), suddenly snapped to life.

“SOKHUMI!” he shouted, the cigarette flying out of his mouth and into his lap. “My home.” He kinds of beats his chest or slams his heart or something in act of sudden, jarring patriotism, taking both hands off the wheel to illustrate his pride. It’s very moving, in the sense that the car swerves into the other lane for a few seconds, where it remains unperturbed by other cars. There aren’t any other cars.

We drive on a few more blocks, then stop in front of another abandoned-looking place. This one has glass, but no lights are on and all the curtains are drawn.

“Hotel!” he beams. “Tip?”

The Dioskuria Hotel appears to still exist today. There are reviews on TripAdvisor and it’s on Booking.com. The TripAdvisor map places it half a block from the Black Sea, a detail I don’t recall and don’t believe, looking back. In my memory it’s in the center of Sokhumi, surrounded by other drab-looking buildings and few restaurants. On TripAdvisor’s dubious map, the nearest restaurant is called Smog, is described as “European, Asian, Russian” and has neither photos nor reviews.

I’m only able to remember the name of the hotel now because I still have the original booking confirmation from 2016 and a receipt for 3,000 rubles per night (about $30 USD), good value for a clean and dull hotel anywhere in the world. But this hotel also had windows made of glass, a rarity in Abkhazia, so was a total steal. It had hot water and working wifi, plus a free breakfast of two pieces of dry toast and some sad-looking cold cuts and cheeses. (This represents a major blow to Georgian claims of control over Abkhazia, as no Georgian breakfast I saw had fewer than 20 pounds of food.)

Seaside or otherwise, the hotel was central because everything is central in a tiny city. Sokhumi consists of about 8 streets running east to west and maybe a dozen short streets bisecting those. It takes half an hour to walk the length of the whole city, a little more if you take the seaside path, which I did immediately after arriving at the Dioskuria Hotel.

At one point in its rich and fascinating history (see above), Sokhumi was a seaside resort getaway. Picture Malibu or Brighton, the long piers with their cute little shops and overpriced restaurants, with their happy young people stealing kisses in the sea spray. Then picture some cruel decades passing, the piers falling first into disuse and then decay, their wooden pieces collapsing or rotting away and only their metal and concrete superstructures remaining. This is the Sokhumi waterfront, just strange concrete outlines of bandshells or visitors’ centers or overpriced restaurants on metal-and-concrete platforms missing significant pieces. These dull skeletons stretched lazily outward from the boardwalk (a turn of phrase, as it was also made of cement) into the rocky sea. They weren’t all boarded off or even off-limits, but they were empty spare a few grumpy gulls, squawking bitterly at passersby.

Of which there were many. Suddenly, cruising the boardwalk, Sokhumi had people. Many people! Young people! Many very, very young people. The boardwalk was full of young couples, most pushing prams with babies or young children, none of the parents looking older than 17 and none looking very pleased. No one so much as noticed me, let alone attempted to make eye contact. These drab young couples just pushed their morose babies dully along in front of the destroyed-looking piers, unsmiling, looking straight ahead at some distant point in the Black Sea.

As a first impression of Sokhumi, it was poor. It projected a city of hopeless, grumpy teens with nothing to do on a weekday but walk grumpily along the shore. This couldn’t be all that Sokhumi was. I looked forward to the following day to correct this bizarre first impression.

The following day did no such thing. Instead, a morning walk around the city revealed more abandoned or deserted buildings, more angry young couples with multiple children, more hats and scarves, more dour looks. I resorted to Google Maps to find landmarks and places of interest, but there were none on the map, so I just walked up one street and back down the next, looking for something interesting.

I found exactly three things interesting things.

1. The national assembly, or similar. This is the largest building in Sokhumi, so it was easy to spot and appeared, from a distance, both imposing and significant. As I walked closer, it took on the familiar characteristics of a building in Abkhazia: it was windowless, huge cracks had formed in its façade, and it smelled of an old fire. It might have been a functioning place. I still don’t know. It has symbols of a place where things happened. Some cars were parked in its driveway and it had flags hanging from flagpoles.

The thing with these microstates of dubious provenance is that they exist always in a scramble for legitimacy. As mentioned, very few other countries recognize Abkhazia, but those that do had their flags flapping lazily outside of the capital building. Here, proudly displayed, was the Russian flag alongside those of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Nauru, and Syria. A few flags that I didn’t know were also flapping lazily in the morning breeze, as a kind of weird foreshadowing.

2. A poster for the World Cup. Not that one, with the top footballing nations competing once in four years. No, this was much, much worse. By sheer luck—given that no research or planning had gone into this trip—Abkhazia happened to be hosting the CONIFA World Cup, or the World Cup of Unrecognized Countries. The poster listed a website, where I discovered that the host nation had made the quarter-finals, a game that they were playing that very evening against a team called Sápmi, which represented the Sámi people from Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The other quarter-final that day was between Northern Cyprus and United Koreans in Japan. I later asked at the hotel if they could help me buy tickets to the Abkhazia game, and they assured me that tickets would be available to purchase at the gate. This was correct.

3. A billboard for what I still call, to this day, the Soviet Space Monkey Museum. We’ll come back to that in the next post.

This is the official list of the teams that participated in the World Cup of Unrecognized Countries in Abkhazia in 2016, the second time the bi-annual competition had ever been held:

• Abkhazia

• Kurdistan Region

• Northern Cyprus

• Panjab

• Romani people

• Sápmi

• Chagos Islands

• Székely Land

• Somaliland

• Western Armenia

• United Koreans in Japan

• Raetia

We’re dangerously close to further history lessons here, so I encourage you to research any of these of particular personal interest on your own time. Raetia is pretty interesting. The “country” that stood out to me from this list was the Chagos Islands, which is an unpopulated archipelago in the Indian Ocean. According to Wikipedia, the islanders were evicted between 1967 and 1973 by their British landlords, and the team represents the Chagossian diaspora. In June of this year, a few players switched allegiance in an attempt to represent the British Indian Ocean Territory, and the team is in a real crisis moment. At the 2016 World Cup of Unrecognized Countries, the Chagos Islands lost both of their group stage games by a combined scoreline of 21-0. This was devastating for me, who had been cheering for them since I had learned of both their existence and the existence of this tournament earlier that day.

As my hotel had promised, it was easy to get tickets at the gate for the quarter final that evening between Abkhazia and Sápmi. More challenging was to find a working ATM in Abkhazia that would accept a Canadian bank card to withdraw rubles, but I was able to hobble together a solution involving sending the hotel front desk clerk $100 on Paypal and him giving me what he said was the equivalent in cash. Thus flush with cash, I bought my ticket to the knockout game (second row, baby!) for the equivalent of about $1.50 and found my seat.

Like everything else in the city, the national stadium could easily have been mistaken for an abandoned place. The ticket booths were caked with dirt and the bars on the wickets were laden with spider webs. The stadium only had seats on two sides and it backed onto a field that stretched toward a highway or a forest or something. It felt decidedly small, dated. And yet.

The Dinamo Stadium has a capacity of 4,300, and was probably two-thirds full on that day. Remarkably, the stadium had opened in 2015, one year before this monumental tournament. That was likely a stipulation of the bid to host the World Cup, a fact that shall go unresearched. Learning that the stadium was new is startling, given how easily it blended into its surrounding. Maybe this is a quality unique to new, kind-of countries: everything immediately turns old, gets covered in dust, and looks forgotten. And yet, and yet!

It positively thrummed with life. All of those angry teen parents were here cheering on the local heroes and booing those dastardly Sámis. It was truly terrible football, the lowest quality, lower even than the MLS in its earliest days, but god, how we cheered. There were chants of a sort, disorganized and out of sync. There was an attempt at the wave, which is difficult with only half of the stadium having bleachers. But there was real excitement, a chance to prove that among all of these sort-of nations, Abkhazia was the nation-iest. Every dismal long ball was cheered, every corner won a kind of vindication. If we’re not a country, the crowd demanded to know, how can we win a corner at an international football tournament? Abkhazia won the dismal game 2-0, with goals coming from penalties awarded from clumsy fouls. It was awful. It was hilarious. It must have felt legitimizing to many in attendance.

Abkhazia (spoiler alert!) went on to win the 2016 World Cup of Unrecognized Nations, beating Panjab in the final on penalties. How the Dinamo Stadium must have erupted that June night. You can almost picture the hordes of young mums clutching their scarves close to their throats while their young husbands punched the air in delight at the first good thing that had happened in this sad place since the war.

On the way back from Abkhazia into Georgia, I decline the mule cart and just carry my bags across the bridge. It only takes a few minutes. It’s another grey day. I stop halfway across to put my bags down and take a photo of the scene, the mud in the road and the rain-soaked valley no longer dusty, but instead radiant and shimmering green.

I linger happily on the bridge, this no man’s land, a fitting place to ponder the nowhere place I had just spent a few days. What had this trip even been about? What is Abkhazia? Was it even a real place?

I wasn’t any closer to an answer. Abkhazia reminded me of a scene from Everything is Illuminated, where to look rich and accomplished a local businessman hires actors to appear as construction workers renovating his home. This impresses a few neighbours, so the man hires more actors to appear as architects, consultants, whatever. He erects scaffolding around the house and pays more people to walk around the scaffolding all day, looking purposeful. His need to impress becomes chronic, and the house becomes wrapped up in a permanent performance to appear like a house that will soon be bigger and better. The actors portraying experts and tradespeople are there around the clock, but nothing is ever really built. Nothing ever changes.

This is Abkhazia. People live there. A life goes on there. There are restaurants and shops and a football stadium. I think I saw a public bus. But it’s just movement, not progress. These are people without futures, the restaurants are closed, there’s nothing on the shelves in the shops, and the football stadium hosted a tournament for fake countries. Maybe the bus went somewhere. There’s hope in that thought.

So what had I been doing there? Curiosity had unquestionably drawn me here—it was close to where I was, it was strange-sounding, it was difficult to enter. As a travel writer, there’s always an element of wanting to experience and explain a place but the outcome of that trip (this writing) is neither journalistic nor reliably factual. The curiosity that drew me to Abkhazia turned morbid during the trip, and then I was no longer curious. I was simply morbid.

And here I was, leaving none the wiser, no better informed than when I’d crossed this bridge earlier in the week. Yet there was a sense of something achieved, that pleasant sensation of going somewhere impossible and looking around, feeling it out. I picked up my bags and within a few minutes was smiling at the same mule cart driver who had taken me across the bridge. Something in his smile said, “What was that?” and something in the one I returned said, “I have no idea.”

It’s the tenth day of incessant rain and I’m starting to lose my mind.

My temporary apartment is on the 20th floor, facing Hangzhou’s grim river. The floor-to-ceiling windows are covered in a yellow slime that’s sometimes being pelted with fat, gross raindrops. At other times, it’s as though waves are crashing against the dirty glass, rhythmic and constant and maddening waves. The yellow dust stuck to the outside of the windows doesn’t get washed off, but instead it forms new disgusting patterns—Rorschach splatters that all look like bad decisions.

This is the time of the quaintly named “plum rains” that fall in the early summer all across Southern China. During this time, Hangzhou is constantly soaked. The plum rains manifest sometimes as cruel horizontal sheets, a kind of wet and inescapable constant wind that mocks umbrellas. When that wind lets up, the world is a permanent drizzle. Sometimes, in between, it simply straight-up pours. It’s also 30 degrees outside before the humidity, which is always 100% due to the air being comprised entirely of water.

I was finding it impossible to go outside. Toby, of Mediterranean stock, refuses to get wet. He’s offended by it. It is an affront to his genetics. When we step into the rain, he freezes, then turns and looks at me with an expression suggesting I should have known better. This, I think, is punitive behaviour and a life-long campaign of revenge for me having subjected him to a bath the first day that he wormed his way into my life, when I picked him up filthy and tick-invested off a pedestrian street in Istanbul. That day, he had patches of fur missing and splotches of green paint mixed in with the dirt, and the kindest thing I could think to do was take him to a vet and have him cleaned up. He whimpered and cried so loudly in the bath that I could hear him from down the street, where I was trying to have a coffee and ignore the whimpering and crying. From that day on, he despised water, especially that which he couldn’t see coming.

As a solution to this new damp life we shared, I ordered him one of those silly dog raincoats online. He would wear it proudly and comfortably indoors, but the second we were outside and the raincoat was necessary, he’d shake it free. This happened for a few miserable days in a row, and we limited our walks to the places of the apartment compound that had the slightest bit of tree cover. Before long, I did what anyone would do in a new country, wet and annoyed and alone with a wet and annoyed dog: I started walking him underground. 

Beyond City’s five huge towers are connected by a vast, mostly unlit parking garage. In the mornings and evenings, we’d do long laps of the place, the water running down the ramps as churning grey rivers, pouring down the stars in thick brown waterfalls. We’d jump over puddles. I’d take a tennis ball and throw it for Toby in a disused corner. We’d steer clear of the rat-infested garbage pile that took up 1/5 of the parking garage, an informal recycling center that functioned on the principle that residents of Beyond City would throw their bagged garbage down one specific parking ramp, and someone would come along and open the bags to find anything that can be turned in for money, then leave the rest to rot and stink.

I only left the apartment and Toby to get food or to look at the dozens of other apartments I mentioned in the last post before settling on one across the courtyard in Building Number Three. It also had a view of the river, which you can almost making out during the constant drizzle, but can’t see at all during the other two variations of rain.

One of these days sitting around inside, I received an email from Alibaba telling me to accept my contract and to choose what is called a “flower name” in English. Having not started work yet, I had no concept of what this meant or how important it would prove to be; I simply knew that I have to enter some Chinese characters into a form to be able to read and digitally confirm my work agreement. The HR website gave scant clues (“pick a unique name of significance; must be in Chinese”) and so I typed random words that I liked into Google Translate and then pasted the Mandarin into the form. Time after time, they were taken, and I couldn’t move to the next screen. I tried a few dozen before I began to get frustrated and saucy and typed the names of things I saw lying around the apartment. “Window.” Taken. “Ruler. Used already. “Stapler.” Nope. I stared at the filthy glass, the driving rain. I hated it all so much.

I tried “Raining.” 下雨 (xià yǔ). It worked. At this point, I realized that there is no back button. Instead, I’m taken to a screen to view my contract and I click “Accept” (there is no “Decline” button). It’s done. I am Xiayu.

A few days later, in an effort to find a bit of grounding, Xiayu went to work.

Work would have structure and rules, I reasoned. Work would have people who spoke English. Work would have people! I missed people. Work might even have food I could eat that wasn’t the same rice noodle beef soup that I’d been eating for every meal because the waiter spoke a teensy amount of English and wasn’t scared of the dog. Those first few days in Hangzhou were many things, but above all they were lonely. I was looking forward to work. Work might feel normal!

These were the first of many assumptions about Alibaba that would quickly be proven incorrect. Others included:

• Because they hired me and relocated me as a “foreign expert”—my work permit even said so!—and because it took nearly nine months for me to arrive for my first day of work, the company would be ready for me.

• Because Alibaba was in the thralls of a huge internationalizing push, at least according to everyone I spoke to during the hiring process—they would have some support for new overseas employees.

• Because it was a company with tens of thousands of employees in Hangzhou and more still around the world, the company would know how to integrate new employees, foreign or otherwise.

• Because it is such a huge company, there must be a lot of very clever people who are doing very interesting things.

• Because it’s such a rich company—Jack Ma claimed once that Alibaba was the world’s 21st-biggest economy—it must ooze dough, like Google or Amazon.

• At the very least, there would be a computer and desk ready for me.

When I arrived at the gate of Alibaba’s Hangzhou campus on June 15, 2017, these bubbles began bursting rapidly.

The Alibaba campus is a very good imitation of a Silicon Valley tech hub, all cool honeycomb architecture and reflective surfaces and interesting shadows and bizarre installation art. From the main gate, where my taxi dropped me on the first day, it was undeniably impressive. It suddenly felt like I had ended up where the world happened, this swampy corner of this grim Chinese city. For the first time, and for a fleeting moment, I got it. I was happyish to be here.  

The campus where I worked at isn’t even Alibaba’s main campus. The Xixi Wetlands campus is the true show-stopper, an imitation Google headquarters with eight enormous buildings encircling a reed pond crisscrossed by bridges upon which to contemplate bad career choices. At Xixi campus, free bicycles—including whimsical tandem bikes—are placed outside each building, encouraging employees to cycle between the far-flung office spaces, though Hangzhou’s monsoon climate prohibits this about 50% of the time. Xixi is where foreign dignitaries go, where deals are struck for trade agreements between sovereign nations and a private company, where Justin Trudeau’s bilingual messages to young women entrepreneurs are displayed on the jumbo screens. It’s where Alibaba truly hums. And it’s a dastardly, confusing place, laid out to deliberately confound and encourage chance meetings—mostly of people saying “excuse me but where is meeting room 6-5-1?!” (It’s the first meeting room on the 6th floor of Building Five, obviously. Or the fifth on the sixth floor of Building One.) Xixi Campus also has conceptual installation art strewn about, sometimes tasteful and sometimes bizarre, but is perhaps most famous for Jack Ma’s private Tai Chi gardens. It is an appropriate headquarters for a company with the ambitions and reach of Alibaba.

My office wasn’t quite as flashy nor quite as new, but it wasn’t some dusty, drab thing. Even here, there was an evident shine to Alibaba. It was an imposing—but playful—place. It assuaged my fears about whether or not this was a real company, let alone a serious international player in technology and finance. The red flags from the long process of getting to China, of “negotiating” with HR, were briefly pushed to the back of my mind. Instead, I felt excited to get started.

I fumbled with the VPN on my phone so I could access Gmail, and proudly loaded an email from my manager explaining how to get into the compound on that first day. I showed it the security guards outside of the gate, who promptly blinked and offered no response. “It’s my first day,” I beamed, and tapped the screen. They panicked in a way I thought was unique to China: not sure of how to help, they avoided eye contact and try to stoically ignore me. But my optimism was at an all-time high, and I smiled and tapped the name of my manager. Nothing. The security guard finally and uncomfortably explained something in Chinese and gestured to the side, the universal sign for “you’re in the way.”

Not to be deterred, I messaged my manager to tell her I had arrived at the agreed time of 9:30. It was a Thursday morning—Alibaba only allowed employees to start on Mondays or Thursdays—and was wet and hot, so I understood that my boss might be running late. It had taken me ages to find a taxi to get to the office. I waited. No response. Around 10 o’clock she came scurrying out to the gate.

“Drung?” she asked. This might have been spelled Jleung. “Are you Jleung?”

I was the only one there, but still looked around. The uniformed security guard showed the same blank expression, so it seemed that she was talking to me.  

“Um, hi. Yes, hi,” I responded, maybe just hiding the confusion on my face. “I’m Drew.”

“Dreeeeeeung!” she explained. “So nice to meet you. We are excited to have you here, Jleung.”

This was Celina, a mousy Shanghainese woman who led the content team for Alibaba.com. I assumed, then and many times in the future, that I had simply caught her on an off day. She wore her hair in a tight, wet-looking perm, her thick glasses were always sliding off and she was fiddling and adjusting them constantly. She looked to have dressed for a different, far-more-joyful climate: a heavy red skirt falling just below her knees, thick white stockings, and a fuzzy festive sweater.

But no, this was her. She had previously worked in Shanghai for Hewlett-Packard, a fact she reminded her team of daily. (“Well this would never happen at HP, Deroong.”) She was usually on edge or distracted, always with her face close to her computer screen or her phone, always on the way to a meeting or taking a call and laughing shrilly and flirtatiously any time a man asked her a question—“Oh Jellllllllung! Of course there’s nowhere nearby to print in colour!”—and always, infinitely, dressed for the office Christmas party in 1985.

Only after working with her for a few months did I come to understand the deep well of her nervousness. Like many people who worked for Alibaba, Celina had left a comfortable, though complex and ambitious, life on pause elsewhere. Her husband and daughter lived in Shanghai, sharing a house with her parents. On Monday mornings, she would board the company shuttle bus in Shanghai at 6 a.m. and head directly to the office, nearly four hours away. She had an apartment in Hangzhou, but she hated it. It was a bed and refrigerator, and probably only the bed was used. She was at the office from 10 a.m. until well past dinner each day, except on Fridays when she would race to the bus at 6 p.m. sharp to return to Shanghai. She struggled with a workload that none of the rest of us on her team understood, for it never filtered through to us. She would video call her daughter every night to try parenting from afar. She worried constantly about money, as she owned half a dozen apartments in Shanghai and around Zhejiang province that she kept as investments or rented out to foreigners. Her husband didn’t seem to be involved in raising their daughter, focussing instead on his own career. He showed her no attention, but she lived in constant fear of disappointing him. She refused to allow herself to drink in the company of other men, even at group work dinners, actively hinting at some past indiscretion that she was forever paying for. She was a person who perpetually walked on eggshells, trepidation in human form.

She offered no explanation for showing up 30 minutes late. Instead, she asked how I was liking Hangzhou. “Oh Droong, Shanghai is much better. You must come to Shanghai.” I told her I’d been to Shanghai twice before moving to China, and liked it a lot. “That’s right, Gwereng. That’s right. It’s perfect there.”

Celina led me across the wet stones beneath the suspended honeycomb ceiling of the campus to the buildings, while I wondered why she was having such trouble with my name. She spoke strong English otherwise, after all. We passed the Starbucks, where one of my new teammates was waiting in the long queue. Celina poked him on the shoulder, and he slid off his huge headphones. “This is your new teammate,” she told him. He smiled broadly, and shook my hand. “You must be Javier!”

 “Drew,” I said. I made sure to articulate. “Drew. Nice to meet you.” He laughed and apologized, asked if I wanted a coffee, flashed a maniacal grim, and said quietly: “Welcome to hell.”

