Flying Hobo Girl

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Our Biotruck made it around the world!!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-14804297

As far as errands go, stopping for gas is really pretty easy. In Oregon, where state law requires that an attendant dispense the gas, you just roll down your window and say Fill her up with regular and soon enough you’re driving cross-country. The pay off is huge considering the tiny effort you expend. Yet somehow this simple task can feel like a real nuisance.

But if I thought stopping for gas was pesky in my car, in the Biotruck it’s a Homeric ordeal.

First off we have to find a station that dispenses biodiesel. There aren’t that many. Selling biodiesel is a tough business, the domain of dogged dreamers and innovators, so unless you’re driving through certain idealist epicenters like northern California and Oregon, you can find yourself at a loss.

Then it has to be the right kind of biodiesel—not the stuff made from crops grown specifically for biodiesel, like imported palm oil. We don’t want our journey powered by valuable farmland and food resources. We are in the market for fuel made from waste cooking oil.

If that didn’t whittle the options enough, then we have to find someone who likes what we are doing enough to fill our tank for free in exchange for advertising on our bus. The Biotruck’s holding capacity is 300 gallons, so it’s a Big Ask. Andy picks up the phone and in 100 words or less must pitch our cause to the producer in a way that appeals to their adventure fantasies yet avoids stirring a bitter realization that while he/she is scraping grease traps all day in bib-overalls, we’re freeloading our way around the world.

Except to say free-loading is inaccurate. Sure we haven’t paid out any hard cash, but to get our fuel, we’ve made some compromises.

Stopping for gas in Kuala Lumpur, we got roped into a 3-way promotional gig with a biodiesel company and a 5-star “eco” hotel.  The concept sounded great over the phone: we’d park the Biotruck in front of the downtown high-rise hotel to attract attention. The TV news would come interview us, we’d wear the company T-Shirts, and the hotel would be visible in the background. Everyone wins.

But when we pulled the Biotruck into the circular drive in front of the lobby, the marketing director greeted us with a tense smile. Like two cyber lovers who court online only to realize face-to-face that they actually look nothing like their picture, it was a strained moment. The Biotruck with its rusty frame, cracked windshield, and wafty compost toilet was not exactly what they had in mind. But the disappointment was mutual. Their 5-star notions of “eco”–floors made of rice-husks, refillable shampoo bottles– did not make up for the sheer exorbitance the place.

Still, they followed through on their agreement to comp us a room for a couple of nights and so we abandoned our grimy-but-lovable Biotruck and on the 23^rd floor swaddled ourselves posh white towels and crisp sheets.  Andy leaned back and swiveled around on the leather black office chair like an entitled CEO, while I swam laps in the rooftop infinity pool like a trophy wife.

But the story doesn’t end there. The biodiesel company then offered to rebuild our truck into something shinier and more marketable. In exchange, we would become the company’s mascot. It was an attractive offer and we spent a lot of time in the lounge discussing the potentialities in view of the Patronas Towers during the hotel’s happy hour. But just as I was consigning myself to living in Kuala Lumpur forever, the deal fell through. We got our promised fuel and were happy to return to the Biotruck and resume our adventure.

It was a stop for gas that not only took a week, it almost rerouted our lives.

Last week we found a station in Temecula, California that fit our criteria. Promethean Biofuels agreed to full our tank for free so it was worth the detour. On arrival, we were directed to park in the recycling yard around back. There we waited amid the shattering sounds of dutiful home recyclers  hucking their glass jelly jars and beer bottles into the correct bins. An hour went by while I wrote, tidyed, up, and staved off an encroaching headache with a few deep breaths. Eventually, the manager Todd popped his head in the door with a huge smile.

He led us into the biodiesel plant. He was giddy to show us the facility–the filters, grease traps, gauges, and collectors. He explained in detail every step of the fuel-making process from collection to processing to dispensing. While he spoke, he held glass jars of fuel up to the lights and ogled them like pure honey This was all stuff I want to know—I’d grown long tired of referring all the techie questions to Andy–but despite Todd’s infectious enthusiasm, it was hard to absorb the information. My critical thinking faculty hadn’t felt this battered since high school chemistry.

