in the land of smiles, starvation and sullen elephants

"... never would have thought I would buy an expensive smartphone just to get addicted to it, but this one was worth every cent! I have loads of apps already, just for travelling. Just a few touches and I can read about a city I want to visit, then book a cheap flight there and check in using the phone, as well as look for inexpensive food and accommodation ... Not to mention the currency converter and various dictionaries. Just having Spotify in the phone makes it worth the money." 

Came across the blog of a young Finnish girl, name of Tess, out backpacking alone in Thailand. Funny how it seems so EASY.

I was nineteen when I went to Thailand. It was like going to another planet. But then, that was the '90s ... I went there with a group of friends, and like Tess our plan was to stay a few months and volunteer for a charity organisation. Unlike Tess, I had never even been on a normal two-week vacation in Southeast Asia before - so common among Finns now - so I had no idea what to expect. Unlike Tess, none of us had a smartphone or a phone of any kind, not even a credit card - in order to make travel arrangements to another city, you went to a travel agency and used your traveller's cheques as payment. If you wanted to know something about the places you were visiting, you referred to your friend's dog-eared copy of the Lonely Planet's guidebook and hoped that the information was up to date.

There weren't even any Internet cafés yet, much less any Skype. When a scared and homesick teenager wanted to get in touch with her family, she had to go to one of the little shops that advertised "overseas calls", order a call at the counter and then wait by the phone until it was connected. (Collect call since it was so expensive.) Or she could write an old-fashioned letter and hope it didn't take much more than a week to reach Finland. Whenever one of us received a letter from home, we were so excited that we read it out loud, regardless of the fact that we were from different cities and didn't know each other's families at all. Everybody "oohed" and "aahed" at the news that somebody's little sister had performed in a school play or somebody's dog had got a new toy. We tried to comfort ourselves by listening to an old cassette tape with music from home.

We were all homesick. Thailand was lovely but too overwhelming. It was full of sun, people, strange bugs, an incomprehensible language and weird rules. Just taking a bus was a mystery as we didn't know where it would stop, what the fare was or how to get the driver to drop us off at the right place. Once, we jumped off a moving taxi ( of the open-back pick-up variety ) because the driver got mad and refused to let us off. The few Western food-places in existence were American ( Burger King, Swensen's, Dunkin' Donuts ) and seemed only slightly less alien to us than the hundreds of street stalls selling local fried rice.

We did weird things like talking to prostitutes (who only spoke three words of English), singing Christmas carols in sex bars and hiking for hours in the mountains to reach primitive villages. On these mountain expeditions, which sometimes lasted for three days each, we filled our water bottles in streams and just popped a purification pill in the bottle before drinking. In the same streams, we took our baths ( with our clothes on, out of respect for the local tradition ).

And we alternated between starving and being horribly sick to our stomachs.

And what an adventure it was:
* Sleeping in a huddle on the floor with six other girls to stay warm in a chilly mountain hut, with a water buffalo for a neighbour.
* Going to the toilet in the great outdoors.
* Trying to communicate with people without a common language.
* Riding an sullen elephant. Visiting crocodile farms and snake farms. Chasing cockroaches.
* Walking down dangerous back streets in a city at night.
* Sunbathing on white beaches.
* Singing a lot.
* Meeting a Buddhist monk.
* Seeing the sun rise over the mountains and the coffee plantations while driving down perilous mud paths.
* Eating chicken feet and condensed milk.
* Getting to know my weaknesses and learning to love my friends.
* Driving a motorcycle for the first time on my own. Riding a motorcycle with two other people on it, in the mad Bangkok traffic.
* Witnessing a violent assault on my friend.
* Walking along a beach at midnight, the surf caressing my bare feet, on Christmas Eve with a beautiful man.

Not to mention breaking up a fight between  a dog and a monkey  ( without contracting rabies ). Oh, the things you do for charity. Probably a good thing I didn't have a blog back then, like Tess. My mother would have fainted.

I don't think I envy Tess so much after all. With her blog, Skype and all-knowing smartphone, I'm sure she is missing out on that terrifying, dizzying, absolutely exhilarating feeling of being lost on an alien planet.