We were off to a flying start. Celina led me up to the third floor, where the User Experience Design (UED) team sat. At 10 a.m. on a weekday, it was empty. By-and-large, the 50 or so members of the team showed up around 10:30. The only other person there was a handsome young British guy in jogging pants and a sweaty t-shirt, his face red and his brow sweaty, who Celina introduced as “Garisss.”

“Gareth,” he corrected. “Nice to meet you.”

After a few minutes of simple pleasantries, Celina took me to a small meeting room where I’d officially start my onboarding with Alibaba. There, I was joined by Nelly, from HR, and Javier, another new hire who was originally from Spain. This solved one of the day’s mysteries. Javier was joining AliExpress, Alibaba’s attempt to mimic Amazon as a consumer goods ecommerce platform. He wore the same expression that I assumed was on my face: bewilderment, amusement, confusion. There was comfort in that. It was short-lived. 

Nelly, grappling with English and boredom, asked us to huddle around her computer to show us a company values video—a three-minute advertisement for working for Alibaba—while she fiddled with her phone. She explained with imprecision where certain vital areas of the campus were and told us we’d have a tour later. All the while, in the large meeting room next door, the 60 or so local staff who were joining and had the Chinese-language version of the same onboarding were shouting slogans and singing and dancing. “It’s a little different for Chinese,” Nelly offered by way of explanation, frowning a little at her bad luck for being stuck with us. 

She proceeded to run through some basic rules of the company, none of which had been shared before and all of which were terrifying. At Alibaba, the human resources department seems to exist to fire people for violating these basic rules, and Nelly’s role in that process seemed to be to explain the rules and then quickly see if we would violate them so she could fire us. There are many ways to be fired from Alibaba, but three stood out: “data security” (removing any company files or leaking any of its data); “unethical behaviour” (preferential treatment of a particular vendor, giving or receiving gifts from clients, random things to be determined); and “discussing money” (including sharing with anyone else your “P” level, your salary, or any of the details of your contract). The negotiations suddenly made sense. Fountain could tell me whatever she wanted about my offer—“Everyone gets this!”—because I would be fired if I tried to verify that information. Once again: well played, Fountain.

Upon delivering these strict rules, Nelly proceeded to hand us our contracts. Side-by-side in a small meeting room. Clearly visible to one another. And then she just say back in her chair and stared at us. Javier and I turned slightly away from one another to read. Nelly nodded, then stood up and left the room.

“So, what level are you?” asked Javier.

“P7—you?”

“Nice. I’m P6. 

“Cool.”

I read through the contract that I was seeing for the first time. The offer I had received before flying to China had only included the salary I hadn’t been able to negotiate and a few other other financial terms, but was very light on the full employment details, including working hours, non-compete clauses, and non-disclosure stipulations.

These last two were concerning. The NDA less so, as who would I disclose anything of these specifics to? It’s not like I’d be writing about it or anything. But the non-compete seemed ludicrous at the time: employees who quit or were fired were prohibited from working for any of Alibaba’s competitors for one year after leaving the company. Alibaba considered its competitors to be any company working in any field in which Alibaba has interests, which is every field. Basically, if you leave, you can’t work for anyone else for a year, but Alibaba offers no gardening leave or compensation for this, just threat of legal action.

“Have you seen any of this before, Javier?” I asked.

“Nope. Nothing.”

“What do you think about it?”

He paused, but I think just to appear to be thinking about it.

“Looks like a Chinese contract, all right,” he said.

Javier had lived in China for many years, worked a few different jobs. He knew the game.

“Looks illegal to me,” I said.

“In which country?” he laughed. That same old immigrant cynicism. I hope it wasn’t contagious.

I had no real answer to his question. For a brief moment, I considered not signing the contract and just walking away. The whole process of getting here had left a funny taste in my mouth, but this was the dodgiest behaviour so far. This was entrapment, probably. But I had already signed a lease and paid four month’s rent up front (40,000 RMB), my furniture was already somewhere in the Indian Ocean on a container ship (another 40,000 RMB I hadn’t yet been reimbursed), and my dog was already quivering in an AirBNB to the thunderstorm raging overhead. Of course, I was welcome to walk away. Everyone is. Yet who does? The stakes were too high now. I signed. I tried to console myself as before: it’s an adventure! But it wasn’t feeling less and less like an adventure and more and more like a mistake.

Still, onward and upward to greater things, I reasoned. It couldn’t get much lower. And I had other mysteries to solve, like “Did I have a computer?” and “If so, where was it?”

The answers were “yes” and “inside of a vending machine, obviously.”

When she returned, Nelly led us to what looked like an overgrown filing cabinet. It had rows and rows of orange drawers and was about 5 meters long, with a giant touch screen panel in the middle and a scanner for our employee badges. By tapping my badge on the scanner, I woke the vending machine from its slumber. My employee number and name flashed on the screen briefly, then one of the drawers suddenly popped open. Inside was a box with a laptop and other bits and bobs needed to be a modern corporate stooge.

This was cool. This was the future, I decided, and for a brief moment I forgot about the high-pressure contract signing session I’d just endured. Such was life here in China: prolonged periods of stress and exhaustion punctuated by moments of serenity and curiosity that obliterated the stress and exhaustion. The day-to-day could be grim and depressing, but every so often this would feel like adventure, that drug to which I had long since been addicted. I was once again on top of the world, and was able to ignore the contract misstep, the rain, everything.

Besides, it was nearly 1 o’clock, and I was hungry. My hiring manager, Kyle, had offered to take me for lunch in the company’s two-storey canteen, so I messaged him that I was free and he seemed surprised that I hadn’t already eaten. “Let’s hope there’s some food left,” he messaged back.

Over a bowl of sad rice with a side dish of limp bean sprouts in greyish water, Kyle and I discussed our dogs, live in Hangzhou, and China in general. He was quick to point out how I was dressed too seriously for the company. It was my first day of work, so I’d put on a shirt and jacket, no tie, with slacks and a pair of brogues. I was, he correctly pointed out in his T-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops, seriously overdoing it. The canteen was mostly empty, but those who flitted about looked fresh from bed, dressed in flannel pyjamas or oversized T-shirts, wiping sleep from their eyes and desperately seeking the last of those grey bean sprouts.

This conversation with Kyle was low-key devastating. Throughout the hiring process, he had been an enthusiastic beacon of hope, a champion for a professional life in China. Now that I was here, he was glib and cynical like everyone else, teasing me for things I didn’t know anything about and exuding a kind of competitiveness that would define most of my male friendships in China. This was just the latest bait-and-switch in a weeks-long campaign of baits and switches, and I was already exhausted.

Meanwhile, around us, the staff of the cafeteria were starting to realize that no one else was coming to eat, and were taking their own lunch break. They sat at one long table, not speaking, all in their sweat stained uniforms and looking like the survivors of a particularly harrowing war. Kyle droned on about his time living on a construction site in Shanghai as a way to learn Mandarin and I watched the restaurant staff find benches to fall asleep on. There were no other diners, just me and this bragging American in his flipflops. Eventually I went back to my desk to find the rest of the team missing, and I turned on my computer to find out that my login credentials had already expired.

And so that first day passed, calamitously, slapdash, disorganized, and wild. The bold façade of the company from the main gate seemed now like a mirage—the glitz and glam of this shining edifice of technology and commerce being routinely tarnished by an engineer walking by in a black T-shirt emblazoned with eight-inch-high letters saying “FUCKBOY” or a tiny woman in a pink tutu walking slowly, eyes glued to her phone, into a plate-glass window. I spent the rest of the afternoon googling flights home and left at 4 o’clock, not sure if I’d be coming back.

***

Read the rest of the Faulty Memory China series (so far):

1. Introduction

2. Part One: The Long, Silly Road to Hangzhou

3. Part Two: A Brief Interlude About Finding A Place To Live And Failing To Blend In

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Dog and I were unceremoniously dumped at the gate to an apartment complex straight from the sketchbook of a nihilist German architect: five grey towers clad in black bars and reflective glass sprouting out of a concrete courtyard with garden boxes full of pale shrubs and dead grass.

It immediately started pouring.

I was home.

“Home”, it turned out, had been designed by a German. I know this because every real estate agent I met in the coming weeks who showed me apartments in the bizarrely named “Beyond City” shared this fact with a pleased, conspiring grin, as though this was our little secret. “This is a German design by a German architect,” they would say. “Many foreigner families here. You’ll like it here.” 

I did like it there. Within the context of Hangzhou, anyway. I had given myself two weeks to find a place to live, and in the first few days of being in China looked at about 30 apartments in the Binjiang district, one of the city’s old “new” suburbs.

Binjiang lay to the south of Hangzhou’s Qiantang River, a filthy broad strip of grey water that flows 500km across Zhejiang Province before emptying into the East China Sea. Beyond City, in addition to is dark German architecture, afforded views of the mighty Qiantang and its endless coal barges dredging dully along in both directions. The apartment compound had grey garden boxes and a small grey forested area to walk the dog. It was across from a supermarket and near a 20km walking path that ran alongside the disgusting river. It had a Starbucks and a Costa Coffee. And the apartments I looked at within Beyond City were, by and large, reasonable facsimiles of what my mind conjured upon hearing the word “apartment.” 

So many places I looked at in Hangzhou simply did not reach that first, lowest bar: to be a functioning apartment. Before joining Alibaba, I’d asked the hiring manager what to expect to spend in terms of rent. He’d suggested 3500-5000 RMB would get me something comfortable, but that many people paid less. (That’s about $600-$800 USD per month.) I informed the real estate agents that this was my budget, and was soon shown some of the foulest, least livable homes imaginable. Apartments in this price range offered features such as: bathrooms with bedsheets operating as both shower curtain and door; water stains and visible mould covering every wall (“I’m sorry—will someone be cleaning that?” “I don’t think so. We can ask the owner.”); rats scurrying at the opening of the front door; cockroaches scurrying at the opening of each drawer; broken windows; doors hanging from a single hinge; piss- and sweat-stained furniture (“I’m sorry—will someone be removing that?” “I don’t think so. We can ask the owner.”); kitchens consisting of a rusted hot plate and a broken mini fridge. Hangzhou felt like a squatter’s city, a city of transients, a place of millions of empty, uninhabitable apartments.

I upped my price range, and for nearly double that budget saw places with many of the same features as the cheaper apartments (rats, cockroaches, stains), plus bizarre luxury features such as wretched, stinky urinals and heart-shaped beds concealed behind mirrored sliding doors. It was at once tacky and revolting, but most of all it was confusing. Hangzhou was a wealthy city—Zhejiang was China’s wealthiest province—so the standard of living here should have been considerably higher than rural Myanmar, which the apartments reminded me of.  

Against this backdrop, paying exorbitantly for a two-bedroom apartment with a balcony in the German-designed Beyond City was an obvious and easy choice. And a few other foreigners lived there, as advertised. The Hangzhou International School was just down the street, and some of its teachers were my neighbours. As were various traders and pilots with young children and dogs, and on some mornings—walking the dog and chatting in English about my job or their job or the football scores—it was almost possible to forget that this was, in fact, China. At least until the grey sky opened and spilled the plum rains, that quaint colloquialism given to the thunderous downpours lasting a month between June and July that essentially shut down the city. When the rain began, we were at once back in China, a band of outcasts and misfits banding together against the elements and slightly baffled about what we were doing here.

The Chinese inhabitants of Beyond City were old people and infants. At least, those were the only people I ever saw. As a tech-hub city, Hangzhou attracts skilled workers from around China. Alibaba in particular, and other Chinese tech companies with offices in the city like Netease and LianLian Pay, hired only graduates from top Chinese universities. Salaries weren’t as high as in a Tier 1 city, but were competitive, so the jobs were attractive here and lured hundreds of thousands of China’s ever-growing middle class to put down roots in compounds such as mine. But these young, university-educated people worked every day—and worked very long days at that—so when they invariably produced their only child, one or both sets of parents moved in to raise it.1

So it was around old Beyond City: septuagenarians with toddlers in tow screaming at me and the dog in the lift, screaming at me and the dog in the garden, screaming at me and the dog along the street: a sort-of startled screech that said god-no-please-keep-that-creature-away-from-my-precious-grandchild. When not screaming, they could be seen potty training the kids by pulling down their pants and holding them over a shrub for them to piss or shit in broad daylight and in full view of their neighbours. Or doing tai chi in the early mornings, which was an absolute joy for me to observe until they noticed I was there and screamed and ran off. Or in the evenings, if the parents had come home from work that day and the grandkids were no longer the direct responsibility of the grandparents, these seniors could be found in the courtyard between the buildings, dancing to traditional Chinese pop songs, this scraggly gang of rural implants keeping fit and being social.

Of course, they didn’t always scream or shout, but I was never left with the slightest doubt that someone had noticed that I was there. The response was somewhere on a scale between quiet, pleasant shock that I existed in their neighbourhood and instant distrust and genuine dislike.

There are two commonly used words in Chinese to describe immigrants: weiguoren (literally “foreign country person” or “outside person,” but used mostly to simply mean “foreigner”) and laowai (also meaning “foreigner,” but more casual and playful, less blunt). Laowais like to think of themselves as laowais, but I rarely—if ever—heard myself referred to as a laowai from a local. Whenever I walked to my taxi in the morning, or stepped into the foyer of my building, or into my elevator, with one of these elderly stewards and a child, the word weiguoren would invariably surface. It was whispered, not meant for me to hear.

“Grandmother, who is that weiguoren?” some terrified child probably asks, her hands gripping folds of her grandmother’s billowy dress. I only ever hear the word I knew, that menacing weiguoren.

“Be still, child—” the grandmother would shush back. “It can hear you.”

They would try their best to not make eye contact for fear that I had, indeed, heard them. Should they risk a glance, they would be met with a wide grin and my friendliest nihao. This would temporarily break the spell. Oh, it’s a person, their faces would say, and they would shyly say hello back and quickly stare at something else.

I’m used to being a new person in other countries. I moved away from Canada immediately after university and lived as an English teacher in South Korea, where having a beard and being slightly taller than Koreans made me an instant celebrity. People stopped to take my picture. They sidled up beside me when I walked to the bus to chat and practice their English. They chided their kids to run up to me and deliver an extremely nervous “Hello how are you nice to meet you my name is James what is your name thank you bye!?” Once, sitting in the front seat of a taxi on the way home from the bar in Ulsan, the first place I lived in Korea, the taxi driver mumbled a question I couldn’t understand and then proceeded to stroke my cheek to feel my beard; he giggled, seemed pleased, and said a very polite thank you in Korean, adding the deepest bow he could manage while driving.

Koreans—at least in the mid-2000s—seemed fundamentally happy to have a migrant workforce to teach their children English. Parents were always thankful. The Korean government made it very easy to be an English teacher in Korea, for better and for worse. It’s a national imperative to learn English, so the bar for entry is very low. All you needed a degree—any degree, in any subject—from a university or college from an English-speaking country. That was all it took to get the teaching visa. (Much more on this in a future Faulty Memory Series). Being foreign in Korea was genuinely hilarious, such was the warmth that lay beneath the curiosity. Very seldomly were you made to feel like a Billy Pilgrim in his geodesic dome. Sure, there were mandatory singing and dancing performances at school and my face was plastered on the buses around Ulsan to tout the white foreigner teacher at my school, which was called—in all seriousness—Ding Ding Dang English Academy, but it all seemed like part of a deal. You were a guest, generally valued, and people were friendly and wanted to chat. In exchange, you got taught their kids and made some money and got a free place to live. I later lived in Lebanon, Turkey, Portugal, and Spain, all of with their own gracious and generous welcomes.

Something felt different about the reception and reaction to me in Hangzhou. The scenes in the elevator, that nervous gawking and staring and pointing, and the pretty frequent screaming and running—these decidedly lacked warmth.

At my most generous, I think of this as curiosity buried so deep under shyness that it simply didn’t know how to come out. In some areas of China, especially in the south and southwest, people often show genuine hospitality and warmth. But there are also longstanding fears of the outsider, fears of the unknown, fears of losing face. In those cities in China with a historical population of foreigners—Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing, most notably—locals are more accustomed to having a mixed local community. There’s still the odd gawk, but by and large you can stroll down Nanjing West Road or sit in People’s Square Park in Shanghai with a minimal amount of fuss. Not so in Hangzhou, even in areas frequented by overseas students or foreign employees. No, here, people stared. They grimaced. They shouted.

Years later, I’m able to look back and understand some of the complexities of that peculiar attitude and to feel less afraid of it, less hurt by it. But the subtleties weren’t accessible to me at the start of my time in China. It was just me, the mangy dog, and many of the people I met screaming and running away, the other half offering whispers and awkward hellos.

It was part of a broader trend of living there: I didn’t understand anything that was happening around me.

I was in northern Scotland, so the day was dull and rainy. A thick grey mist had settled over the loch outside the small town of Torridon, where the majestic Torridon Hotel stands in glorious isolation. From the edge of the water looking back, the reddish bricks of the hotel’s tower could just barely be seen. A fog rolled in, blanketing the fields with more banks of fog. I’d be staring at the loch, at the misty hills, at this chilly, wet paradise, organizing my thoughts, but it became difficult to see much. Across the gloom, the orange lights of the hotel were coming on, little beacons promising warmth. I trudged back across the field; I had a mistake to make.

I finally accepted the offer to work for Alibaba—and, therefore, to move to China—in the fall of 2016, while in Torridon. I was working on a travel story about the North Coast 500, a spectacular driving route along the empty, barren, and gorgeous northern shoreline of Scotland. I’d been on the road for a few days, slowly working my way along the narrow, winding roads. The North Coast 500 and had been without stable internet for most of the time, but that was fine. I had been delayed a response to Alibaba for months, hoping something better would come along. It didn’t.

Standing in a corner of my hotel room, hungry and tired, I pressed my laptop against the wall in hopes that the Wi-Fi would penetrate the building’s ancient stone walls for just long enough to hit send on the email. By this point, I’d been through five rounds of negotiations with the company’s HR representative, a woman named Fountain. Fountain was a skilled negotiator and had a unique communication style: she spent 100% of our conversations screaming at full volume into the phone. Whether this technique was designed to overcome weak cell signals or to disguise her faltering English, I never learned.

“Could we discuss the salary, Fountain?” I had asked for the fifth time. “I don’t think that’s enough for a person with my experience.”

“NO!! THIS IS THE SALARY THAT EVERYONE GETS AT THIS LEVEL,” she shouted back. 

“Okay, then what about flights to my home country a few times a year?”

“NO! ABSOLUTEY NO. NO ONE GET THIS. NO. NO. NO!” she countered.

“Really? What about a housing allowance? I’m moving there from overseas for this job—”

“NO HOUSING ALLOWANCE! NO ONE HAVE!”

Eventually, we landed on a clever compromise: I would stop asking for things, and Alibaba would give me exactly the contract they had offered in the first place. Well played, Fountain, I thought.

I read through those terms one last time—jotted down on hotel stationary, as Fountain, well-school in Alibaba’s HR intricacies, left no email trail of the offer. Everything was done by phone, a practice that continued after I joined the company. I checked the scratched notes and read over my email, took a deep and foolish breath, and hit send.

Then I did the only reasonable thing I could think of: I went downstairs to explore the hotel’s remarkable whisky collection, stared at the fog licking at the windowpanes, sipped from a dram of a rare and perfect Caol Ila, and wondered what exactly I was getting myself into.

Getting hired by Alibaba had been remarkably straightforward up to that point.

I’d had a quick chat with the hiring manager for all content-related jobs, passed a simple writing test, had an hour-long Skype chat with the director for Alibaba’s User Experience Design team, and was told they’d be happy to offer me the role.

I didn’t really want the job. Applying had been an experiment, the result of a whimsical what-if conversation with my then-wife—a reporter on human rights and refugees—who had asked one evening, “Do you think you could get a job in China?” I laughed. China! Why would we want to live in China?! We were happily ensconced in the expat1 bubble in Istanbul, living in a leaky but beautiful old flat beside a park where my Turkish street mutt Toby could terrorize the local stray cats and poop in inappropriate places. We ate from Turkey’s infinite supply of cheese and drank its abundant, cheap, and pretty bad wine. We were writing and I was consulting and financially comfortable. But my ex had a taste for ill-advised reporting in dangerous places, and a financial dependency on my corporate work to fund foreign reporting trips (newspapers and magazines at the time being shy to fork out travel costs on a 10,000-word think piece on Uighur rights in Xinjiang).

With only half an eye on the future and maybe a passing flirtation with the idea of a steady job in a strange country, I applied to the first job I saw listed in China—Lead Content Strategist with Alibaba in Shanghai, working for the company’s financial division, Alipay—and had an interview within a week. “Okay, okay,” we’d laughed, let’s keep this joke going. I was shifted to apply for a different role in Hangzhou (a city I had never heard of) because I couldn’t speak Chinese, but had an offer within a couple of weeks. More laughing. “Why not keep cards on the table?” we said. “It’s fine. It won’t hurt to have a backup plan. Why not try to get the Chinese visa?” Then I had the contract offer. It was clear that the whole thing would take months and months, and in the meantime a better offer would surely come along.

Months and months did pass, with Alibaba’s outsourced visa company very, very slowly stepping me through the process of getting the work permit materials ready. I’d need a health check: they told me to go to a hospital in Istanbul that no longer existed. I needed to get electronic fingerprint data collected: they sent me to a visa office that had never offered the service. I needed to legalize a marriage certificate—none of the notaries they suggested for me in Turkey would do this. Each new requirement provided a dozen pieces of misinformation and more comforting delays. The sheer incompetence of the visa company, the shouting from Fountain, the ineptitude of the whole endeavour threw up red flag after red flag. Surely, I would never actually work for this company. 