My attention wandered. I brought it back. The shadows outside grew long while Todd launched into an extended explanation about energy efficiency–something about how ethanol and methanol would separate into biodiesel and glycerine all on their own, but to meet the current fuel demands, he has to add heat to accelerate the process. His point being that  humans-in-a-hurry mean that more energy must be expended to speed up what would otherwise happen naturally. I shifted my weight from leg to leg, practiced my bandha exercises, and nodded my head.

The sun was setting as we finished up a tour of the plant. Todd wheeled a barrel of fuel over to the Biotruck. Andy readied the hoses and tank.

Buggered!

 The fuel suction hose was broken. Fifteen minutes later he had it fixed and at last the Biotruck drank in 75 gallons of fuel.

It was clear that our plan of camping in the mountains that night was off, so when Todd’s wife arrived it made sense to take them to dinner. Wendolee was gorgeous, wore heels, and had an uncommon charm. I loved the fact that she was a Mexican singer and she was thrilled to meet the only gringa in America that listens to Vicente.Fernandez.

Together the four of us browsed the faux Wild West streets of Temecula looking for the right restaurant. Andy didn’t really care what we ate, but wanted a place with swinging saloon doors. We didn’t find the doors, but we did find a few spellbinding martinis that fueled the best nights any of us had had in a while. Before the night ended, Todd leaned forward.

You’re sitting with a bit of a star, you know. It turned out that Wendolee is a pretty famous popstar in Mexico and her latest album was a week away from being released on iTunes.

In the morning we’d wake up hung over and  look her up on You Tube. Sure enough, we’d been hanging out with a Big Star.  There she was, dancing and singing in a music video.

So when traveling in the Biotruck, this is stopping for gas thing is not a perfunctory five minute nuisance, We don’t just turn up at a station, say hand over the fuel buddy, and drive off to our intended destination. Getting gas is often multi-day affair that has us joking that the Biotruck is not just powered by wasted oil but also by wasted time.

Except it’s not wasted.  Sure we have to hunt down a station, plea our case, and drive out of our way. But we never know where it will lead us.  One moment we think we are just stopping for gas and the next we’re about to move to Kuala Lumpur for the rest of our lives. Or, we are topping off our tank and then suddenly laughing over martinis with a Mexican popstar and a  biodiesel maker  who helps you to realize just what a damn miracle fuel is.

These kinds of things never happen at Chevron.

Thanks and cheers to our great new friends Todd and Wendolee.

It was about a month ago that we pulled the Biotruck up to a gas station off the highway for the night. It was a perfunctory stop, determined by the encroaching darkness and our no-driving-after-sunset rule.

We ate a quick dinner and, feeling uninspired, laid down for sleep. About 30 minutes later, I heard loud music and peered out the bus window. In a field across the highway was a giant tarp enclosure. Wary of guidebook attractions, it’s usually these type of mysterious developments that make this expedition the idiosyncratic long strange trip that it is. I pulled on some clothes, and went across the road to investigate.

I rounded the tent in the dark, and soon could hear music and the unbounded cheers, laughs, and shrieks of children.  A row of vendors sold fishballs and kabobs, and tended spitting vats of fried bananas. I ducked past the ticket taker and stood at the tarpaulin doorway. Inside, the arena was flooded by a spotlight that seemed to carve a circumference of daytime in the black night. At its center, three majestic elephants lumbered down into to a kneeling position, each with several children straddled across its backs. The audience roared approval, and carnival music cranked into the sky from bad speakers. The elephants’ eyes glimmered in the light, sea-deep and a thousand leagues away.

I held my open palm in the air. I don’t know why. Something I do whenever I feel helpless.

A few years ago, I was asked to write a magazine article about the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. Though the Sanctuary is known as a happy place—a sort of pachyderm retirement home where 14 rescued elephants roam unbothered on 2,700 acres, the circumstances that prompted my story were grim.

One of the Sanctuary’s caretakers, Joanna, had worked with an elephant with the innocuous name of “Winkie” for over six years. But on one particular day she was performing an eye exam when Winkie knocked her down, stepped on her, and killed her instantly.

Joanna’s death was a devastating shock and prompted researchers to find an explanation. It was scientist Gay Bradshaw (of Oregon’s Applegate Valley) who pointed to the possibility of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Her theory was this: that Winkie’s violent outburst was a flashback, similar to what any war veteran might experience. Bradshaw’s reasoning added up: like a veteran, Winkie had a troubled past. Before arriving at the Sanctuary, she’d endured the torture of being kept as a zoo elephant—taken from her mother early and forced to endure years of confinement, harsh training techniques, and sensory deprivation.