Then, Turkey exploded. The nationalism and paranoia stoked by its lunatic president Recep Tayyip Erdogan bubbled over with a failed (or staged) coup attempt, and everyone who opposed the government became a target. Suddenly, our long-term residency permits and status as foreign journalists put us in a far less stable position. Enemies of the Turkish Republic were being jailed across the country, from academics and lawmakers to elected officials and journalists. A New York Times reporter was arrested in eastern Turkey and held for weeks in solitary confinement, with no access to lawyers. People were disappearing. Our other expat2 friends began to think better of their extended stays in Istanbul and started easing themselves into other jobs in safer cities across Europe. Far worse, our outspoken Turkish and Kurdish friends lived either in constant fear of persecution or in a state of perpetual depression and despair.

At the same time, the steady stream of work I’d been getting as a consultant for government websites began to dry up. There’s a natural ebb and flow to consulting work anyway, but this was a particularly long ebb and my best guess was that it would be at least a year without a new contract, a dry spell that would eat through most of my savings.

Then my Chinese visa was ready, and life’s funnelling effect—or at least its propensity to cascade troubles—made Hangzhou and Alibaba the most attractive option. Solid income, adventure, and hey what the hell maybe I’d learn something? Sure. China it was!

After months of constant foot-dragging, things began moving very quickly. The apartment was packed up. The dog was repeatedly vaccinated and granted a pet passport. A farewell tour of Istanbul was organized, then drunkenly enacted. There was a plan: my wife would return to Canada for summer weddings and to get her Chinese visa sorted (foreshadowing!), and the dog and I would blaze the trail in China.

And so, one June evening in 2017, Toby and I boarded a KLM flight to Amsterdam and then on to Hangzhou, the place Marco Polo famously said was the finest city he had ever seen.

The plane touched down in a cloud of yellow-brown haze, the sun an obscure blot somewhere overhead. In wasn’t raining, yet everything looked wet and heavy. No airport in the world has ever provided a good introduction to its city, but the scene here was particularly grim: the ground staff were beleaguered and bent at strange angles as they ran shouting toward the taxiing plane. Row upon row of aircraft from Chinese airlines I’d never heard of were scattered at odd intervals across the tarmac, all looking dirty, disused, and forlorn. But the sky—that greyish-yellow goop—was the grimmest sight of all. What was this weather? This was supposed to be a clear summer’s day.

The Chinese have an idiom for everything, and so unsurprisingly there’s a popular saying about the beauty of Hangzhou. “Above the sky, there is heaven; beneath, there is Hangzhou and Suzhou.” Hangzhou was doing its best to refute this: I couldn’t tell where the sky ended and where this heaven on earth began. I couldn’t even tell what was sky, but I soon tasted it. As the gate was attached to the plane and the door opened, Hangzhou’s vile air gushed in, reeking of dust and gasoline.

I hadn’t known exactly what to expect from Hangzhou, but I certainly wasn’t coming in to this experience blind. I had done my best to foster enthusiasm for the city. In those nine months between contract offer and visa approval, I’d looked at every available English resource about Hangzhou. This is an admittedly short reading list, but the Internet had reassured me that Hangzhou was one of China’s greenest cities, not in the sense that it was unpolluted, but in the sense that it had green hills throughout, and canals and waterways, and tea terraces and bamboo forests, and pagodas and vast temple complexes. It looked serene, the sort of place the old Chinese poets would contemplate the moon rising over the lily ponds and, stroking their wispy moustaches, would pen beautiful couplets about the eternal beauty of nature and human fragility. That was the Hangzhou I was eager to see, not this slum of an airport in the ass end of a half-built suburb. “To the apartment!” I bravely thought to myself. “Let’s start this adventure!”

I asked one of the friendly KLM flight crew where I could get the dog once I had cleared the border. “I’m sorry, I have no idea. No one has ever brought a dog on this route. Probably the luggage carousel?” was the reply. An inauspicious start.

After an hour of queueing for immigration in the sticky, un-air-conditioned arrivals hall, I found the dog, his enormous crate sitting beside one of the baggage areas, and loaded him and my two giant suitcases onto two luggage carts. Toby, excited to see me and wailing after almost 24 hours in transit, promptly rocked his crate off the cart. As it slid along the tile floor, the other passengers screamed and ran. One of the KLM staff helped me load him back on the cart, and we repeated this ballet several times while waiting for customs, always with the good Samaritans of Hangzhou awkwardly scattering out of the way.

There’s no real concept of lines in Chinese airports. The mass of people pushing to be first to the on-arrivals luggage scanner moved slowly. (All bags are scanned multiple times at Chinese airports and train stations, both at departure and upon arrival.) As yet unaware of the appropriate etiquette for these circumstances, I waited patiently toward the rear of the blob as other arrivals cut in front of me. My pardon mes and excuse mes went unheard. There was still no sign of the serenity promised by the tourism bureaus. No, Hangzhou was a stinky, bewildering blur of elbows and shoulders, broken air conditioning, and a whimpering dog.

“You’re going to have to push ahead of these assholes or you’ll be here all fucking month,” said a voice behind me. “What’s your dog called? Here, let me help you.”

At last, something passing for a friendly face. This was John, a stocky American. He held one end of Toby’s crate and looked around with visible disgust. “God, I fucking hate this place,” he said. “First time?”

I laughed, which seemed the only appropriate response. I was too new here to agree with him yet. “First time, yeah,” I agreed.

“You here for work?” he asked.

I explained the situation briefly while following John’s instructions and pushing ahead.

“Good luck,” he said when I told him I worked for Alibaba. I could tell he didn’t mean it.

“I work for them too. I’m Jack’s pilot. But they let me live in Hong Kong and I fly up whenever he needs to go somewhere. I would never live here. He has a few of us.” Pilots, he meant, not grumpy Americans, though time would prove he had more than a few of those too. “Push ahead of that lady, man—she’s not going to let you go first.”

John kept me company in the crowd. I’d later come to meet many of his type in China: vaguely friendly and loosely well-meaning, worn down by years of struggling with what they perceive as China’s inconveniences. They were all covered in the same crusty layer of cynicism and sarcasm and cussing. A perfectly sound companion for 25 minutes in a customs queue, but not the first guy you’d call on a Friday night for a beer. These men—and they are always men—become hardened by their chosen circumstances, and wear perseverance as a badge of honour, as though manfully struggling in perpetuity were a kind of merit. Maybe it is. They are sometimes very helpful, understanding of the difficulties of living in a place like this without a grasp of the language. They know the people who know the people who know the grey areas of Chinese society, they can find you a crooked accountant or a drug dealer or a place to buy cheese. They often marry Chinese women and raise families here, but always position themselves on the outer fringes of Chinese society, from where they can comfortably criticize both their home country and their adopted country, grumbling at both, happy in neither.

Time passed more quickly in John’s company, though. Before long, we were through the luggage scanner and he deposited me at the animal quarantine station, where to his immense credit offered to wait for an hour while I filled out paperwork and politely bullied my dog into China.

I hadn’t been able to find any information on whether Hangzhou’s airport had a mandatory quarantine for live animals like Shanghai (one week) or Beijing (one month). I’d decided long in advance that I’d smile and nod my way through the process, under no circumstances handing over my dog to customs officials at a backwater airport. The customs officer looked like a teenager, his faded olive uniform too big for him, and he was clearly uncomfortable to be dealing with me. He spoke no English (no fault of his) and I spoke no Chinese (a fault of mine). My phone didn’t work, so translation apps were out of the question and we dealt in gestures. I handed over the immigration paperwork, all the details I had with me, and gave a thumbs up. The officer fussed over an ancient all-in-one printer to try to make a copy of everything, shrugging to indicate “technology huh?” I laughed, an over-the-top pantomime laugh to say “I know, technology is so stupid.” He laughed. We were bonded. Then the awkward moment arrived. The officer gestured to the crate with the panting, manic dog to say, “That’s fine, just leave it here.” I thank him in English and grabbed the handle and started wheeling away. He froze, said something in Chinese. We were shifting to the spoken word, which spelled trouble. I said the only Chinese words I knew: “Xie xie.” Thank you. As in, thank you, we’ll be going. His tone changed slightly; he said something else in Chinese. “Yes, thank you,” I said in English. I smiled. I xie xie’d a bit more, all the while inching out of the office with the cart. I waved. He spoke more loudly. I waved. I left. I passed through the glass sliding doors. I didn’t look back.

“Do you want to get a beer tomorrow?” asked John as we entered a mass of taxi drivers scattering at the sight of the dog. I took his business card, thanked him, and told him I’d send him an email. He rolled his eyes at the thought of email in China. “Good luck,” he offered again. We shook hands and he wandered off to find the driver that the company had provided him, but not me (well played, Fountain). I never saw John again.

I wheeled my luggage cart to some kind of grass-covered median and freed Toby, who promptly went insane. He smothered me, leaping and licking in his manic way, standing up on his hind legs and putting his paws on my shoulders so he could lick my face. I fed him, and he ate eagerly. He did his doggy things, scratching and rolling in the wilted grass and peeing on a bush to the disgusted looks of every single person around.

Meanwhile, something in me shifted, and I was filled simultaneously with tremendous exhaustion and dull excitement. The ordeal of travelling here was over, and I was free to begin the ordeal of living here. I was in China.

Hangzhou is an immense place. It’s considered a Tier 2 city in China, which means it isn’t one of the few megapolises of over 25 million people, like Shanghai, Beijing, or Guangzhou, that are consider Tier 1 cities. China has over 100 cities with more than one million inhabitants. Hangzhou has anywhere between 8 million and 10 million people. It’s hard to say officially, as Chinese citizens are counted based on where their residence permit—called a hukou—is issued. The hukou gives them access to education and healthcare in their registered region, and the ability to own property, which makes certain Tier 1 hukous highly sought after. This means that when someone from a Tier 1 city moves to a Tier 2 city, they don’t easily give up their hukou for Beijing or Shanghai or Guangzhou, since that’s the city in which they want to own apartments and raise their family. Practically speaking, these people don’t “live” in the city they actually live in; they aren’t counted as residents. So: Hangzhou has 8-10 million hukou holders, who could live anywhere. Maybe in Hangzhou. Maybe not.

I certainly didn’t see anyone. China is meant to be crowded. It’s the most populous place on earth, with a supposed 1.6 billion people. Where were they? On the 45-minute drive from the airport to my AirBNB in Hangzhou’s Binjiang district, I counted only a dozen or so people on the sidewalks. There were a few cars, but it wasn’t busy. It wasn’t pulsating. It did not teem. It seemed deserted.

Not that it wasn’t massively built up. Everywhere, 40-story apartment blocks, dense hives of ugly grey-brown skyscrapers were going up, partly camouflaged against the yellow-grey sky. Through that ungodly thick haze, more and more apartment towers revealed themselves, empty and quivering against the pathetic sun.

The distance from the airport to the district I was staying in represents maybe one-fifth of Hangzhou, maybe even less. The city has a dozen main districts spreading out from the old centre around the West Lake in all directions until they meet some natural obstacle (the river, another lake, a mountain) or a man-made obstacle (tea plantations, an expressway, another city). Each district has thousands and thousands of these horrible high-rise apartments, tall and terrible and empty, built for a population that never came. To drive across Hangzhou would take the better part of two hours, all of it ugly, just uninterrupted expanses of rampant development and very few busy places.

Eventually, my taxi got off the highway on Binsheng Road, where I would live for the next two years. Sickly trees lined the street, but they were trees all the same and forced a kind of quaintness on the neighbourhood. In my exhaustion, I mistakenly thought it looked like Taipei with its tidy shopfronts and the drooping branches. The buildings here seemed older than the rest of the city, the density lower. There were cute-looking clothing boutiques promising Korean Trendy Styles and small restaurants with a few customers. This was more like it, I thought. It was quiet, but there was a faint heartbeat. 

 “Here,” demanded the taxi driver, stopping at the gate of the compound where my AirBNB was. He’d spent the trip panicking about dog hair and screaming every time Toby shifted in his seat. He got out his cell phone and typed “300.” About $60 CAD. He had said 200, about double the normal fare, I later learned.

I didn’t know how to argue. I typed “200?” into my phone. He hammered away at a translation app and after a few minutes held up his phone, which read: “Dog.” I’d been travelling for, and hadn’t slept in, 24 hours, so his argument seemed fair and exceptionally well-reasoned. I paid him the 300, and Dog and I were unceremoniously dumped at the gate to an apartment complex straight from the sketchbook of a nihilist German architect: five grey towers clad in black bars and reflective glass sprouting out of a concrete courtyard with garden boxes full of pale shrubs and dead grass.

It immediately started pouring. I was home.

***

Read the rest of the Faulty Memory China series (so far):

1. Introduction

2. Part One: The Long, Silly Road to Hangzhou

3. Part Two: A Brief Interlude About Finding A Place To Live And Failing To Blend In

It’s the first of June, 2018, and the heat is unbearable in the mid-afternoon. This is usually a calm time around the Alibaba office, the slanting sunshine lulling everyone into a productive rhythm. The small courtyard in the centre of the seven modest buildings comprising the company’s headquarters is completely empty, the lawn and its morose, enormous, bronze nude statue forming a bizarre pastoral scene. It’s my favourite time here, as close as it comes to lovely, that hot sun and the green, empty lawn. It isn’t frenetic. It’s quiet, a rare commodity in any corporate campus, where to look busy—bustling from useless meeting to pointless presentation—is to be busy.

At this time of day, I usually take my 27th break, getting up from my desk to wander around looking purposeful, squinting at some place in the middle distance to avoid making eye contact with anyone lest they ask me what I do. There’s something about the lack of light that’s able to filters through the full-wall windows in the office that makes me perpetually sleepy, something in the low hum of 1,000 computers and the muted music coming from 1,000 headsets that gives me a constant headache. These little jaunts do me good, and around four o’clock in the afternoon I like to drift down to the courtyard to breathe in what passes for air here.

I’m sitting outside of the campus Starbucks under an umbrella with my teammate Cecilia, sipping one of Starbucks’ newest iced coffee monstrosities that’s unique to the Chinese market, some cold foam concoction that—like all import goods labelled as “luxury brands”—is staggeringly expensive here. Cecilia, a Beijing-born, naturalized American, is halfway through a string of expletives about another colleague. We are bonding over the mediocrity that surrounds us, about the oppressive heat, about the peculiar smell of everything, the way the breeze has a gross, chewy quality. We chat eagerly about greener pastures elsewhere. We vent, laugh, sip, repeat. It’s a normal day, except for a crowd beginning to swell across the little moat surrounding the Starbucks. 

Two black SUVs are parked outside of the main entrance, and a spark is spreading through the office. A few people are perched on the edge of the broad staircase by the main door of the aptly named “Building 1,” then a few more join. Rumours swirl. A celebrity has been sighted, and everyone wants a glimpse. 

Ten pleasant, sweaty, shit-talking minutes pass, all the while the crowd grows bigger. There must be 200 people squished into the 10 square meters between the doors of Building 1 and the SUVs. They are tense but orderly, a neat row five deep forming a pulsating processional guard between office and car. It feels fabulous to be far away from this scene, simply watching.          

Every few seconds, the automatic doors of Building 1 slide open and a low, excited murmur starts. It soon erupts into an enormous, simultaneous sigh, a shared disenchantment. Red-faced and ashamed, some poor random person has walked out a door they use frequently and has disappointed the crowd, who desperately hoped they were someone else. It happens over and over, random employees coming out of the door, becoming confused, and rushing sheepishly past. Some, having deciphered the situation, join the ranks at the ends of the lines. Doors open, followed by more screams and sighs, and the crowd grows larger still. 

Then, suddenly, it’s real.

The doors part, and the sound of pure glee fills the courtyard. A small man emerges, smaller than you’d expect, and from my comfortable patio chair at the coffee shop I can see the space around him close instantly. He waves to his adoring fans. They, in turn, try to swallow him whole. He’s flanked by bodyguards, sinister black-suited figures from an action movie, who stick tightly to him now. The crowd swarms closer to the man, cheering and gasping. People are visibly and audibly weeping. For a long moment it’s just a mass of humans in the sweltering courtyard, screams and laughs and cries and a steady jostling until the celeb-bodyguard axis burst through the funnel of limbs into the sunlight and heat. Blinking wildly, the man of the hour looks overwhelmed, and a bit disappointed. The screaming crowd circles tightly around the cars now. A bodyguard tries in vain to pry the SUV door open, then pulls more firmly to dislodge a few of the rabid fans from the space that now needs to be occupied by the open door. The man regains composure, turns, waves, smiles, and yells, “xie xie!” It looks like he tries to bow, but doesn’t have enough space to move. He disappears into the car and the doors close.             

The car slowly pushes its way through the crowd. People breathe again, shaken and alive for what seems to be the first time in their lives.

This is Jack Ma, and these are his people: blissful, enraptured at having witnessed their god.

I spent two years working for Alibaba in Hangzhou, China.

I was hired as a “content strategist,” a silly title for an even sillier job. I was an awful employee, disillusioned and demotivated from the first week, but I grinned-and-bared my way through two years with the promise of stock options dangling, that thickest and roughest of carrots. I resigned the same moment the stock vested. I produced remarkably little of value in those two years, either for the company or in any kind of creative way. I wrote nothing. I gained 20kg from greasy food, too much booze, too little exercise. I made some friends and some enemies. I ate parts of animals that I didn’t know were edible. I was frequently food poisoned. These last two points are not unrelated. 

It was a bizarre, sometimes hilarious, uniquely frustrating period in my life, a slow-motion spinning of the wheels of my career. But it also offered me a long, unbroken look behind the curtain of modern China, the world’s most populous and—as I’ll argue throughout this series—most technologically advanced country.

I’ll avoid leaning on the metaphor of “China at a crossroads,” if only because China moves so quickly and continuously forward that it never really considers turning left or right. Yet China is a country forever struggling to keep up with itself. It has only recently moved beyond its One Child Policy, and the parents of that One Child Generation are products of the Cultural Revolution, the great famine, living always in the long shadow of madman Mao. Some of those survivors and their offspring have become tech billionaires. They own great tracts of land in China and abroad. They buy islands and ancient French vineyards. They are communist China’s great success story, these brilliant capitalists.

I got to watch them work for two years, saw the gears turn on their lives, saw them fret over how to save for a new designer handbag or pair or designer shoes, saw them turn up to work in a new BMW or Tesla a few days after the annual bonuses came out, saw them work long hours and do very little and not particularly excel at anything and never especially fail. I saw some of the world with them, both on vacations and on business work trips, and witnessed their internal desire to have what they believed to be the best things in life; usually material things, like brand name expensive items, but when more intangible—a vacation, a wedding, a family—to likewise spare no expense. I saw them explode into being at the strangest of times and was sometimes unsure when their true selves were showing. I shared meals with them, learned of their struggles and desires. And yet I was never one of them.

The day-to-day operations of a big company, even one as important as Alibaba, are not particularly interesting. The company’s history has been painstakingly and fawningly recounted elsewhere, most notably in Duncan Clark’s The House that Jack Ma Built. Clark, was an advisor to Alibaba in its early days and knew Jack Ma closely and well. He details Ma’s rise to power with authority and the kind of affection that allows such a book to escape censure by Ma and by China. Books about Ma and Alibaba on the market today paint a curiously rosy picture of the company and its influential founder. For deep reading on the company, read that. For descriptions of the food and some weird stories, read this.

That said, we need to talk about Jack for a minute.

Jack Ma and Alibaba represent the great tech leap forward better than most figures, most companies. Alibaba came into existence at the time when China was just getting online, in 1999. Jack Ma, so his legend goes, was one of the first people in China to have a personal computer—one he essentially smuggled back from the United States in his checked baggage—and was an early advocate for the Internet. He saw its potential more than he understood how it worked, but delegated well and grew a company from 19 people in 1999 to almost 100,000 employees in 2020. Along the way, his original vision for Alibaba has mutated and spawned, having gone from a simple business-to-business website to a comprehensive empire, a gilded state within the state, of more than 1,000 individual businesses flying the Alibaba flag. And he then ran afoul of regulators and the central government, went suspiciously quiet for a few months, and re-emerged only in the depths of the pandemic to reassure the public that he, too, had contracted the virus. His story is the story of every Chinese tech entrepreneur, amplified by some degree.

Alibaba is important for other reasons, of course. It has played a huge role in China’s poverty reduction initiatives, giving an average Chinese person access to the rest of their own country (if not the world at large), to small business ownership, to financial services. Many of China’s technological and social advancements, now trumpeted by the Central Party, are Alibaba innovations.

But to focus purely on these is to overlook the company’s deeply cultish environment, its culture of sexual harassment, its demands on its employees to 70 or 80 hours per week, and its closeness to a government that commits grave human rights abuses, dutifully tracks all of its citizens at all times, and bullies its way to financial—and possible military—domination of most parts of the world.

China’s poverty reduction is real, but has been replaced by a form of capitalism and consumerism that would put America to shame, if Americans understood how China worked. Personal wealth is possible, but so is staggering personal debt. China, when I lived there from 2017 to 2019, had the highest debt-per-capita of any country, by some margin. Property values are absurd, yet owning a home is a central goal of all but a few young Chinese people. Marriage and children likewise, yet the cost of raising a child in China is mind-boggling. Nowhere in the world are luxury fashion and cosmetic brands coveted and purchased. In 2018, Chinese consumers accounted for one third of all luxury purchases worldwide. By 2025, according to McKinsey, that figure will rise to 40 per cent as the number of high-income households in China rises to some 350 million. Still, spending per household is nearly triple income per household: a statistic that Alibaba boasts in its yearly wrap-up of its enormous online sales event, Single’s Day.

Practically speaking, and most importantly for the purposes of this series, that creates a truly weird environment. Those two years in China were spent breathing foul air, being honked at by luxury cars and surrounded by people with Louis Vuitton bags and Prada suits eating cheap noodles and napping on any available surface.

For most people, two years of gainful employment at a leading company would be satisfying, one of life’s easier chapters to close and move on from. For me, there’s a lingering sense of unfinished business. A bad taste in my mouth. A sense of having witnessed something often unseen and a need to shout it from the rooftops, or at the very least a low soapbox or a comfy chair within earshot. Or a newsletter, whatever.

From the first day at Alibaba, things felt off, but only vaguely so, like a faint ringing in your ears or a persistent but very slight itch on your foot. That offness swirled around the edges of my life in China for a few months, only seldomly taking form.

There was something unsettling about the mania I saw on that June day in the sunshine: the fervour and passion for a leader, the cultish hero-worship. On the day of Jack Ma’s visit to the office, I’d already been in China and working for Alibaba for a year, and had grown used to the egomania at the center of the company and of its C-suite staff, but this was the first time I’d seen average employees reflect the egos of their great leaders back upon them. A company run by self-obsessed, self-important tech nerds is not new to the world, let alone to China. I’d laughed off the silliness when I saw Jack Ma dressed as Michael Jackson and rejecting the advances of the CEO dressed in drag at the annual party. I’d scoffed at the mandatory HR indoctrination sessions when I first joined the company, which seemed like run-of-the-mill company propaganda that had been cranked up to Chinese levels of bizarre. But seeing normal employees disrupt their days to stand in the blazing sun to catch a brief glimpse of their company’s founder: this unsettled me. I began to reassess the behaviour around me and suddenly saw this rampant enthusiasm for Alibaba everywhere, and not just within Alibaba.

The name Alibaba inspires awe within China. I only half understood that at first. From within, it seemed so incompetent and incoherent, and while it is both of those things, it is also tremendously successful and of huge importance to China. Why else would people become fevered and wild at the sight of an entrepreneur?

The easy answer is that Alibaba is different, that Jack Ma is different. He is—or was then—a wildly popular figure in China, both for what he has achieved and what he represents. He built, through great determination and hard work, one of China’s giant unstoppable internet companies. Alibaba touches some aspect of the average Chinese person’s life every day, sometimes every hour. Its apps have replaced traditional shopping and completely supplanted traditional banking. If you ride a shared bicycle or hire a shared car, if you order takeout or want grocery delivery, you’re likely using an Alibaba-developed app or one that it has invested heavily in. When you pay for something online, you’re almost certainly using Alibaba’s payment app, Alipay. Your modern life as a Chinese citizen likely depends on Alibaba. And since it has made your life considerably easier, made your family significantly richer, you feel a closeness to its founder, that slight, generally humble man from Hangzhou. 

Beyond a sense of gratitude, the Chinese saw Jack Ma as a beacon. And in many ways, he is something of a posterchild for success in modern China. He’s the man who couldn’t get into a good university because his math scores were too low, the man who couldn’t even get a job at KFC (a story he used to tell often), the man who honed his English skills by speaking to tourists, the man who went from a struggling English teacher to China’s wealthiest person. He represents the generation who, encouraged to look outward for the first time in centuries, drove China to become the world’s largest economy. In the 20-plus years after founding Alibaba, Ma had amassed a net worth of $36-billion US, which is more than the GDP of Cameroon, or Iceland. It’s nearly double the GDP of Afghanistan. His is a wealth sufficient for the maintenance of several nations.

There’s a Chinese idiom that translates as “as rich as a country,” essentially meaning how rare and impressive it is for a single person in China to become very, very wealthy. It’s an old saying in need of updating to reflect the new China, in which incredible wealth is available on tap. And it’s not just Ma. He is not the only example in China of a person making the single-generation leap from the low-middle class to the super wealthy—nor is Alibaba the only company in the country to emerge out of the fertile economic landscape of the 1990s and become one of the largest in the world—but Ma had the perfect combination of hard-luck story and remarkable success to inspire those around him. When Ma came to his company’s office, the maniacs in the sun were no longer simply his employees—they were his worshippers. They are people who see in him the chance to become as rich as a country, as rich as many countries. Like any star-struck fan, they scream and snap photos and forget themselves for a little while, here in the presence of what is possible.

***

Read the rest of the Faulty Memory China series (so far):

1. Part One: The Long, Silly Road to Hangzhou

2. Part Two: A Brief Interlude About Finding A Place To Live And Failing To Blend In

Read more of The Faulty Memory Series:

There are thousands of people squeezed into the Plaza del Salvador in the center of Sevilla, and the balconies and rooftops lining the square are likewise packed. It’s nearly dusk, and the city is muggy and caked with bright-yellow dirt, the leftovers from a sandstorm blown northward from the Sahara that mixed with the unseasonable rain earlier in the afternoon. The sky has lost some of the ungodly, menacing hue it once held, but we bear the marks of the foul weather: everyone has dusty splotches on the shoulders of their fine suits, of their pretty dresses.  

I’ve lost track of my friends in the sheer mass of well-dressed and attractive people. The men all kind of look the same here, the Andalusian Standard Male Sunday Best outfit consisting of a dark suit, a light blue shirt, and a colourful tie. Many have a cardigan (brown or blue) tied around their waist. Many have a puffy vest under the jacket due to the rainy weather, which is seen as a symbol of winter in Sevilla. The women have a certain sameness too, wearing heels with elegant pantsuits or long dresses, all in similar bright tones.

Being separated from my friends is not distressing, since none of us can move anyway. They were somewhere close by, even if I can’t pick them out of the crowd. Everyone, the whole crowded mass, is swaying happily and chatting and snacking and waiting, so I sway and wait too, and wish I had a snack. Across the plaza, the procession Borraquito is arriving back to the Iglesia Colegial del Divino Salvador.

Two rows of nazarenos (penitents) in long white tunics and tall pointy hats carry candles slowly toward the church gate. Music can be heard somewhere off in the distance through Sevilla’s narrow streets, a signifier that one of the procession’s pasos is nearing. Each procession has one or two of these pasos, enormous and heavy displays like parade floats, always depicting either Christ in some stage of his final days or the Virgin Mary in her various states of distress—or of her ultimate, serene acceptance. These pasos are hoisted and carried step-by-step around a procession route by about 50 men called porteros (and they are always men). The procession routes are all different. Every procession begins and ends at its patron church and is required to pass along a few hundred meteres of a central path to Sevilla’s remarkable, but the rest of the route depends on where the patron church is. In each procession, the pasos are immediately preceded by people carrying incense and standards and immediately followed by marching bands of varying size and ability. A single procession can last for more than 12 hours, depending on the length of the route and the number of nazarenos. The longest ones—with over 2,000 nazarenos—take as long as two hours to pass by a single spot.

The smoke from the incense bearers has begun to waft from the opposite corner of the Plaza del Salvador. A low drumbeat bounces off some faraway wall. This signals to the entire crowd that the paso is about to enter, and thousands of people begin shushing one another. (North American readers will imaging a kind of “shhhhhhhh” sound, but the Sevilla shush is like a tsking, a sound from behind clenched teeth, like you’re telling a cat to stop clawing you.) The shushing quickly gives way to a startling silence, the whole square having been shushed into quiet submission. Any attempt to talk is met with several dozen sharp tsks, and within a few seconds, it is utterly still.

The paso shuffles into view across the square, this one probably a “Cristo” (an image of Christ, but it’s hard for the uninitiated to tell from across a vast plaza) but moving with the familiar gorgeous rhythm of all pasos, that sheer human will to move a big thing somewhere other than where it currently is. Behind the paso, the band begins to play, nothing somber or sad but a full spectacular march with swelling horns and drums and in contrast to the silence of the square moments earlier, the sound is devastating and beautiful.

Then the music suddenly dies and another silence takes hold. The men under the paso navigate a tricky corner and carry the float for a dozen meters toward a ramp leading up to the church. This is the home stretch, and the paso wobbles onward and ever-so-slightly upward, every breath in the plaza held. A few wobbles more and it’s gone, completely inside the church. The square erupts with applause and the band starts up a triumphant, horn-filled tune. When the band stops playing again, the square is already starting to clear, the sky having once again grown menacing. The band takes a smoke break. Tired porteros collapse in the church, the job done for another year. The bars around Sevilla fill with exhausted watchers, everyone smiling and laughing and looking nervously at the clouds. So goes Semana Santa, the holy week.

The entirety of holy week reminds me of one of my favourite songs, which begins like this: “There are times that walk from you, like some passing afternoon.” It’s an old Iron and Wine song, and it’s mostly about the slow life in Georgia and the way that traditions are handed down across the generations, and about the obligation to religion in traditional places (“And she’s chosen to believe in the hymns her mother sings” and “Sunday pulls the children from their piles of fallen leaves”). There’s an inescapability to the lyrics that always felt equal parts melancholic and sweet to me, that ever-presence of religion, the oppression of traditions.

These are things I’ve never experienced firsthand, a child of an agnostic and an atheist or something similar. We never talked about religion at home, but were sent to bible camp religiously each summer because my town had a by-donation/pay-what-you-can summer camp run by Baptists. My parents decided to pay zero dollars, and we lived in a cachement area that allowed us to go twice per summer, equaling four weeks of free childcare. Camp was mostly sports and singing children’s hymns and catchy Christian songs. There was a really great tuck shop, and we’d each get a dollar every day to take with our lunches so we could buy candy. There was an hour of chapel in the mornings (mostly singing) and random prizes taped the bottoms of the plastic chairs that filled this small rural church. One time per camp we’d go on a day-long canoe trip to this place on the lake called Slippery Rock, and we’d spend the afternoon sliding down a slimy angular rock into the dark waters of Graphite Lake and laugh and scream and it was pure Ontario summer glory. “Is this what god does?” I’d wondered. Splashing around with your friends in cold lake on a hot summer day, the sky dotted with big puffy clouds—surely this is the definition of divinity. Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention in the bible classes.

Sometimes, the camp counsellors—mostly troubled youths from around town who I’m sure were doing some sort of court-mandated community service in this role as youth leaders—would ask us halfheartedly if we wanted to accept the Jesus Christ as our personal lord and savior. When I said no, they always looked slightly relieved.

Beyond those weeks at bible camp, religion was always a kind of low-level background noise to my life in rural Ontario. Our elementary school had more than its fair share of evangelical teachers—my fifth grade teacher was also a reverend in a small Baptist parish church—but only the most fervent of these risked crossing the line between Church and State. My fourth grade teacher was a preacher’s wife and would read from the New Testament around Christmas (and all year long our spelling tests would contain the names of biblical places, which is how I am still able to spell Bethlehem and Nazareth and Gomorrah with ease). My most significant Christian trauma also happened in fourth grade. 

My best friend one day asked me if I believed in god, maybe out of the blue or maybe because we had been quizzing each other on the spelling of Galilee. We mostly talked about hockey or soccer or the Ninja Turtles, so this was a departure. I had no idea what to say in response, so he kindly asked me if I wanted to try praying with him. I said sure, of course, I’d love to, because I knew as a young boy that you shouldn’t deliberately hurt someone’s feelings, and also another part of me really wanted to try it, in earnest. It was winter, and during one school recess (the short one in the morning), he and I went to a remote part of the schoolyard and got on our knees and clasped our mittened hands together in front, just like you’d see on TV. He said some words, which I repeated with whatever solemnity I could imitate. I closed my eyes so tightly in case he was looking at me, and there in the cold field I hoped desperately to feel something. When we were finished, he said, “Did you feel something?” and I told him the truth: I didn’t think so. We went back inside to do our 30 minutes of French homework.

I went home that night entirely devastated. It’s one of the earliest feelings of disappointment that I can remember in my life: a search for a bigger thing, a call unanswered. I struggled to find the words then to describe to my parents why I was upset, and today have no clearer understanding about it. Was I sad that I couldn’t feel anything? Or was I just a kid who wanted to share something with another kid and felt left out?

Thirty years on, I know. I felt left out. Standing in the dust-caked square in Sevilla, I still felt no connection to god or Jesus or whoever, and knew that everyone around me did. But that didn’t matter; I was still profoundly moved by the spectacle, by the shared experience with those who probably did believe in god or Jesus, in saints and miracles, in the whole godly thing.

After the Borraquito’s paso had entered the church, the rain began to fall in earnest. People hurried from the square, desperate to squeeze into a bar to wait for news of either another procession or the cancellation of the rest of the day’s events. Each day during Semana Santa involves at least 12 hours of processions, and only a handful of these begin before noon. The last arrives back to its home church well past midnight. Devout Sevillianos, or at least passionate ones like my host Antonio, live in a kind of on-off frenzy throughout each day. They intersect a procession at a particular location to see the pasos, then squeeze through the crowds to find a place for a drink and a snack, then rush to the next spot on the map to see the next procession.

On the Plaza del Salvador, one bar has room for our group, which starts with four people and ends with about 20. This bar has no chairs. No bar has chairs. During Semana Santa, they’re all tucked into storage to make room for more exhausted people, none of whom get to sit down. I guess this encourages people to move around between locations, spending money quickly and leaving to find somewhere to rest. It works. The bars are constantly packed, people scarfing down tiny sandwiches and chugging Sevilla’s hilarious tiny beers.

(A quick note that serves as actual, real-world travel information! In Sevilla, when you order a beer, it is assumed that you want a caña, which is about 200ml of beer usually served in pint glass, of which fills up about one third of the cup. Supposedly, this is so that the beer will be cold for the entire time you’re drinking, which is about 11 seconds. A pint would get too warm, the logic goes. Let me try, I say. A larger beer exists in the form of a cortado, which is supposedly a double but which is really about 300ml. Still, the glass looks more full and feels more satisfying to hold, and my beer has never once gotten hot while drinking it. It’s considered in bad taste to order these larger beers, and unspeakable if you’re a local, hence most people drink 2-3 teensy tiny beers in quick succession and move on to another bar.)

The group I was with showed no interest in braving the rain to find another location, and news was spreading that the rest of the day’s processions had been cancelled, so we stayed put and discovered a loophole in the Semana Santa system: if you keep ordering food and drinks, you can remain at the same bar for hours. If you’re lucky, they may even let you lean on the wall. Chairs be damned!

By midnight, with our legs tired from standing, our bellies full, and our livers earning their keep, everyone went home. I felt exhausted, less from the frenetic religiosity and the crowds than by being on my feet for 10 hours. The next day, the frenetic religiosity and the crowds would prove they could exhaust me too.

Sunday, then. The big one. Saturday’s rained-out processions had left a whole city craving more god. We get a late start, pacing ourselves. We don’t leave to see the first procession until almost 4 p.m, half-running across the city to make sure we’re in a particular plaza at a particular moment. Antonio knows Sevilla’s old city perfectly, its millennia-old Moorish map imprinted on his brain. It’s a cool but sunny day, and the streets throb with excited families waiting along the procession routes. The air hums with a now-familiar excitement. It’s happy and busy and sweet, and it makes getting around extremely annoying.

We seem to always be moving against traffic, by which I of course mean against 5,000 people heading toward the Cathedral. But I trust Antonio, and follow as closely as is possible. Like a strict father with his wayward child, he’s constantly looking over his shoulder for me as I try to take a photo of some kid playing with a ball of wax or a spectator stuffing their face with Cheetos. His friend has joined us too, a handsome farmer who looks like Walton Goggins with a deeper tan, and who shares Antonio’s urgency. Antonio’s pregnant wife shares my irritation at being needlessly rushed, clicking her tongue and sighing at every insistence to hurry up.

Why did we leave the house only 30 minutes before the parade, I want to ask? We had spent the day lazing around, nursing hangovers, having lunch, having a cheeky hangover-helping beer or three. If we’d given ourselves even 15 more minutes, there would be no rush.

No matter, we soon arrive at the plaza to join a few thousand people who had exactly the same idea. We’re at the back of the crowd, near a bakery, and press our backs against its windows into the only remaining space available. The nazarenos are already passing and somewhere out of sight I can hear the music that follows the paso, which means it’s close. Which means I’ll only be pressed into this glass for at least 20 more minutes. I’m sweating, due more to a hangover and having 15 people squeezed up against me than from the outside temperature. It’s incredibly uncomfortable. I hate god, I decide.

But then that same familiar magic descends on the square. The paso jiggles into view, the horns behind it start to swell, the crowd goes silent and watches with its single held breath to see how far the paso will make it. It shuffles and jostles—its candles and virgin shaking and flopping around on top of 50 pairs of shoulders—halfway across the square, then stops.

The stopping is also a kind of magic: the plaza explodes with applause, whoops, shouts. The band takes a breather too, and the sounds of the music are replaced with a thousand excited conversations. Que rico, que bueno, que magnifico, que so on. The break lasts about five minutes, during which the exhausted porteros are passed huge jugs of water. The bottom of each paso is covered with a large curtain or sheet, so that only the socked feet of the carriers can be seen, except in these breaks. Then, one or two of the porteros flops on the ground, the sheet lifted to let some air in. The men underneath are dressed identically (classic Sevilla), in dark pants and white shirts, a coloured towel wrapped around their neck. Most are in tank tops, but those with sleeves have their sleeves rolled up to hold their cigarettes. They are drenched in sweat, which I appreciate. They take turns gulping water.

The end of the break is signaled with a wooden knocker on the paso. A processional leader bangs it once, and the curtain drops while everyone beneath shifts into position. People in the crowd begin shushing. A second knock and you see the paso jostle slightly as the men step up with their shoulders into the bars, ready to lift. More shushing. The third knock is answered with a communal grunt and the paso shoots upward, sending candles and decorations tumbling. The crowd cheers. Then the paso starts its slow shuffle forward once more, and the band starts to play.

Another pattern reveals itself: no sooner has the paso left the plaza than the entire crowd does too. There’s another procession to get to a few blocks away, so we push through to get to a quieter side street to rush to the best spot to stand still and wait for it to go past. In this one, the nazarenos wear fantastic moody purple hoods to go with their white cloaks. The sun is already starting to set, and the dimming light casts long shadows and cranks the spookiness up to 11. (That’s when I thought the Spooky Scale only went to 10, and that 11 was an exaggeration. The scale would be expanded several times more that day.)

We are, if anything, slightly early for this one, and I get to enjoy a few pleasant minutes just mulling about on a not-entirely-jam-packed sidewalk. The purple procession quickly loses its air of spookiness under closer inspection. The nazarenos are carrying huge white candles, six feet tall, and cupping their hands tenderly around the flame to keep it lit. A man walks up and down between them, lighting those candles that have gone out. And all around the street, children swarm with balls of wax.

There’s so much to explain about Semana Santa and its many rituals that that my gracious hosts had forgotten to mention this one, its most charming. In addition to being handed candy from the nazarenos, children collect drops of wax throughout the week from these long candles. The ball of wax starts as a little cork ball when a child is just four or five years old, and grows to the size of a softball over the years. I’m standing by two or three families with young kids, which you can tell because their balls of wax aren’t that big. It’s like rings on a tree. The kids wander freely in the procession, tugging on the white sleeve of a pilgrim and holding out their wax balls. Most nazarenos say no with a shake of the hood, but one in every 10 that passes by will lower their candle and the kid will hold up their ball of wax and one or two drops will fall and that’s it. Very little is said in these moments, deliberately I suppose. It’s all meant to be solemn, but it reads as overwhelmingly sweet, almost cute. Maybe this god character is alright.

It’s more than half an hour until the purple procession’s paso passes (that was unavoidable, sorry), and this half hour is the most pleasant I spend during Semana Santa. The light is wonderful, the photos excellent, the mood friendly, the personal space respected. It’s the most subdued procession we see that day, and I feel like I’m starting to get this whole thing. Christian or not, believer in god or not, that doesn’t especially matter here. This is a family—no, a community—no, a whole-city!—event, a way of coming together and sharing a space, of tolerating busyness, overcrowding, and dust storms altogether. Against the backdrop of the KKK-style hoods (these inspired those, one hopes), it’s jarring and strange but generally just … nice. It’s just really, really nice.

But this procession is over, as far as we’re concerned. Antonio is signaling to me that it’s time to go. There’s more to see. We switch back into hustle mode and head toward the main square, within spitting distance of the Cathedral. This is Holy Ground Zero. Every procession must pass along the same specific route into and out of the Cathedral, in the heart of Sevilla’s old city. On either side of this route, a kilometer on either side of the Cathedral, temporary bleachers have been erected as seats for certain well-connected or wealthy families. Or old people. It’s a bit unclear how someone gets one of these seats. I’m not destined for one in my lifetime, so they serve only a single function: obstructing half of the walkable area. Practically speaking, this has a huge impact on the next two hours of my life.

Antonio has earmarked one of his favourite processions (of the day) as a must-see (one of seven of the day), but it’s across the main procession route from where we watched the purple one. There are two ways to get to the square: walk around the entire old city, or queue to cross the street. We choose the later, and wait between metal barriers for 20 minutes to be allowed to cross, then funnel into a plaza too full to allow us entry. We squish. More squish behind us. The world comes to its now-familiar standstill as off across the plaza a paso enters, horns blare, etc. Applause, shushing, applause. It’s probably beautiful. I can’t see a thing. When it’s over, we turn around and cross the street again, waiting 30 minutes this time. We catch another procession accidentally while waiting to cross, and then after some sweating and pushing emerge into the open night air on a dark street.

Processions come and go. There are at least three more that night. There are drinks to be had along the way, some desperate leaning on door frames or the outer walls of the bar. Feet start to ache, then calves and thighs and lower backs. Standing and walking all day, drinking only booze—it gets tiring. We eat something along the way, or we must have? Sandwiches, I bet. They eat a lot of sandwiches in Sevilla, and cod in its ten thousand Spanish forms, all mediocre. At one bar, we spot a huge ball of wax—years of work—left behind on a table. A few minutes later a child of about 10 or 11 comes bursting through the door, eyes wet, darting from table to table. Antonio hands him the ball, the child screams sweet relief and runs back out into the night.

By now it’s nearly midnight. In the dim streetlights the processions are even spookier, but they’ve got nothing on what’s about to come. We’ve had our last drink of the night at a tiny corner bar and head towards a main street to catch the final procession of Palm Sunday. Antonio now tells us that this is his favourite, but he’s at the stage of the night and level of alcohol in which he starts dancing like a bullfighter and constantly clapping out the beat to a flamenco only he can hear, so I take this with the grain of salt it deserves. We find a perch/learning spot against a restaurant we had leaned inside of earlier that day. Nazarenos dressed entirely in black are slowly marching past, carrying long black candles. As they pass, the city becomes utterly silent, a silence deeper than any that have come before. Even Antonio’s clapping trails off.

Then, as soon as the procession turns a corner onto a main street, all of the streetlights are turned off at once. The only light is the faint glow of the candles and in the near-pitch darkness sounds are weirdly amplified and the loudest thing is the soft shuffling of robes and the gentle padding of feet on the wax-covered street. The paso silently slides into view and drops for a break. Nothing stirs. Moments pass in this near-total darkness and almost-total quiet, and then the knocker sounds one, two, three—low grunt—and the procession moves quietly on. But then—then!—the music from the band rises out of the shrouded street. Soft and melancholy, it hangs in the smoky air longer than usual. But eventually it too is gone, and the city and its waxed old streets finally go to bed.

Semana Santa is exhausting. We arrived home around 3 in the morning the night of the spookiest darkest procession, and Antonio and his wife were both awake and taking calls for work at 9 a.m. The pace at which life is lived here is something to behold, full-throttled until it isn’t, calm until it’s time to go go go.

That pattern exists at all times in Sevilla, but is heightened during Semana Santa. That is to say, Sevilla is always a little bit exhausting, with its endless options for eating and drinking and dancing and singing and walking and just enjoying a happy and fulfilling life. Every time I visit, I’m entranced and energized for the first few days and then, somewhere around day four, when I start to pickle and the lack of sleep is making me see double, I am desperate to escape. Then a few days later I’m telling anyone who will listen how much I love and want to be back in Sevilla, but how I’d never live there because of how exhausting it is. And though this is how I always feel about Sevilla, I’ve never felt it to the extremes that I did during Semana Santa.

And impossibly, there are many more days of this planned. It’s a holy week, after all. The next morning Antonio is laying out the schedule for more processions and atheist me is starting to pray for some divine intervention.

The weather remains grey and grim in Sevilla, and then turns a corner to become fully miserable. Processions begin to be cancelled for the final afternoon and evening I’m in town. My heart swells, and I feel badly about this, but only slightly. I head to the airport in the evening against a backdrop of rain on the Andalusian plain, and I’m gone. The rain in Sevilla doesn’t let up. A couple of days of processions are cancelled outright. This is viewed by the majority as a tragedy. It makes the national news, the distressed faces of priests and penitents alike expressing abject disappointment.

I wonder if the cancellation comes as something of a relief to some people? Not the nazarenos or the porteros, for whom the procession is a distinct right of passage. Not the churches or the makers of the pasos, who have spent months preparing. Perhaps not even the children with their balls of wax on that high shelf in their bedroom. But surely, some of the exhausted watchers must welcome a day to rest their feet and not be pressed into a square with a thousand other hot and tired people waiting for a few brief flashes of a holy thing. Surely they would welcome a breather?

Semana Santa has its detractors, of course. Not everyone I spoke to was planning their days around the processions, and friends even talked about distant cousins and mere acquaintances who actively fled Sevilla during the festival. This meant that some folks were—if not strongly opposed to—not enthralled by the whole thing. But for those who stayed in Sevilla during Semana Santa, that communal suffering seemed to be part of the appeal. Let’s push this way to see that, they say. Let’s jam into this too-small space. Let’s stay up too late, be a bit too tipsy, they say. They say it wearily, but with one voice.  

A man emerges from the dark space between two oversized trailers and stumbles a few steps down the road. He spins, head titled skyward, as though looking for the stars to guide him. After a moment, he stops, his eyes lowering. His gaze falls upon me, then flicks to my mother, sitting just to my left. The man squints, takes a step closer.

“Canada?” he barks. His voice his high, nasal. In that one-word interrogation, his Quebec accent is clear. “Canada? That you?”

“Hi JC!” screams my mom, Gillian. French people call her Gillian; everyone else calls her Jill. Until today, I’ve never heard anyone call her “Canada.” She stands up and gives JC a hug, then a kind of ghost kiss on each cheek. The accents, the kissing—how vaguely European it all seems. “When did you get here?” she asks.

“Just now!” yells JC. He speaks only in shouts. “Can’t remember where anything is.”

“Where’s your wife?” my mom asks.

“Not coming! Sick!” JC replies. No further explanation seems necessary. She’s sick, so she’s not coming, alright? I wonder, sick with what? Not coming this week, at all this year, ever again?

“And how’s your health?” asks mom. Smalltalk is weird here.

“I just got my 12th stent!” yells JC. “Right here!” he adds, beating his chest with his fist. This man is a risk-taker.

“Oh, great. They’re cheaper by the dozen!” says mom, giggling at her own excellent joke. It’s lost on JC. Maybe a language barrier, maybe he’s a bit deaf. Maybe he’s offended? It seems unlikely. He’s moved on to the next topic, pointing at one of the trailers just across the street.

“Who lives there?” he demands. He wobbles over toward the trailer, trying to peer into the darkened windows. Unsatisfied, he waves goodbye like a man trying desperately to fly—turning and flapping both arms with his fingers pointed outward, but without coordination of any kind—and disappears back into a dark laneway.

Later in the week, while swimming laps with my sister, I see JP beside the pool. It’s about 10 in the morning, a glorious, sunny day. These are the kinds of days that make you understand why people spend the winter months here in Naples, Floria. JP is tanning, half asleep, and doesn’t notice us for the first 25 minutes we’re there. Then he stands up and marches toward the stairs of the pool, studying a huge thermometer stuck on a wall between a sign that says “Paradise Found” and another that says “Here we salt margaritas, not sidewalks.” Having examined the thermometer for a few seconds, he turns toward the pool and shouts, “There used to be a clock here!” and demands to know the time.

I tell this to my mom an hour later. “He’s right,” she says. “The clock used to be there.”

I had visited Florida once before. It was 2011, and my ex-wife’s family had a timeshare in Saint Augustine, along the Atlantic coast. It struck me as an awful place. The apartment my in-laws owned one-twelfth of was in a block of brick buildings very similar to the place they lived in Ottawa, although in fairness the shrubbery was pretty different. The whole city of Saint Augustine was built in long, straight, boring lines—highways intersecting highways, all box stores and strip malls and miniputt courses and chain restaurants repeating in a dull, comfortable pattern. You were never more than a mile from any of them, or the liquor store, or the beach, or the nearest gun range. Saint Augustine is meant to be the oldest settlement in the United States, so it seemed fitting that it was a mediocre grid filled with average things, as far from greatness as can be.

During the trip in 2011, I met very few Americans, and even less Floridians. The condo complex was filled with mostly grey-haired Canadians. They swarmed the pools in the hottest parts of the afternoon, pink-skinned and freckled, noses red and blistering. They drank beer and yelled about the hockey scores. They said “oops sorry” when they passed within 10 feet of you in the parking lot or along the beach, that uniquely Canadian greeting.

My ex-family filled their Florida home with the familiar objects of their Canada home. We drove down with a minivan full of canned goods, pots and pans, tablecloths, homemade wine, chair coverings, doilies, golf clubs, dried pasta, fresh pasta, and enough clothing to dress several families. They also filled their home with the rest of their family. The Florida Month was not so much a suggestion as a birthright. Each of my ex-wife’s siblings was expected to join the vacation for at least a week, and dutifully obliged. Some drove, others flew, but all arrived.

It seemed to me that this should have felt like a chore to all involved, but instead it was an elation. The time spent as a family somewhere warm, surrounded by golf courses and Sam’s Clubs and that seemingly infinite stretch of beach—this was a thing they lived for, cherished, shared. They had dinner together each night, something home-cooked and delicious from the stores of food slogged 3,000 kilometers, and they shared memories and laughed long into the night. Again, normal life transplanted. It was all so wholesome and, even though I resisted the feeling, kind of lovely. They tried to include me, of course, but I always felt like an outsider, a transplant from a more dysfunctional family into this outwardly perfect one.

Also on that trip, my ex and I escaped her family to go see mine. We rented a car and drove across the state to Naples, where my aunt and uncle have lived for 40 years. The drive showed Saint Augustine to be the rule and not the exception to Floridian urban planning. A bend in a road in Florida is a novelty. It can be seen coming for miles, for there are no hills, just flat stretches of pavement bisecting brown waterways presumably filled with deadly creatures. From Saint Augustine to Naples, you drive through orange groves and at one point bypass Orlando (another curve!). You see firework stands and gas stations and little else. And then you arrive in Naples, which is much the same as Saint Augustine, though facing west.

My uncle John and aunt Heather moved to Naples in the late 1980s from Guelph, Canada, where they had been living in the same suburban development as my uncle Scott and aunt Su. Scott and John are my mom’s older brothers—Scott is four years older and John six. In the late 80s, we were also living in Guelph, a cute university town then that was beginning to show the first signs of becoming what it is today, a commuter hub for Toronto. My parents craved a quieter place and bought the ridiculous hobby farm in Bancroft where I grew up, and Scott and his family followed a year and a half later to the same rural region. Heather, the only one of any of that generation of adults to have a single, stable career for her entire life, moved to Naples to continue her work as a nurse. She and John are two of the smartest and funniest people anyone could hope to meet, which, in addition to the perpetual good weather in Naples, I believe accounts for the gravitational pull that their move to the US had on the entire family. Scott and Su starting going most winters during school break, driving with their three kids in their wood-paneled minivan to spend Christmases or March Breaks in Naples. My cousins would return with tales of alligators in swimming pools, of holes-in-one at the ubiquitous miniputt courses, of sleeping outside in shorts on Christmas Eve. It drove my siblings and I wild with jealousy.

My own immediate family hesitated about (or were forced to avoid planning for) Florida, my parents citing financial difficulties, which was true and not true at once. I remember being given a choice when I was 10 or 11 years old about what to do with the money I had saved between my paper route, working with my dad during summers, and saving all the birthday money I’d received for years. I had a couple of hundred dollars in a Kawartha Credit Union My First Saving’s Account, and could either play hockey or go to Florida to visit the family for Christmas. I don’t remember what I chose (I think hockey?), but it’s immaterial. The family used the money to pay bills. Or my dad stole it to buy beer. I’ll never know.

Either way, my first trip to see the Naples family was delayed until 2011. (I also never learned to play hockey.) On that visit, Naples itself left no great impression on me—I vaguely remember visiting its only tourist destination, Tin City, and hearing that it had a zoo—but the trip was important for confirming a long-held suspicion: I didn’t really care for my in-laws. My own family was chaotic, but hilarious. They were deeply generous with their limited means. They ate badly and never exercised and drove everywhere, but it didn’t matter. They were the echo chamber in which my sense of humour and personality formed, but they were more than that too. They were, and remain, the safest space. You could express your views around them and expect to be either applauded or widely (though warmly) ridiculed, but never quietly judged or gossiped about.

The happiness that my in-laws wore was the thinnest of veneers. Each night, retiring to their separate rooms, the “Can you believe she said that” conversations would begin. Grudges would metastasize. The next morning around coffee, smiles would be faked, positions entrenched. This was a family in which homosexuality was scoffed at despite one of my ex’s cousins being married to and raising children with another woman. It was one in which mental health was a joke about a short bus despite another of the cousins having committed suicide as a teenager. There was real love in there somewhere, but so mingled with gossip and scorn as to become obscure.

I visited Naples at a time when I needed reminding that not all families were this way. I spent a few goofy days with my hilarious, big-hearted family, and driving back to Saint Augustine was able to easily conclude this trip that was one of the final nails in the coffin of an unworkable marriage. A few months later, I was gone.

It’s hard to say exactly when my mom became a snowbird. She and her partner bought their first place in Florida in 2012, but had been visiting for a few years before that. She had always been close with her brothers, yet my sense is that she needed to wait until she was free of her abusive marriage and that my dad was dead with his ashes kind of scattered to really embrace and enjoy her relationship with her own family. Or maybe she just needed to be retired with some free time and extra cash. Whatever set her free, the life she found waiting for her in Florida seems custom made for her.

The Naples Mobile Home Park, then:

Driving up Tamiami Trail, you’d never know it was there. There are motels on either side of the road that are beige and off-white, respectively, the kind of ignorable low-lying places called things like Garden Suites or Oceanside Bungalows despite a noted lack of garden and oceans—and, for that matter, bungalows. This section of Tamiami Trail seems comprised entirely of strip malls, some with stores selling lawn furniture or boating supplies, but most catering to South Florida’s aging/aged population: hearing aid centers, vision centers, pharmacies, mobility equipment shops, and a smattering of family-run restaurants with very cheap happy hours.

Naples Mobile Home Park sits behind one such strip mall (donut shop, hearing aids, eyeglasses, lawn furniture) and is accessed through the parking lot of the Garden Suites or through a side road I always miss the turn for. It is three longish streets abutted on one end with a pond that forms a natural divide between the park and a neighbourhood of what can only be described as real houses. Beside the pond sits the heated saltwater pool and the event center/community center, where every night some park member hosts social events—Euchre, bingo, beanbag baseball (more on this to come), live music, billiards tournaments. The center has long tables for all kinds of activities, and a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle is always being assembled on the table nearest the front door. There’s a fridge full of beer and wine and some bottles of water, but it’s mostly beer and wine. The center has huge windows covered in screens to keep the bugs out and let the breeze through, and is a pleasant temperature almost always.

Two of the three longish streets of the Naples Mobile Home Park are lined with tidy mobile homes, which are not at all what I thought mobile homes were. For one, they are immobile, held to the ground with giant clips and spikes to stop them blowing away in one of Florida’s frequent storms. Secondly, they don’t look as though they were ever mobile, except when a truck drove them here and dropped them in place. Many have decks built around them, making them further immobile, and almost all have a lanai attached, a kind of screened-in outdoor area where people spent most of their time in Florida, just watching people go by and waving and making knowing jokes and laughing. The third longish street has what I would classify as mobile homes: RVs and “fifth wheels” that are also anchored in place, but that sometimes drive away. These are all in row C of the park, and one of these bloated trailers is where my mom and her partner first lived when they moved in. She’s in row B now, a matter of no small pride. Her home looks out at the side road that I always miss the turn for, and at some of the trailers and fifth wheels. If she leans out her front door, she can see her old home, sitting there immobile, a little ways down the street.

There are no shortages of Adirondack chairs or American flags on these houses, both of which would lend the park a kind of backwoods menace were the natural surroundings not so beautiful. There are tall palm trees framing the streets, and wispy clouds that turn a harmless deep pink each evening, giving the place the look of an 80s album cover, a warm glow that seems like it will last forever.

From about 4 p.m. onwards, life is lived outdoors at the Naples Mobile Home Park. There’s a series of little rituals you could set your watch to. Around 4:15, a couple from northern Ontario in their late 60s or early 70s will ride past on a special tricycle for old people that has a giant basket on the back and sometimes another on the front. This couple put their dog in the front basket and ride around the park’s streets several times between 4 and 5 p.m., she stopping frequently to chat with anyone who says hello and he holding a can of beer in one hand and a smoldering Churchill cigar in the other. Other couples ride or walk past, everyone staying active in their own way as the heat of the afternoon begins to burn off. This is the time to squeeze in exercise, because dinners are early here and evening activities begin around 7 p.m.

I develop a few favourite passersby, of course.

There’s Denise, the youngest resident in the park, who at 50 looks 40, so by contrast with everyone else looks even younger. Denise is loud, funny, cheerful, and has always been somewhere that the other residents have only thought about going to. She’s full of energy and her husband is skiing in Quebec or something and her kids are at college maybe and they are either the makers of or heavy consumers of a blueberry wine. She certainly has a lot of it.

There’s Marilyn, a semi-retired schoolteacher from Queens. It takes about four seconds of conversation with Marilyn to know that she’s from New York and that she’s a teacher, as she mentions both facts frequently. Marilyn talks in a kind of uninterrupted stream of consciousness about what she’s been up to that day, and if something really important has happened she takes a seat and adopts an even more serious expression, leaning in to brush a shoulder or knee to emphasize when something really important happened. These qualities would be irritating in a less warm and less interesting person, but something about the way she speaks—it’s definitely the New York accent—and the way she makes fun of herself constantly makes her the most entertaining person in the park. She’s also the chief umpire of beanbag baseball, so you need to stay on her good side.

There’s Rick, mom’s deeply tanned and sarcastic neighbour. I think he’s almost 80, but he’s fit the way that some men always are, especially those who work outside or with their hands. Even at his age, he’ll ride down to Naples from his home in Pennsylvania on his motorbike in a single day (18 hours, minimal breaks, glad when his wife Marlene flies so he doesn’t need to stop so often). Rick has installed a full bar in his lanai, and Marlene is said to make a mean margarita. Every morning, Rick delivers his newspaper to mom’s front door wearing his bathrobe. He has a joke or a bad pun for every occasion. On the live music nights and also in every single inning of beanbag baseball, he does this joke where he stands up and starts to dance and then pretends to pull a muscle in his back and screams in pain and hobbles away, and he’s so good at it that every time he does it, I forget that he’s acting and worry that we need to call an ambulance or something. He and Marlene contract COVID while I’m there, so she never gets to prove that she makes a mean margarita. After beanbag baseball when I compliment her and tell her she’s the finest beanbag baseball scorekeeper I’d ever met, she grabs my arm and whispers, “Well I could just take you home and gobble you up.” I like her almost as much as I like Rick. 

Then there’s George, one of the fifth-wheel residents. He’s from New Brunswick and is nearly 90 years old. He’s tall and broad-shouldered and strong in the special way people from New Brunswick seem to be even in their very old age. Every day around 5 p.m., when he’s done his exercise walk, he stops by for a chat in both French and English. He buys a 24-pack of beer every Friday and allows himself to drink that over the weekend, but refuses any offers of drinks from Monday to Thursday. He is always smiling, always curious and courteous, always happy. He needs to fly back to Canada in the middle of his stay in Naples to re-engage his insurance, a special kind of modern corporate cruelty that means Canadians over a certain age aren’t allowed to leave their home province for more than 30 days at a time, but this doesn’t phase George. This is just life for George, a quick inconvenience to endure in order to enjoy the things he loves: being warm, chatting with the neighbours, playing music. On music night, George plays guitar and fiddle with the dexterity of someone a quarter of his age. He is the absolute model for aging well.

There are obviously less incredible people, poorer role models. But it warms me and fills me with a filial pride to see that the good ones gravitate towards my mom. Good people finding good people, out here in the swamps.

Okay, let’s talk about beanbag baseball.

It’s kind of what it sounds like, but it’s also nothing like what it sounds like. If you have a concept of baseball in your mind, let it go. It’s no use to use here. But if you know what beanbags are, that’s a solid enough start.

Baseball is a sport typically played by teams of at least nine people. It’s typically played outdoors, in a space that’s basically green but also brown in places and with some white dots that indicate process. It’s usually played by large men with huge arms and a hankerin’ for tobacco. There are wooden sticks and balls involved.

Whereas baseball has beanbags.

It may not have been invented at the Naples Mobile Home Park, but it seems to have been perfected here. This normally pleasant place loses all sense of decorum and respect on Sunday nights, when we all gather in the community hall, an airy building beside the pool. Everyone arrives to the community center building as usual, which means carrying a bag filled with beer or wine or, best, both. (My sister and I arrive dual-equipped.) But instead of the usual layout of a sort of conference room enlivened only by the thrall of a jigsaw puzzle off to one side, the room is dynamically transformed. All the tables have been pushed to one side and there are two long lines of folding chairs leading to a board propped at a 60 degree angle with various holes cut in it, all labelled with things from baseball. There are three chairs arranged around the board. The holes on said board say stuff like “out” and “HR” and “1B” and it becomes clear that this is an object at which to pelt bean bags.

I keep wondering who moved everything around? Who ever does the physical labour here? It must be George.

There’s a long table that runs perpendicular to the chairs where the “umpires” sit, a term I use with extreme looseness here. The umpires are Marilyn and Marlene and a woman I don’t know and whose name I never catch, but she’s of the ilk of the others: mid-60s or -70s or -80s (these are a for-all-intents-and-purposes catchall here) and wrinkly and tanned and pleasant and flirtatious. Upon entering, we are obliged to choose a playing card from a deck sitting on the table. I choose a black card and so does my sister, so we are on a team. Others file in and choose cards, and before long both teams are more-than-full. There’s hilarious pre-game banter and trash talk that precedes a completely outrageous sport. That should be in quotes, really. “Sport.”

The sport (“sport”) works like this: the teams, arranged on rows of chairs, take turn throwing bean bags at the board labelled with baseball terminology. Each thrower, or I guess “batter,” gets three bags to hit any-old-hole, and wherever their bag lands first is their turn. If you throw a bag into a hold labelled “out,” you’re out. If you land on “1B,” that’s a base hit and you have to sit in the first chair that’s arranged beside the board. If someone is already in that chair, they move to the next one, like going around the bases. If you land on “HR,” you have to run around and touch all three chairs and then come back to a line of tape that has been temporarily affixed to the floor that is also the line from which you throw the beanbags. That’s a home run, baby. It’s kind of like baseball, but adjusted for geriatrics who have spent the day hydrating with Pabst Blue Ribbon. Like baseball, but easy.

Or it seems like so it seems for about 9 seconds. In truth, it’s a violently contested affair. These sweet old ladies, who make up 90% of the teams, are as vicious as they are well-practiced. Most of them can hit the “HR” spot with their eyes closed, as they quickly and happily demonstrate. Each time someone hits any spot on the board, the whole room erupts in extasy, and the person (old lady) who threw the beanbag dances and screams and runs around the room with such a vigor that belies their 60/70/80 years.

Things get aggressive rapidly. A homerun from the other team is met with jeers from our team, and the homerun hitter waltzes past our chairs giving everyone these annoying thumbs-down raspberries and actually jumping and dancing and where-the-hell-did-that-energy-come-froming and laughing right in our shocked faces. There’s something remarkable about the way people move after a great throw. They float across the floor. They lock eyes with you to taunt you while floating. My own mother, on the other team, runs—positively sprints—past her own children when she nails a HR, which happens frequently. I haven’t seen her move this quickly in about a decade. (I want to say two decades, but in truth can’t remember a time I saw my mom actually run.)

Our team tries to respond with likewise jeers, but we know we’re beaten as soon as the first inning has passed. There’s no respite. We play nine innings and lose by about 12,000 runs, which is both humiliating and so hilarious that it ceases to be humiliating.

Which is kind of the lesson here, really.

I guess I’m afraid of aging out of relevance. Not that I have any particular relevance in a broad sense; I’m far from a pillar of any society. Broadly, though, we all hope we matter somehow. We want to be important in little ways. We want someone to call us when they need help, or when they have something they need to get off their chests. I personally take tremendous pleasure being of some kind of use to the people I love, the people in my family, the gang of quirky weirdos I have collected and call my best friends, those I care about in some way. I worry that when I’m older no one will depend on me for anything, and I’ll just be some guy who likes video games and who no one calls or messages about the important stuff.

There’s something deeply reassuring about seeing the communities that my mom and her brothers have built here. A lot of my apprehension about her decision to retire to Florida comes from the world “Florida,” from all of the well-trod stereotypes about the place, but comes too from my ignorant supposition that it was a mediocre choice. What imagination resides within the decision to just, I don’t know, go to Florida for the winters? It felt inadequate for someone like her, who’s curious and fun and funny. It felt like settling. But another, probably bigger part, of what I worried about for her were my own fears of becoming useless. I needn’t have worried.

Her decision to live here was no mediocre choice. It was an active choice to surround herself with her people, with her own quirky weirdos. It’s a life with enough structure to feel constantly supported (Bingo nights, thrift-shopping ladies-only lunches, billiard tournaments, bake offs, big community dinners) and free enough to not feel overwhelmed. The community is big enough to ignore the people who aren’t that interesting, and small enough to form lasting and deep friendships with a special few.

And isn’t that kind of what we all need, at least eventually? I wrote the first part of this story from Florida, surrounded by that warmth. I’ve written the last parts from Barcelona, where I have lived for a couple of years, and where I have just this year started to realize that I still haven’t found that thing my mom has found. This is a too-big city with a too-small community, despite the ease with which it’s possible to meet new people here. It’s diverse and interesting, the weather is often perfect, the food is wonderful and cheap, alcohol is essentially free. There are often good, nice, smart people around. But the longer I stayed, the more I yearned for my people, a community of goofballs always with a quip ready and who are generous with their time and their emotions.

For a brief moment I considered forming a Barcelona Beanbag Baseball league, but the alliteration was too much so I had to abandon the idea.

For people of a certain age, who grew up in a certain part of the world, the specter of nuclear war always loomed large. In small-town Canada in the 1980s, at least, this was understood as fact.

My parents were born a few years after the end of the Second World War, and spent their youths in public schools where nuclear bomb drills were, they claimed, common. Like my generation knowing “don’t drink and drive” and “stranger danger” and “only you can prevent forest fires” by rote, my parents grew up with “duck and cover,” which is frankly awful advice for avoiding a nuclear Armageddon. My father—for whom it was a virtue to prove that his life had been more difficult than ours, than anyone’s—missed few opportunities to remind us of how easy we had it, how a fire drill was nothing really compared to the whirr of the air raid siren, the throwing yourself to the ground, the crawling under your ridiculous school desk for safety, the burying your head between your knees and hoping this wasn’t the real one. He also had a penchant for getting his kids Christmas presents from the dump and screaming at his wife all night, so six of one, grain of salt etc.

Still, North American baby boomers grew up in a world in which mutually assured destruction was a monthly—if not daily—worry. Pop culture obsessed about the bomb for decades. Dr. Strangelove, The Day After, these were but the merest satirizations and fictionalizations, an easy mental leap from the oft-repeated promise and terror of the arms race. Growing up in the total calm of deep backwoods Ontario, I struggled to understand the concept of destruction on a large scale. I assumed the bombs would just kind of … miss? Our town had nothing of interest even to its residents, so the idea that it could be a strategic target was laughable. That our tiny farm, a million miles from a pointless town a million miles from the nearest city, would be on any radar was absurd. There was nothing to be afraid of and what the hell was a nuclear bomb anyway?

And then I learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The story of the bombs that were dropped in 1945 requires no retelling here, because we all know it off by heart: world-ending, era-busting, paradigm-shifting, unspeakable, very-much-speakable, all that. It was told to me a thousand times or more, varyingly specific or vague, but all tellings leaving a single lasting impression of the complete destruction of two small Japanese cities.

So when I visited Nagasaki, I was confused by its being so very alive. Japanese cities can be drab, a consequence of 1950s reconstruction efforts (let’s not forget that before the nuclear bombs, the US effectively destroyed most Japanese cities with heinous firebombing campaigns; everything wooden was burned, and Kyoto and its citizens were spared only by a passing fancy that General McArthur had been stuck by the city’s beauty during peacetime). Many of those firebombed places are grey and concrete and on perfect grid plans and alive in a perfunctory sort of way, people going about their lives—sometimes with eagerness but usually, from the outside view, with a kind of duty to complete a checklist; the enthusiasm of a talented accountant or a mediocre musician.

It’s an obvious and slightly stupid thing to say that Nagasaki felt so alive because I associated it with death. It’s also a true thing, which is inconvenient. When Erin mentioned that she wanted to do a day trip to Nagasaki, a strange dry lump formed in my throat. It was part fear, part daftness. I didn’t want to be radiated and I didn’t know how solemn I was supposed to act. At the time, I had never been to any place with serious radiation (Nagasaki doesn’t have this) nor anywhere that was historically and/or culturally significant because of a mass murder, so I forgive younger me for that initial reaction. I’m not bragging when I say I am more familiar with those situations now, nor proud when I say I still have no idea how you’re meant to behave in them.

But about that first time:

Nagasaki sits in this lush little armpit in the southwestern corner of Kyushu (the world’s 37th-largest island, don’t forget). I’ve neglected to mention how green Kyushu is, all volcanic soil and rainforest and mist hanging low in the winter mornings. I take this somewhat for granted now, having visited jungles and frowned at all their awful bugs. But this was a first-in-the-world-temperate-climate-that-is-green-all-year sort of place, and I’m sure I spent the morning drive saying “Look at how green that is!” and “It’s so misty!” until Erin turned up the music.

We approached Nagasaki from the east, on winding roads that offered only glimpses of the seaside city. That low hanging mist made progress slow but pleasant. There’s something about the way a drive that fights the weather heightens the expectation of the destination, adding a sense of reward to a pre-made plan. We’d left early in the morning, possibly in the dark. It felt early. The occasional glances at a fabled place were tantalizing. Finally in Japan I would see a place I had heard of, 36 hours in Tokyo notwithstanding. This was probably what travel was supposed to be about, right?

We must have parked the car somewhere outside of the centre, and I have a faint memory of Erin wanting to show off the ingenuity of the Japanese by parking in one of the country’s bewildering vertical parking lots. You drive your tiny car onto a tiny metal circle that sits in a hole in the wall, you punch some buttons on a control panel or you ask a man in a uniform to do this for you, and then the circle spins and your car disappears upward into a building to be stored, kind of like a reverse vending machine. I know these places exist in Japan. I cannot say with any degree of certainty if we used one that day. Either way, we walked and did not drive around Nagasaki.

I remember long, covered streets and steaming piles of food. I remember it rained for a while, and the reason for the covered streets became obvious. I remember trying takoyaki, little dough balls stuffed with chopped up octopus and covered in mayonnaise and barbeque sauce and fish flakes. We walked, we ate, we stopped at an arcade and played Mario Kart—the kind where you sit in a car with real pedals and a steering wheel and yell like children. I won handily. We played some kind of arcade game that was like Dance Dance Revolution but for traditional Japanese drumming. Erin won handily. We probably bought a beer from a vending machine and revelled in the freedom to drink it while walking around. Eventually, we headed to the Peace Park.

Careful readers will have noted by now that this Faulty Memory entry is so far low on memory and high on fault. The whole point of the series that I invented is that I can forget stuff or make things up and hide conveniently behind the conceit of “faulty memory,” but the truth of it is I remember quite a lot of this Japan trip, as though it happened last week. The reason I can’t summon the minutia of that morning in Nagasaki with the same crystal clarity as the rest of the trip is that the afternoon in Nagasaki imprinted itself so firmly on my mind that the things around the edges have been completely blown away.

A little outside of the center of the city, a tram silently glides up the slight hill toward what appears to be an average park: trees, benches, some buildings in the middle. The tram’s automated speaker system announces the stop for the Peace Park, and we step out into a warm and sunny street. I forget, as always, that Japan is left-hand drive, and look the wrong way before stepping off the tram. A cyclist swerves around me, looking annoyed but too polite to do anything but nod apologetically. I nod back and mumble a perfunctory sumimasen, looking around to take in the busy street.

Blandly or enthusiastically, people were going about their lives—business people walking down the street with hands full of restaurant take-out packages, or teenagers cutting class to smoke cheeky cigarettes in little alleyways, or the postman in his perfectly pressed uniform hurrying along. It didn’t exactly hum, but there was a kind of low-level persistent background noise to the street that would later strike me as an act of profound defiance.

Approaching the entrance to the Peace Park—though there are many entrances; it’s a circular park without gates—I noticed that the ground changed. Gone were the smooth, ruthlessly clean sidewalks. Surrounding the entire park was a kind of wave of cement, rising parabolically up from the street about 12 inches in a smooth, convex curved line. The effect was that all visitors are asked to make a deliberate step up into the park, minor but notable. Viewed from any point along the circular edge, the effect was sudden and terrifying: this whole memorial was raised up on plinth designed to look like the base of a mushroom cloud, only sliced off in a huge flat circle at an early point in the explosive metaphor, just a foot off the ground. The start, then the immediate end. The bloom, then nothing.  

I walked deeper into the park, towards the centre, where some kind of pointy buildings stood in a small, open area. The ground was mostly dirt, strange for Japan with its ubiquitous paved urban outdoor spaces. There were stone monuments and statues and what looked like fountains scattered here and there, but my eyes were drawn to the buildings and I ignored these for now. As I drew closer to the buildings, their form became clearer. They appeared to be two pillars, one black and one red, roughly the same height. The black pillar was of that deep, impenetrable shade that war memorials favour, which made sense, this being one such memorial. The red pillar was made of hundred-year old bricks. It was a piece of church.

Okay, it’s actually a corner of a cathedral. As I got closer, I could see that the red pillar stood on the edge of a series of concentric circles that had been laid into the ground, and that the black memorial stood in their centre on another raised plinth shaped like the base of a mushroom cloud. This, I realized with an instantaneous heart-sinking desperation, was ground zero.

The monument stood perfectly level with the top of the remaining corner of what I later learned had been the Urakami Cathedral, a Catholic church built in 1895. The Urakami Valley had been home to some munitions factories and other heavy industry, which in the twisted logic of the Second World War made it a viable target. Reports vary of the destruction, of course, but it’s generally understood that of the thousands (and maybe more than 100,000) deaths on August 9, 1945, only 150 were military service-people, and that includes a handful of allied prisoners of war. The rest were civilians.

Urakami Cathedral was, of course, almost completely obliterated. There are photos online of the remains of the church in the days following the bomb: only small sections of two walls standing, joined at the corner that remains in the Peace Park to this day. The huge steeple lay toppled, collapsed inward. The photos look fake to me, partly because the current site is so pristine and partly because the destruction is surreal. After the cleanup—how many months or years must that have taken, in the long shadow of the thousands of deaths—all that remained was this stubborn corner, a sad bit of an archway reaching skyward to nothing.

Earlier I talked about not knowing how to behave in such places, in the face of the such destruction. The truth is, you don’t need much prompting. The weight of the situation takes over and you become subdued, solemn, introspective. You act slowly, deliberately. You say little. When thoughtfully and tastefully designed, a memorial has that power over you. Your only responsibility is to allow it.

Moving very slowly, I began to step away from the church and took in the rest of the park. I became gradually aware of two important features of the Peace Park. It was utterly silent, and it was covered in paper birds.

The absence of sound is a difficult thing to notice. You can’t be immediately certain if a moment is simply quiet or if something is missing. No one else was in the center of the park, and neither Erin nor I were speaking or making much noise. But it felt like the place, the specific spot, was devoid of sound. I’m not sure if it felt this way because this little clearing was far from the street, or if it was designed to be shielded from the bustling neighbourhood sounds by well-positioned hedges and strategic stands of trees. Or if it was something more permanent, as though all life on this specific spot had been scrubbed from the earth for eternity, told never to return. Or if I was assuming this last thing, and had sort of blocked out any noise to match that expectation. Who knows? Listen, it was really quiet.

A less difficult thing to notice is a million tiny paper cranes, yet I didn’t see these for the longest time. It wasn’t until I stepped up toward the black pillar that I noticed a splash of colour along its base. There was a pinkish—maybe a heavily faded red—line running along the memorial. I walked around the side a bit to be able to see more, and the reddy-pink turned kind of orange, then yellow. Coming closer, I realized that what looked like a line was in fact a string of origami cranes. And then I realized that there wasn’t just one string, there were dozens, all laid around the base of the memorial like flowers on a grave. And then I realized that there were dozens of dozens of strings, laid not just on the memorial but on any surface with enough space for dozens of strings of colourful origami cranes. The cement flower boxes: full of paper cranes. The weird little statue gardens: full of paper cranes. Everywhere. You get it.

Erin was—if not exactly unmoved or unimpressed by this—aware that it was a thing that happens in Japan. Every year around this time (New Year), students in every elementary school in the country set about making crane wreaths to sent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are millions of them. It’s not unusual for the children of a nation to spend a day at school making a thing out of paper as a commemoration. Older Canadians have all traced our hands on different colours of construction paper, cut out those hand shapes with safety scissors, and used glue sticks to make a monstrous turkey-shaped object to take home to our unimpressed parents around Thanksgiving. I have it on good authority that this still occurs in France. Savages!

But this was something different, something that required an uncomfortable amount of thought and emotional processing. Rather than red-brown-orange-yellow turkeys, all of Japan’s schoolchildren had delicately folded origami to very specifically not take home. Think of how this must have come to pass: a teacher in formal clothing and not-entirely-sensible shoes explained to a gang of kids how to patiently fold and refold edges until a form began to take shape. Then the cranes must have been collected and painstakingly threaded onto a long string. Then packed up and shipped across the country to only two locations. Then someone—local schoolchildren, reportedly—brought them here and placed them on every available surface. This was national mourning in paper format, a collective plea to not forget those unspeakable days in the summer of 1945.’

The cranes were utterly haunting, more than the blown-up church or the deeply dark memorial, more than the mushroom cloud shape of everything. I don’t know how long I stood there, hit by the weight of it all. I don’t remember at which point we went to see some giant, vaguely brutalist blue statue of a disrobed Greek philosopher or something that punctured the mood. At some point we got back on the tram, got the car back from the vending machine, and headed back to Kunimi. On the heated floor that night, I dreamt of paper birds and fallen church bells and distant screaming.

The next day, Erin drove me to Fukuoka to catch the high-speed hydrofoil ferry to Busan, Korea. I left Japan completely addicted to the feeling of getting comfortably lost somewhere new, to being confused and happy in equal parts, to hearing sounds and smelling smells that I hadn’t known existed, to laughing with a stranger to diffuse the awkwardness of a language barrier, to being here, wherever here was. 

***

Read about Tokyo in part one of Faulty Memory Japan: Adrift in the World’s Largest City.

Read about Kyushu in part two of Faulty Memory Japan: Graveyards and Heated Floors.

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Japan is a country of islands. Look it up. I did.

The second-smallest of the four main islands is Kyushu. This makes it the third-largest island in Japan, and, according to Wikipedia, the 37th-largest island in the world. Also according to Wikipedia, it is slightly larger than Taiwan, to give you a sense of scale.

Kyushu is home to about 12 million people, 1.6 million of whom live in Fukuoka, a city famous in my family as being the place you catch the fast ferry to South Korea, as was my eventual goal for here. The primary goal was to visit my friend Erin, who had been the managing editor at the University of Ottawa newspaper while I was its editor-in-chief and who was now teaching English in a tiny town called Kunimi, which at the time I believed called “Kumini,” a typo I evidently make to this day. The closest airport to Kunimi/Kumini is in Nagasaki City, which is where Erin was waiting for me on a rainy December night with her car. (Editor’s note: a comically small car.)

As often happens, Erin and I have since fallen out of touch for the most part. Life took her to France sometime after Japan, where she lived with another university friend in Nice. She went back to Canada for a while, I think, then back to Japan and now lives in Thailand. We follow one another on Instagram, and I’m always happy to see what dog she is dogsitting in a given month, or which pantsuit she is trying on and considering buying. She is brilliant, possesses both a gift for languages and for sarcasm, has a kind of Ontarian cynicism she was born with and wears proudly, and is a wonderful cook and an exceptional host, though only the last of these was relevant for my purposes today.

Her being in Japan was half of the justification for my trip. She left Ottawa a few months before me, and her leaving was an important trigger in my leaving. She was in the JET program, one of those acronyms that was clearly written before words were found to stand for it (Japan Exchange and Teaching) because it sounds like a cool, familiar word and is fun to say. There were interviews at consulates, and then you were assigned a random school somewhere in Japan in what the JET website proclaims promotes “grass-roots international exchange between Japan and other nations.” In this case, it promoted high-school students in a rural area with a variety of opportunities to laugh at a foreign teacher and all the friends she invited to visit. Or, in the case of one student, an opportunity to scream, drop the musical instrument she was carrying on the way to class, and run in the other direction. As far as I know, this “exchange” involves no teachers or students from Japan going to other countries, and so it’s one of those famous one-way exchanges.

Erin was living the impossible for me. When she entered JET, I was dragging out a long-term relationship with my high-school girlfriend, who I was living with in Ottawa along with another woman from our home town. Life was stagnant. We watched endless re-runs of Friends and thought ourselves sophisticated by hosting dinner parties in our large apartment, where I subjected people to early Joanna Newsom albums to appear edgy and artistic. The relationship was a few years past its best-before date. I remember stating my determination to visit Erin in Japan as soon as was possible at one of these dinner parties, and my girlfriend laughed in my face. “Who cares what Erin is up to?” she shrieked. “Who cares about Japan?” Something became dislodged in me, almost instantly. Here was a choice to be made: this group of judgemental shut-ins on their paths to suburban lives or friends who had an interest not just beyond their apartment door, their neighbourhood, but beyond their own country’s borders.

Visiting Erin in Japan was a defiance, a deliberate choice to live a life more interesting, more open, freer than the one I had. Loading my too-heavy suitcases into her ridiculous car was a triumph. I had won.

For those who are interested, this is what winning looks like: being in the smallest car on a dark, rainy road, with a driver who shouts “Oops!” when changing lanes or missing an exit. Winning looks like making a U-turn on the freeway (“Oops!” as a car honks and passes angrily). It looks like jungle roads on the side of an active volcano, like a narrow driveway across rice paddies reflecting under a suddenly clear night sky and a full moon, like a small house in a field, like Erin unlocking the door to her home and the sudden warmth of the underfloor heating hitting your tired face, like dropping onto a tatami to drink beer with delicious snacks bought from the 7-11, like laughing past midnight and sleeping deeply in a room with a sliding door made of rice paper like in a goddamn samurai movie.

I hadn’t really understood why Erin had bought a car after only a few weeks of living in Japan. I remember she had emailed me photos of it or maybe posted them on Facebook, and I’d laughed and thought, how ridiculous. Both the car itself, it coming up just past Erin’s hips, and the need for a car in a country like Japan.

In the morning, the need became clearer. Kunimi is a watery farmland, the houses set amongst low hills and greyish-brownish rice fields stretching in all directions. Erin’s driveway, by the light of day, was revealed to be a harrowing strip of concrete barely six feet wide and raised above water, which partly explained the narrowness of her car. My daylight, I admired her driving skills in a way that I hadn’t the previous night.

She went to work, leaving me to explore. I went for a walk, but it was a half an hour before I saw other people. On a rise above the tiny town sat a small temple with a cemetery of perfectly polished stones clustered around it. An obese elderly couple tended to the graves and eyed me with suspicion as I approached the temple, their size and the scrutiny both unusual. I poked around among the tombstones, marvelling at the orderliness that seemed endemic in Japan, even here in rural Kyushu. Some of the graves were adorned with fresh flowers in identical vases either side of the headstone, and once the elderly groundskeepers had grown bored of my presence, they set about swapping out dying flowers for fresh ones. Dead flowers lay in neat piles in the rows between the graves. The woman was picking them up delicately, so as not to scatter any petals. Did they do this every day? What else did they do? What was their life, beyond this tiny plot beside the modest temple in the smoky hills above a remote town? I idled happily, taking advantage of a pair of vending machines to have a hot can of coffee (the single simplest pleasure in the world, as far as I’m concerned) and to watch this tidy couple work. Eventually, the pair acrobatically arranged themselves onto a scooter and, bowing as they drove away from the temple, left me alone in this quiet, beautiful place. I spent a long while there, watching cars pass in the town below, watching the smoke from incense rise then hang in the muggy air. Was this the first moment I had ever had like this, alone and content in a strange place? Twenty-four hours earlier I had been marvelling at all of the Tommy Lee Jones posters around a small public square in Tokyo, and the week before had been freezing in a small bedroom in Ottawa. The world seemed so huge and so small, all possible and within reach and all so far away all at once.

I don’t know how long I stayed, but know with certainty that the reason I eventually left was that the ever-growing rumble in my stomach became impossible to ignore. I needed to eat. I walked slowly down toward the town, admiring more neatness and tidiness. I saw few people, but those I saw bowed politely and shyly. One braved a timid wave. I was so charmed by it all that I began to feel invincible, the kind of traveller’s high that comes with feeling in control. This was easy. I was crushing this.

The confidence lasted all of 10 minutes, when, firmly in the center—if such a place existed—of Kunimi, I tried to find food in a place where no English is spoken and where no English appears on signs. The first challenge was to decipher what was a restaurant. In Japanese cities, restaurants are often marked with huge glass displays featuring plastic recreations of every dish offered within. This also makes translation as simple as bringing the waiter out to the street and pointing at the thing you wanted to eat, a language trick I employed often the first few times I visited Japan. But in Kunimi, I saw no plastic moulds of food. I saw no signs with a list of words and corresponding prices. I saw nothing, in short. Every building looked the same.

The night before, we had stopped at the 7/11 on the way home, and Erin had selected a range of steamed buns from a heated cabinet beside the cash register to go with onigiri from the refrigerator section. It seemed too easy to repeat on my first full day alone in Asia, so I plodded on, tracing the few streets for any sign of food. Kunimi has a train station even more modest than its temple—famously part of a route featuring Japan’s shortest train, an adorable yellow single carriage that trudges up and down this quiet stretch of coast. Train stations in Japan famously have fabulous food, but the Kunimi station had no kiosk. It did, mercifully, have a very Japanese answer to my hunger: a fried chicken vending machine. The mechanics of this baffle me to this day, and while I would love to recount a story of a steaming hot plate of karaage and some delicious, crispy fries emerging from this machine, the truth is that the machine was out of order. Or possibly in Kumamoto, and not in Kunimi at all. You can never trust what you read on the Internet.

I wandered for another half an hour, and signalled my surrender by eating a near-identical 7/11 feast of steamed buns and onigiri, then and wandered back to Erin’s house to have my first adventure in a Japanese bathroom.

I’m not going to talk too much about Japanese bathrooms, as I feel these are deserving of their own separate story but also because I’ve just finished reading David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and have decided no one needs to ever write about the pleasures of a good bathroom again. The cannon of English literature has an admittedly small section of Toilet Writing, but Foster Wallace’s descriptions of the water pressure and vacuum toilets on a luxury Caribbean cruise are sufficiently wonderful for an entire culture’s output on the subject.

Still, Japanese bathrooms! Ignore the high-tech toilet with its various cleaning hoses and built-in dryer. Ignore the heated seat and the white noise machine (or music player, in high-end department stores). If we’re going to talk about the toilet, let us say only this: it’s made of the same slightly course plastic material that the sink, the floor, the shower cabinet—the whole damn bathroom—is made of. This is the magic of a Japanese bathroom: the weird coarse plastic. Everything is designed to get entirely soaked every time you shower. There’s a door between the shower area and toilet area in most Japanese bathrooms, unless they are truly, truly microscopic, but the door is kind of decorative as it gets soaked and then you open it and the other room gets soaked too. Some Japanese bathrooms have a kind of tall, skinny bathtub that’s like a plunge pool for one person and that takes about two hours to fill with water, and then when it does fill you have to sit with your knees tucked up to your chin, which is kind of fun because you feel like a giant. The tub of course overflows and spills, but it doesn’t matter because the plastic floor has a drain in it and in half an hour everything is somehow dry. This is engineering and design at their pinnacles. This is genius to be celebrated.

The hostel in Tokyo, catering more to foreign tourists, had standard changing-room-style shower and toilets in little cubicles, like an any drab office building. Erin’s toilet was my personal waterpark. And if she’s reading this today, I’d just like to say to her: no it wasn’t. I was very clean and respectful of it the entire time.

Having successfully drenched half of Erin’s home, feeling sated on convenience-store grub, I felt fully prepared for my first cultural interaction in Japan: dinner at Erin’s student’s house.

I say “student,” but Erin’s student was a woman in her late 20s or early 30s, a fellow teacher (probably) who was taking private English lessons from Erin. To say they weren’t exactly working is to be extremely generous. But the student, who for the purpose of this story shall be called Himiko, had mastered the art of non-verbal communication, not to mentioned speaking rapidly in Japanese and assuming we’d just figure out what she meant, which for the most part we managed to do.

On the drive to Himiko’s house—on second thought, I think her name was Kimiko—Erin coached me on a single phrase in Japanese: hajimemashite (“nice to meet you” or “thanks for having me in your home”). It took me the better part of an hour to memorize these six syllables, and infinite courage to summon them up upon entering Kimiko’s house.

An absolute truth about east Asian cultures—having lived in South Korea and China, and travelled extensively in Japan—is that a little linguistic effort goes a very long way. Upon stumbling through my hajimemashite, Kimiko raised a hand to cover her mouth and screamed. She stumbled over as though shot, or stricken with sudden stomach cramps. She gasped, recovered her composure, and proclaimed that I spoke perfect Japanese. Erin laughed in my face, and Kimiko looked slightly betrayed and embarrassed. But the job was done, the goodwill earned, and we carried on.

(On a recent trip to China, I memorized the Chinese equivalent of hajimemashite, and each time I said it, Kimiko was there. She was there in the bowled-over businessman, in the shocked cousin twice removed, in the child whose mind had simply been blown. The smiles and laughs, the slaps on the back, the sly smile that follow the badly uttered phrase, the honest attempt, are priceless.)

My supply of Japanese phrases was now exhausted, and it was over to Kimiko to drive conversation. She had a her fair share of nice to meet yous up her sleeve, and was proud to ask Erin how have she been doing, before we began a tour of her lovely home. Like Erin’s, the house was a traditional Japanese design, lots of dark-wood-and-rice-paper sliding doors, floor heat blasting. Each stop of this tour involved a lot of talking, and even more hilarious gesturing. For example, what did this button do? This was not a question asked by either Erin nor myself, but by Kimiko. She would point at some complex panel on the wall with 15 labels in Japanese and then shrug her shoulders and pull a quizzical expression like Charlie Chaplin, then proceed to pantomime the result of pushing said button, all the while narrating with almost-whispered Japanese and not the supposedly excellent English she’d been learning. She showed us a couple of rooms. She showed us the kitchen. She showed us the bathroom, where I had to pretend to be unimpressed. Before long, we settled onto the floor, sitting cross-legged around a low table, while Kimiko spoiled us with home-cooked food.

The pattern of the week was set. Erin would leave me to explore the tiny town in the mornings while she taught, then in the afternoons we’d meet and go on silly adventures to nearby towns. One afternoon, I met her at her school and she gave me a tour: this is the hallway, this is a classroom, here are some lockers, this way to the music room. On that last leg, a group of students were coming down the hall lugging instrument cases—big things, brass section I think—and chatting quietly amongst themselves.

A girl bowed nervously at Erin and then made eye contact with me, promptly screamed, threw her instrument to the ground, and turned and ran the other direction. The other students burst out laughing, bowed a bit, dropped some nice-to-meet-yous and shuffled away in slippered feet. No one picked up the instrument case, which we must assume remains in that hallway to this day.

“That’ll happen,” offered Erin by way of explanation. “Let’s go look at a castle!”

Of all the lessons I learned on this first-ever trip, this is perhaps the most valuable, the one that prepared me for years of living in Asia and the Middle East, and for a life-away-from-home in general. The strange, often hilarious, sometimes offensive reaction to the way you look and how you stand quietly smiling or wave or whatever, hasn’t stopped happening since. It could be so easy to get bogged down in negative feeling because of it, but the easier and more fun thing to do is to laugh about it and then go do something fun and new. Go have a look at the castle.

Shimamura has a castle, so we went to look at that for a bit. Another day we went for a hike on a steaming, stinky volcano, then ate eggs that were cooked in the sulphur pools and sat around in a public foot bath in a town square. We took a ferry to another castle and ate fried chicken out of a vending machine (finally!). We took Japan’s shortest train, one gleaming car that putters along the coast. And finally, by way of a farewell, we went to Nagasaki.

Read about Tokyo in part one of Faulty Memory Japan: Adrift in the World’s Largest City.

Despair when reading part three of the series: That Bell No Longer Tolls.

I don’t especially care what happens to my body when I die. Funerals, burials, wakes, cremations: these are events for the mourning, though I do hope you all mourn. And, listen, has it always been my dream that my funeral involves—nay, centers around—my body being fired out of a cannon at whoever is considered to be my mortal enemy at the time? Of course. Do I plan to enshrine this wish into a legal document? I mean… maybe? Probably? Probably.

No. No, I don’t. Whoever is in charge of disposing of my no-longer-useful body is entitled to decide that it would be more sensible to burn it and keep the ashes in a tiny, ornate jar in a place of some significance to them and other living people, or to put me in a box and bury that box in some place and mark it with a stone so they could come by whenever they want and drop off some flowers and say a few things privately to themselves. Whatever the outcome, well, I don’t plan to make much of a fuss about that. I’ll be dead. I really won’t mind. But, also let’s not forget the whole cannon idea, okay? Should the executor of my will be reading this now, all I’m saying is don’t rule it out. Google “cannon rentals” at the very least, then—and I can’t be clearer about this—the choice is yours.  

Yet there remains an ideal that we consider from time to time during our life about what should happen to us when we die. Meaning, more precisely, what will happen to our body when we are no longer using it. I suppose that for religious people this is easy, and for spiritual people less easy but still a lot easier than I find it. For those with beliefs, there’s a certainty (or at least a hedged bet) that some tiny part of our soul lingers there in the shell, and that knowing its whereabouts is somehow helpful in case they need to keep tabs on the bits that didn’t go to an after/next life. But the trouble with not believing in any form of religion or even any kind of half-assed spirituality is that there’s an ever-present certainty that when it’s over, it’s really over.          

Still, the ideal. The romance. There’s something intoxicating about meeting with lawyers and finalizing outrageous demands about what to do with our leftovers on the mortal coil. People ask all kinds of favours of those they leave behind, from the outrageous (see previous, re: cannon) to the sweetly banal (“bury me in the family plot beside my husband, who died 25 years before me and who represents but a quarter of the life I lived”). If I were to sit with lawyers and pay to have my desire for the treatment of my corpse finalized, I would come up with a spectacular request, like this:

Cremate me, and scatter my ashes at some pretty place of your choosing that you think with this very specific and limited caveat: it must be in a particularly pretty place that you think I’d like, somewhere along the Lycian Way.

When we start the hike, the sun is already high in the sky, blazing unrelentingly on the hills around Fethiye, in southern Turkey. There is no tree cover on the first section of the trail, which rises gently out of a non-descript car park and up toward Babadağ, the magnificent peak towering high above the perfect crescent beach at Ölüdeniz. Only five minutes into a three-day trek, we are sweating profusely. All around us, day-tripping families skip ahead up the road in beautiful summer dresses and high heels, in casual suits and dress shoes, while over-burdened long-haul hikers slouch slowly upwards along the path.

Our journey begins (and continues, as this will show) with a touch of arrogance. Having just been handed a packet of directions and trial notes from a grumpy driver called Mustafa at the trailhead of the Lycian Way, we promptly discard them. We’ll figure it out, obviously, and throw the notes into the car. We laugh. We start the hike. At the first fork in the trail, we take a wrong turn and nearly both sprain our ankles scrambling down a hill on the way back to the path.

We: I’ve convinced my friend Sarah—an American who I met while working for Alibaba in China and a dedicated long-distance hiker who is systematically conquering the length of Appalachian Trail on her weekends—to ignore a nagging foot injury to walk with me from Ölüdeniz to somewhere near the small town of Alinca, only 40 kilometres away. It’s October 2020, in that weird bubble that occurred in the first year of the pandemic. After the first wave, when numbers were falling around the world, we all high-fived and borders opened again and travel was encouraged. I took the first flight out of Canada, where I’d been living in my mom’s basement, to Portugal for a few weeks and then onto Turkey to meet Sarah. She used Turkey as a starting point for months of pandemic remote-working, ending this particular trip in Kyrgyzstan many months later. By the end of 2020, the world has shut down again, as you probably recall.

In the build-up to the trip, we contemplated turning the three-day hike a two-day affair, scoffing at the short distances each day—further arrogance!—but after only an hour on the Lycian Way, we’re glad to be humbled. The Lycian Way is not an experience to rush. It’s difficult walking, often along high ridges on uneven footing with certain death awaiting an importune stumble, but the reason not to rush is simpler than that: this is one of the world’s great walks, stunning view unfolding after breathtaking view, with each step revealing a new vantage point at which to stare, mouth agape, at the unbelievable beauty of the Turquoise Coast.

The Lycian Way is an ancient footpath, but has only recently been established as a coherent walking route. In the 1990s, a British historian called Kate Clow, who in all of the literature surrounding the Lycian Way is always somewhat disparagingly referred to as an “amateur historian,” researched the old byways used to connect early settlements in the area and painstakingly marked the 580-kilometre route between Ölüdeniz and Antalya. The trail is a slapdash collection of markings—sometimes having official signs labelled “Likya Yolu” pointing the distances along roads (which the trail frequently makes use of), and other times just white, red, and/or yellow bits of paint on rocks deep in the thick, green woods. In general except when leaving the parking lot, the trail is well-trod and obvious, but there are passages where a GPS is helpful, especially when coming off roads to rejoin the wilder parts of the path. Rock cairns mark the way at particular crossroads to simplify the choice, but the usual approach we took was to keep the sea on one side and the mountains on the other.

It takes us less than an hour to establish our pattern for the next three days: walking a few minutes, then turning around to say “wow that’s pretty!,” stopping for water and a few photos, and then making slow progress for another few minutes before repeating the water and photo break. Any other approach would be inappropriate. The trial rises gradually out of the small town of Ovacik, little more than a string of restaurants and shops beneath the official starting point of the Lycian Way—marked with a not-very-official-looking banner sponsored by the local rotary club—along a cobblestone road. Where the cobbles end, the trail becomes loose gravel, but is still busy with couples dressed more appropriately for a nice dinner than an arduous climb, and it isn’t for a few hundred meters that it becomes clear this is a serious hike. The crowds thin after the first viewpoint, where the crescent beach of Ölüdeniz forms the perfect backdrop for the photo hunters, the nice-dinner seekers. Beyond this, everyone we encounter is decked out in proper gear, carrying huge packs and hiking poles, presumably with an eye to completing all 30+ days of the hike. We’re dressed in running clothes and wearing matching $10 backpacks from Decathlon, and easily pass the serious hikers, unencumbered as we are by tents and a month’s worth of clothing. Before long, we have the trail completely to ourselves.

The climb isn’t easy. Over the first five kilometres, we ascend nearly one kilometre vertically, mostly on the old foot-and-mule path that has been worn by millennia of human and animal traffic, by the rain and wind. At times, the path opens out to the ruins of an ancient house, a disused cistern, an open-air museum of sheer human endeavour to inhabit such an out-of-reach part of the world. We stand in these very old places, sipping water and scratching our heads at the audacity of building anything so far above the sea, so far from the nearest place, roasting in the still-hot October sun, while above us thrill-seekers in parasails zip down from the peak of Babadağ to the eventual soft landing on the white sand of the beach far below. It’s a surreal scene, these modern Instagram-hungry tourists—having been carted up the mountain in four-wheel-drive trucks—drifting above the ancient settlements that were built stone-by-heavy-stone when this was a flourishing collection of Lycian settlements.

By mid-day, the gorgeous sweeping views of the beach are behind us, and the trail cuts inland and reveals another side of Turkey, that of rabid development, a desperation for foreign funds to curb an inflation crisis that will outlast the pandemic. We turn a corner and are suddenly hiking on a new road that runs up to the paragliding start point at Babadağ, busy with construction vehicles and their accompanying dust. Half-finished villas line the way. We have a quick lunch in a shady grove before misidentifying a forest road as the correct way down to Kabak. We walk for half an hour in thick trees, a switchback road heading back toward the sea. The air is fresh, the scent of the trees intoxicating. Yet something feels wrong; we’re going too far down. We push on, the maps and trail descriptions back in the car, but our GPS showing us as trail-adjacent, and we plod on until the road gives way to a dirt trail that gives way to a tree and a boulder. Backtracking is gruelling, hilarious, and teaches us nothing. An hour later, we’re back on a paved road, heading in the right direction, feeling hungry and happy.

The path/road is dotted with shops serving gözleme—a wonderful crispy pancake stuffed with potatoes, cheese, meat, and local herbs—and tea and fresh fruit juices. From the teashops, the trail leads mercifully (and correctly, this time) downward, passing through olive groves, slowly heading back toward the coast. The air is cooler, the scenes bizarre. At one point, our only company is a herd of four mangy goats huddled in the shade beneath a lone farmhouse blaring Anatolian pop music, a discarded armchair and rusted motorbike stacked beside the path, and not another soul in sight. The path carries on steeply downward. Bees are everywhere, great buzzing masses of them taking up residence on the cisterns where clear mountain water flows freely. Then, suddenly, the trail once again meets a road, and we are in the tidy mountain town of Faralya, with its dozen guesthouses and restaurants perched atop the intimidating Butterfly Valley.

We settle easily into our pansion for the night, eating a delicious home-cooked meal and drinking slightly spoiled Turkish wine, watching the sun set on the sharp cliffs far below. We sleep in simple wooden cabins with a view to the sea. I sleep deeply.

The next day begins with a kind of lazy riddle. The notes on the Lycian Way (which we’ve been reunited with through Sarah’s boyfriend, who drove the car to the first night’s hotel) suggest that there are two ways out of Faralya: a steep climb that those with vertigo or a fear of heights should avoid, or a walk down the road to well past the steep parts, rejoining the trail to descend to Aktas Beach. Both are mysteriously described as tranquil and moderately difficult. We opt for moderately difficult tranquillity with a climb and the views. This is the only day that all three of us will be walking together. It’s the shortest day (only 6km), so we start casually and late, letting all the other trekkers get a head start so we can have the trail mostly to ourselves. That plan backfires twice, though not immediately.

The trail starts on the upper rim of Butterfly Valley, one of Turkey’s vaunted tourist gems. It’s one of those natural places for which there are not enough adjectives, a narrow beach at the bottom of a steep and rocky valley, that famous turquoise water made to look even more blue against the grey and brown of the sharp and shadowy hills around it. The trail leads us a few hundred feet above the valley, and the deep bay is already, at 11 am, home to half a dozen party boats from Fethiye, their ridiculous music blaring and clearly audible from a kilometre away. Above us, the sheer cliffs of Babadag’s imposing southern face block most of the sun. There’s a light breeze off the sea. It’s utterly surreal, the warm air and vast mountains and Mambo Number Five ricocheting all around while Sarah takes photos at the cliff’s edge and her boyfriend slowly works his way through a pomegranate that he carries in one hand for the first 90 minutes of the trek. He’s a weird dude.

This last detail becomes more notable and hilarious as the trail gets steeper. Heading inland, away from the valley, the walk becomes the well-advertised steep climb, first up a loose rock surface with the aid of a rope tied to a tree, then up nearly vertical steps in the rocks. Sarah and I climb using both hands to pull ourselves up; her boyfriend pauses every now and then for another mouthful of pomegranate, balancing masterfully while scaling the difficult pass with ease, always chomping on fruit.

Even so encumbered, we begin to pass the hikers who left earlier in the morning, one straggler at first and then, at the top of the rocky path, a group of Russians scattered on either side of the trail, soaked with sweat and breathing heavily, not a facemask in sight (remember, it’s the pandemic; facemasks were still a common sacrifice that we all agreed was necessary, even outdoors). This is about 2km, maybe less, from the starting point.

 Two more Russian hikers come to us, rushing out of the bushes, waving their hands furiously and then demanding directions, first in Turkish and then in English, to Aktas Beach. We hurriedly put our masks on (again, it was just kind of the done thing), a social cue completely lost on our inquisitors. “Not far,” I tell them, knowing no more than they did. They shake their heads violently in disagreement, and hold up two or three fingers to ask how many kilometres, and which direction. “Three,” I say, and point vaguely toward the sea. There’s only one path, so they’d probably figure it out eventually. We hurry past them and down to the beach.

Beach is a misnomer. Aktas is no more than a rocky point jutting out magnificently into the Mediterranean, with a jagged, stony shore on one side and, separated by enormous boulders, with huge, flat rocks sloping down to the water on the other. We choose the flatter half because it has fewer people and allowed for social distancing (remember?!) and all that, and spread out a packed lunch provided by our hotel on the rocks, where we are immediately set upon by gangs of hungry stray cats eager for a handout. (This is a fact of life even in remotest Turkey: when food is available, cats swarm.) The water is crystal clear and warm, and we linger in the sunshine, swimming and laughing until well after the other hikers are all gone. We are in no hurry to leave this serene spot. It’s only a couple of easy kilometres to the next hotel, and there may not be a better swimming spot in the world.

The cost of our lingering is having to pass the Russians again. We find them only a few hundred meters from the beach, once again out of breath and taking up the entire trail to recuperate, their packs laying in the bushes beside their splayed, miserable bodies. They demand to know the distance to Kabak, only to once again disagree with any estimates we give. Again, we hurry past, and enjoy the last hour on the trail in solitude, stopping frequently as each new vista is unveiled. Here, the coast is all old pine forests, interrupted occasionally by more rocky shores and olive groves, and each step towards Kabak, each corner turned, reveals another view that stuns and amazes us. Huge, steep mountains rise drastically out of a darkening sea, and the long grass has turned golden with the season and shimmers in the sunshine beneath the silvery leaves of the olive trees. Here, it is possible to imagine a world without humans, just the simple beauty of millions of years of the continents colliding, of slow and silent growth. The only reminder that people ever lived here is the fact that we are on an ancient byway between equally ancient villages, but it’s a faint trace left on much older things, and easily forgotten.

Eventually, the trail cuts inland once again, up a short and steep path, until we spill out on a dirt road in tiny Kabak, the last village on the coastal road out of Ölüdeniz. We stroll happily into the Kabak Armes, our hotel for the night.

The only other guest at the Kabak Armes is a Russian guy in his early 40s. He’s sitting at a pool-side bar at about 4 in the afternoon, wearing a bathing suit and an unbuttoned floral shirt. I don’t recognize him from the hike. Despite the time of day, the music from the bar is at what seems like full volume, a mix of early-90s hits that this lone patron dances passionately to, slipping his flipflops off and lettings his rail-thin body—that of either a lifelong labourer or a junkie—loose, all flapping arms and legs and feet. When the Macarena comes on, one of the Turkish women who works at the bar attempts to humour the Russian, doing her own lazy version of the dance from her chair, looking bored and miserable. Another of the owners looked at us pleadingly, clapping and dancing behind the bar in a way that urges both participation and rescue.

In these situations, at a remote hotel with an undeniable party-of-one mood, you have precisely two options: stick or twist. Dig in, fortify, and refuse to indulge the whims of a drunken traveller; or recognize that a moment is occurring that will likely only occur this one time, and leap in. Luckily, Sarah has enough twist for us both, and took to happily dancing around the bar in her bathing suit and towel, fulfilling the communal requirement to let loose while ordering a round of beers and dancing her way back to the table, and within half an hour the bar had returned to a kind of wonderful slumber—the music quiet and calm, the staff idly swiping away at their phones, and the three of us sipping beer and playing backgammon with what must be one of the best views in the world behind us.

Kabak sits in the armpit of one of a dozen such breathtaking valleys along this stretch of the Turquoise Coast. We got glimpses of its beauty on the 3-kilometre walk from Aktas Beach, but the full sweeping view of the bay isn’t really visible until you’re firmly in the town and perched on a terrace like that at the Kabak Armes. Beneath us, every colour of green competed to be greenest, the olive and fruit trees and the tall, wispy reeds all dancing in the late afternoon golden hue above the brilliant blue of the Mediterranean and the tree-covered hills, the jagged cliffs.

Later, over the simple dinner—included in the cost of lodging at most places along the Lycian Way—of soup, some freshly prepared mezze, even fresher bread, and grilled meat, the Russian reappears. He’s with a maybe-Turkish woman who we only see this once, and only for these five minutes. They sit down at the table beside ours, and he insists on shaking hands and not wearing a mask. I shake his hand and then liberally apply sanitizer, while he fist-bumps waves at Sarah and fist-bumps her boyfriend. He wants us to know he’s from Russia, and in telling us this reaches the outer limits of his English. Neither he nor his travelling companion touch a bit of their food; she soon disappears and he goes back to sit at the bar for a while, then he too is gone. We see him the next morning while we’re eating breakfast. He waves a friendly, though strained, good morning, and a few minutes later we see him walking back from the bar with an enormous glass of whisky and a beer. It’s 8:30 a.m.

It’s easy to imagine that the Russian is always here, leaning on the bar and demanding another whisky, always raging against the wind and his blood-alcohol level. He’s the textbook friendly local drunk, part of the furniture. Except he can’t be.

Like us, he’s probably only here for a night or two. It’s impossible to be here much longer. Kabak is nowhere near anything, not really. We walked two days to get here, and though there’s a road there’s not much reason to take it. There are prettier beaches, easier to get to. The party vibe here exists as a force of will, not as a natural feature of the place. This isn’t Paradise Found so much as Paradise Earned. Getting here was hard work, so finding an almost-empty hotel trying its best to create a Full Moon Party vibe and a leering lazy drunk is jarring.

No matter, as before long the music is turned down and the final call to prayer for the day sounds out in the distance, rattling down on the Kabak Armes from the town’s small mosque halfway up the mountain. The prayer echoes off the cliffs until this tinny invocation to god dissolves somewhere in the pitch black of the swelling sea.

The next day, our last on the trail on this trip, is the only truly difficult trekking we encounter. The first two days of the Lycian Way have been all awe-inspiring sights along the coast, always with the glimmer of the turquoise water off in the distance. There were tricky climbs and slippery descents, but being near the sea made these seem just part of an oceanside vacation. A hot, leisurely walk.

Not today. From Kabak, nearly at sea level, we must climb to the small, almost-nothing town of Alinca, somewhere over the cliffs that surround Kabak. The trail map indicates a serpentine, meandering escape from the deep valley, but in the heavy mist and gathering storm clouds, the peaks aren’t visible and any route through seems speculative at best.

We begin on the steep roads out of the village, heading up and up on switchbacks for almost two kilometres before the brickwork surface abruptly ends at a stone painted with the now-familiar red-and-white trail marking. Here, the path becomes rough and uneven, an old mule trail connecting the towns.

Who would have ever thought to try to find a way out of this valley, or sought a reason to? This lack of logic is partly what makes the Lycian Way so interesting. There is no reason for Kabak with its little beach and its sea connection to the other coastal towns to be connected in any way to Alinca and its rough hills and dusty olive groves. Yet they are connected, and by a totally improbable path.

Once on the mule trail, the path continues ever upwards, though more gently, hugging the sides of the mountains and passing through low, scrubby forests. An hour outside of Kabak, we round a bend and see black clouds lurking above. We hesitate. The path is already wet from the mist and the footing loose, and we don’t know what the landscape ahead looks like. Each step sees the forest growing thinner. We decided to wait beneath the trees for the weather to change. It does immediately, and for the worse—thunder cracks overhead and rain soaks the hills around us. But it passes quickly, and the skies look brighter, so we push on, and are glad to have carried on. The landscape is overwhelming: bare cliffs, hundreds of feet high, shoot skyward on either side of the narrow path. Still, olive trees and scraggly pines dot the trail, but each step up the path reveals more dizzying cliffs, hidden grottoes, faraway caves, and the most common wildlife spotted on the Lycian Way: grumpy Russians.

It’s the same group we’ve been following for three days. Sarah and I find them at the top of a small rise in their familiar positions: splayed on rocks, gasping for air, unsmiling and unfriendly. We say good morning, alerting them to our presence behind them, foolishly assuming this would persuade them to make room for us to pass on the narrow path in the midst of a pandemic. We put our masks on and stand at a distance, waiting. This social cue goes unnoticed. Instead, two of them approach, tapping their wrists and yelling “ALINKA?! ALINKA? HOW FAR?!”

“Three or four kilometres,” I tell them. They wag their heads no, and hold up four fingers. Four kilometres, then. They seem deeply irritated that we didn’t know the answer to their quiz, much like we didn’t know the previous day. They have mistaken us, perhaps, for tour guides, or at least for locals, and they assume that our presence on the trail is for their convenience. They huff back to a spot to sit down, stomping along the uneven path.

We push past them, wondering aloud to one another about their elective misery in doing this hike. None of them seems to be enjoying it, not even remotely, so scowling and unhappy they are each time we see them. To what end are they pursuing this difficult task so joylessly? Is this what a bucket list item looks like in the flesh? Or is this a peculiar Russian trait, a perpetual suffering needed to justify the eventual drunkenness at the hotel bar, which only sandblasts away enough of the suffering so they can face the next day? Sarah reminds me as we walk away that the only time we saw any of them smile in three days was when I slipped and nearly fell in front of them, which brought only smirks and mirthless laughter. Somewhere along the trail to Kabak, I’d seen one of them crumple a water bottle and check over his shoulder repeatedly to see if I was watching as he threw it down the mountain side instead of putting it into his empty-looking backpack. This simple act seems a perfect summary of whatever dark thing lurks in the core of this group: when the easy option is also the kindest, opt instead for the harder, crueller choice.

They are soon far below us on the track, and the unpleasant interruption is soon forgotten. The trail here begins to cross through dried creek beds and waterfalls that must be intense and terrifying in springtime. The rain from earlier has made the air thick with fog, sticky and hot, even at altitude, yet these river and creeks remain bone dry. We start a long series of switchbacks, following a stray dog along the path into a high rocky pass, where it waits for us and desperately drinks water from the palm of my hand. We pass hippies in sandals coming the other way, and think that Alinca must be close, but the hippies have fooled us with their casualness and it’s another three kilometers of laboured climbing through curiously landscaped olive groves and more dense pine forests before the first glimpses of the town come into view. There are false dawns of hope, little moments where the trail seems to level out or descend, only to creep back up again at the next bend. And all the while Kabak recedes in the distance down below.

Then, abruptly, the path becomes a road, with a skinny bull plodding around a muddy patch behind chain link fence to one side and small parking lot with a couple of dusty motorbikes on the other. Ahead lie two teahouses or restaurants, looking smoky and abandoned in the mid-day gloom. And older Turkish couple sits eating lunch over a low table. They wave and smile as we walk by. We have made it out of the valley.

For most, is the halfway point of day three on the Lycian Way. The route carries on for another eight kilometres to the lighthouse viewpoint above Yediburunlar—The Seven Capes—but this is the end of our road. Sarah’s boyfriend has driven the long way around from Kabak to pick us up, and from here we skip along to nearer the end of the Lycian Way, the beautiful seaside town of Kas. It’s a Monday, and we have jobs to check in with back home.

We sit at one of the roadside restaurants in Alinca for one last plate of goreme and shepherd’s salad, happily washing down the food with big steaming cups of sweet Turkish tea while we try to recap this abridged version of the hike. We vow to come back and do more, in similarly short bursts, down the years. We’ve only covered about 30 kilometres of trail, give or take a few kilometres’ worth of wrong turns, which accounts for just a little over 5 per cent of the entire trail. It’s barely a start.

But as a microcosm, it’s remarkable: the variation in the landscape, the friendliness of the locals, the tastiness of the food, the tiredness at the end of each day. To carry on like this would be heavenly: a slow walk across a beautiful part of the world, with only a vague idea of where to sleep for the night. Long days and short days, good and bad (though mostly good) weather. Days on the beach, days in the woods. Coming into a town near sunset and looking around for a bed and a hot meal, then waiting for the morning to decide if it’s time to move on or not. Then moving on, or not.

So, Tokyo then.

It’s December. It’s mid-afternoon and cloudy. What strength the sun had is already fading for the day. I’ve traded Ottawa’s snow for Tokyo’s half-hearted rain. More of an intermittent mist, really. The hostel I have booked is not quite downtown, but Tokyo is enormous and Narita Airport is nowhere near it. I have a train ticket booked, a gift from my friend Erin who I’m off to meet in a little over 24 hours. The train ticket and the hostel booking are the only things concrete, graspable. Everything else is impossible to understand.

For example: I did not know before arriving, as it was never made explicit in Mario Kart, that Japan is a left-hand drive country. As a consequence of its being a left-hand drive country, it’s a left-hand everything country. Escalators, travellators, staircases, sidewalks—they were all the wrong way around for me. Add to that the fact that I had learned zero words of Japanese, and I immediately realized I was in over my head. I couldn’t stop smiling.

There is no purer high than arriving in a new country for the first time. I thrive on the sense of bewilderment, the disillusions, the sudden clumsiness, the red-eyed, tired-brained decision-making process that somehow puts you on the correct train platform after a long-haul flight, waiting with your mountain of luggage to enter a new place. I still feel this way when arriving in a new country, nearly two decades after this first trip. I even feel this way when entering some places I’ve been countless times: Istanbul, Bangkok, Barcelona. If I ever stop feeling that way, I ask to be put out to pasture, or at least to be taken behind the shed and shot.

Beyond the first impression that Japan has accidentally put everything on the wrong side of the road, the overwhelming sense was of rigid, uptight orderliness. Every few feet on the train platforms, spaces were neatly labelled to indicate where commuters should stand, at which precise spot they would enter the train, and how far apart from each other these tasks should be performed. (This in the way-before-COVID era, no less.) Having never been the type to follow instructions written on floors or to take orders from stickers, I milled about the well-heeled, well-suited multitude on the platform, yawning and sweating, beaming and mystified.

The train pulled in at the precise second it was meant to and the Japanese Railway Ballet began. The train doors opened, a stream of identically dressed people shuffled orderly out, and two streams of different identical dressed people shuffled aboard. The only missteps in this perfect dance were performed by a bearded Canadian who didn’t know the choreography and dragged his giant bags aboard in a cloud of profanity. The train pulled away at the precise second it was meant to, and I slumped victoriously into an open seat, bags jammed as neatly as I could manage into a corner beside me.

Looking back, it’s easy to think that the next thing I did was pull my phone out of my pocket and check where I was going for the 12th time. Then I probably sent a few messages to friends and family, a few silly jokes and some pictures of some bizarre thing I’d seen in the airport, like a hot dog restaurant called AirDog or an adult dressed as a Pokemon handing out spa coupons. But this was 2006. I didn’t have a phone. I had a bright orange notebook with a few printed pages folded into the middle. I had a pen. I held both, not writing anything, but staring out the foggy window as Tokyo first began to reveal itself.

Are there jagged hills and endless, soggy rice paddies between Narita Airport and central Tokyo? There must be. There must be all manner of Oriental iconography along this path: the sweeping karst vistas under a full moon, the villagers hustling against nightfall and a strong wind that is determined to make quick work of the stacks of rice paper they carry over the old wooden bridge, everyone rushing home because of the distant ringing of the ceremonial gong. So wilful was my determination to be, at long last and for the first time, in Asia, that this is what I pictured then. It’s what I still picture now, looking back. Some visions are impossible to shake. But the truth is far more mundane and mystical in an everyday way that screams, “This is a new place and you don’t get to understand it!”

No, of course the approach to Tokyo isn’t an ancient Chinese painting or a Hokusai woodcut. It’s a quick sprint through drab Yokohama and then a smattering of suburbs glimpsed only briefly, at the infinite railway crosses that make up all Japanese cities. It was these, the railway crossings, that captivated me. Every 30 seconds, the train—and with it, my quickening entry into the world of international travel—bisected a thousand average lives just being blandly led. People waited in plastic raincoats atop bicycles, or huddled beneath clear umbrellas, their white shirts and plain ties and bored faces illuminated by the flashing red lights of the crossing signals. Through the misted window, they were woken spirits, some misshapen approximation of an office worker summoned to existence by Miyazaki’s paintbrush. Behind them, the streets were lit only by the glow of Japan’s ubiquitous vending machines, offering hot and cold beverages for a hundred yen, always casting that pale white light into any darkened spaces needing a reminder of civilization’s continued existence.

 So transfixed was I with the passing landscape that I failed to notice a woman sidle up and sit in the seat opposite me. This was a significant feat of ignorance, given the intensity with which she was attempting to make eye contact. She must have been in her late 40s, short and slim, dressed tidily and with her hair pulled into a neat, high ponytail. She probably wore a simple pantsuit and low heels, the uniform of all Japanese office-working women. The only thing remarkably un-Japanese about her was her determination to meet my eye. This now accomplished, she bowed and smiled in that perfect efficient way the Japanese have mastered, and then signaled with a subtle nod to the empty seat beside me. In fact, the whole bench beside me was empty, but I assume she meant the seat directly beside mine. I gestured far less subtly, a huge sweeping arm movement meant to indicate the seat’s general availability, and she burst into that uncomfortable giggle the Japanese have also mastered, ashamed at how blunt my offer to share a bench had been. Still, she accepted, and sat directly beside me, looking straight ahead instead of at me. It was thus that she spoke her first words to me:

“American?”

This was followed by more polite giggling, another apologetic bow.

“No, I’m Canadian. My name is Drew. Nice to meet you.” I followed this with a broad smile aimed at the side of her head.

“Hi,” she said. Or maybe, “Hai.” Both were appropriate responses. Another respectful bow. “I practice English with you.” This was not posed as a question. It was simply her stating what was about to happen.

The next 15 minutes passed very slowly. Our conversation covered such topics as meeting, it being nice to meet, the niceness of meeting, and how nice it was to, in fact, meet. Eventually, after passing through the fertile lands of Where Are You From and Do You Have a Family, we landed on an important topic: where will you go in Tokyo? I tried to explain by showing the name of the hostel, first in English (met with a blank stare, a head cocked slightly to the side, a sharp inhaling of breath) and then remembered I’d printed out the address in Japanese as well. This was met with exclamations of joy. There was, I think it transpired, a kind of good restaurant near my hostel. My language-exchange buddy, with sudden confidence, grabbed my notebook from my hands, took my pen, flipped to a random empty page and drew a map. In one corner she put a star indicating my hostel, and in the opposite corner she drew a bowl with an expertly drawn tempura shrimp sticking out the top. She tapped the shrimp bowl repeatedly with the end of my pen, saying, “Go here.” I said, “Sure.” She smiled, looked around the train carriage, then stood up and waved goodbye. I saw her walk a few seats away and sit back down. I could only see the back of her head, but read upon it a sense of pride, or at the very least weary satisfaction.

The notebook with the map and the drawing of the shrimp stayed with me years afterward, all my scribbled notes and diaries forced to navigate around that artefact of the first stranger who was kind enough to chat.

I have very limited experience with hostels. Most of my adult life has been spent travelling with partners, and even in the early, cheaper stages of travel, two people sharing the cost of a bad hotel always seemed preferable to sleeping in bunk beds in a room full of strangers. Prior to my trip to Japan, I had spent a few nights in hostels while driving across Canada with two friends, but those hostels were on the backstreets of smaller Canadian cities, and the three of us almost always had them entirely to ourselves.

I stayed in hotels on my first two solo trips, both of which were to Japan. Therefore, more than half of my experience with the hostel world has occurred in Japanese cities. By some transitive property or another, I believe this makes me an expert in Japanese hostels. My finding, as a Japanese hostel expert, is this:

Hostels in Japan are incredible.

They are mystifying and humiliating, ruthlessly clean, and like hostels (presumably) the world over, full of quirky weirdos: the loud Irish guys, drunk at dawn; the quiet, mousy American women smelling of patchouli; the shifty-eyed Russians in too-tight jeans, hands stuffed impossibly into tiny pockets; the snoring German. And in the case of my first hostel in Tokyo, the tall, handsome, energic Greek: Kostas.

Kostas was standing by the door of the hostel as I arrived, the 15-minute walk from the train station over pedestrian bridges and up colourful alleys having left me drenched with sweat, with aching arms and an unremovable smile. He laughed a little and smiled broadly, then without asking grabbed one of my bags and headed inside. I followed him up a narrow staircase to the second-floor, where a scowling middle-aged Japanese man took my passport and checked me in. “How many nights are you here?” This was Kostas. “I’m Kostas,” he added.

We shook hands, and he seemed crestfallen that I was only there for one night. “Then we have to go get a drink right now,” he said. He carried my bags up another flight of stairs and threw them onto a top bunk, then lead me back down the stairs to the street.

Everyone in Canada told me that I would get mugged every day on every trip I would ever take, and to always hide my valuables from view at all times when out and about. This seemed sage advice to someone who had never been anywhere, and so I wore—on the flight, on the train, and even now—a slim fanny pack that could tuck into my pants that contained a bit of yen and my passport and bank cards. I had been wearing it for more than 30 hours. It was chafing the skin on my stomach from walking. It was soaked with sweat. It was vile. I remember wearing a pair of baggy jeans very much en vogue in 2006, and based on file photos of the era was probably sporting some kind of graphic T-shirt under a ragged blazer I’d bought at a thrift shop for no more than five dollars. So attired, reeking fanny pack well-concealed on my person, I took my first steps into the Tokyo nightlife.

Kostas proved incredible company, the exact ideal of a one-day travel companion. He was fearless, spoke to everyone, always with that big grin plastered on his face. Our first stop was a bar run by the hostel, catering to foreigners with a Western idea of Japan. The cocktails had names like The Last Samurai and Land of the Rising Sun. Our second, third, and possibly fourth stops remain a mystery to me. I hadn’t slept and had barely eaten, and the Rising Suns hit hard. We walked, drank, compared notes on our concept of what Japan was supposed to feel like (X, Y, Z) versus what it did feel like (X, Y, Z, maybe A). We never did find that ramen restaurant with the tempura shrimp.

When I finally collapsed in my top bunk, slept came instantly. If this was travel, I was already hooked.

I learned three important lessons on this first day, all of which I still follow to this day. The first three commandments in Drew’s Travel Bible, or Drew’s Travel Exodus and/or Deuteronomy. Having now committed to this whole biblical bit, those lessons are as follows:

1. Thou shalt always speak to everyone.
2. Thou shalt always say yes to offers made kindly.
3. Thou shalt always stay up until it is your normal bedtime, no matter how tired you are and how badly you want to sleep, in order to defeat jet lag. 

This third commandment is the hardest to follow, but it’s a trick that works so please try it. It will leave you more able to succeed at the first and second commandments, which are more important.

The majority of people you meet while travelling are not trying to rip you off, or murder you, and the signs for these intentions are often easy to read. As an absolute rule, no one in Japan is trying to rip you off or murder you. In other countries, this may be more likely, but the odds are still long. (Parenthetically, I’ll later tell a story that proves that rules one and two should not be followed in all situations, but that exception only applies in Vietnam.) The risk of not talking to everyone who wants to talk to you, of not saying yes to the friendly but bizarre stranger on the train, to the smiling Greek, is a life led in frightened isolation, one in which you eat every meal in Tokyo at a Wendy’s or McDonald’s. Saying no means you’ll never spend a night laughing uncontrollably while drinking beer out of vending machines. Saying no means you’ll never learn what’s behind the door with the low-hanging curtains and the barrels of sake in the alley behind the train station. And what kind of life is that, not knowing what’s behind the door?

Read about Kyushu in part two of Faulty Memory Japan: Graveyards and Heated Floors.

Despair when reading part three of the series: That Bell No Longer Tolls.

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