The media caught on and everywhere articles popped up addressing the possibility of PTSD in elephants. Are we Driving Elephants Crazy? asked the New York Times.

Carol Buckely, the Sanctuary’s founder, was not surprised. She’d long known elephants to be hugely advanced and highly sensitive—the terrestrial equivalent of a whale.  They are extremely social, forming tight friendships and engaging in complex communication. Like humans, they experience an array of emotions from happiness to anger. They also mourn their dead.

My worldview has always accommodated the idea that animals are complex, emotional and more like us than not. Who hasn’t seen a dog look bored, excited, sad, or fearful?

For their insight, for their outspokenness, for their love of what is not-human, Buckely and Bradshaw fast became my heroines.

So, it was amazing in northern Thailand to run into Carol Buckely at the Elephant Nature Park outside of Chiang Mai. I was on as assignment writing about elephants again, and was interviewing Lek Chailert, a pixie-sized Thai woman who has been single-handedly changing the treatment of elephants in Thailand. Her 2000-acre refuge is home to over 34 rescued elephants.

Buckely was there performing elephant foot care and training one of the babies.  I sat on a hay bale and watched on as she taught the young elephant how to lift his foot for a veterinarian exam. I tentatively asked her how,  four years later, she was coming to terms with Joanna’s death.

She seemed resolved and upbeat. Horrible as it was, she explained, there have been some positive outcomes; the tragedy brought awareness to the abuses of zoos and circuses, and also reframed the way the public viewed elephants—appreciating more their complexity.

“If Joanna knew that her death was used in this way, she would be so pleased,” Buckely said.

We sat up late that night, and Carol shared stories of her own former circus days, the way she toured with her elephant Tarra. She told of the awakening she’d had when a spectator accused her of abusing Tarra by making her rollerskate. When the message sunk in, Buckely hung Tarra’s 50 lbs. skates up forever. Soon after, she purchased land in the subtropical banana belt of Tennessee to provide a refuge for abused zoo and circus elephants.

She is away from the Sanctuary now, and is making the best of her time by setting up elephant care centers in Asia. The hardest part of being in Asia is being separated from her elephants–especially Tarra, who she’s spent so many years of her life with.

A friend of mine did a mediation, she explained to all of us circled around the table. She said that in her meditation, Tarra told her that she could understand what I felt even when I spoke without moving my lips. A veterinarian at our table then started talking about plant-spirit medicine and the difficulty of practicing in a scientific world. Everyone at the table seemed rapt, including me I guess, because later Andy, ever the skeptic, would say you really seemed to eat that up.

Did I? I replied. I was surprised. Though I’ve always had a deep belief in Nature, I’ve been more than wary of woo-woo type spirituality. One Halloween I dressed as a New Age charlatan called “Frauda”–a costume that was borderline offensive in a town that’s home to Jean Housten, Neal Donald Walsh, and Ecstatic Dance.

Had I gotten all new-agey without even noticing it?

I walked back around the tent, raising up my hand and offering another one of my feeble blessings.  At the end the day, what left is there to do?

Did you know squid experience jealousy? I inquire whenever a friend raises a forkful of calamari to their lips. I yell at people who hit dogs, and have occasionally opened bird cages. Last year, hitchhiking along a remote Himalayan road, I waved off a rare ride when a truck crammed with stumbling water buffalo stopped to pick me up. These things have annoyed a lot people, but haven’t changed a single thing—not even in my own behavior. Like tonight, when I polished off a plate of cashew chicken.

I stepped back into the Biotruck in tears and crawled into bed. Andy was empathetic. Sometimes your reactions seem extreme, but I think if beings from another planet came down,  they would say see this and say,’ Christina is having the right reaction.’

I took that as a compliment and lapped up the validation. So many times, I’ve been told that I over-react—like when my grandpa and I put out a fishing line overnight and pulled up the bowed rod the next morning only to find we’d hooked a turtle. I was undone. Christina, you are too sensitive, said my grandmother.

I laid awake in the Biotruck bed. Please may humanity wake up I prayed to no one in particular, knowing that I was dealing with forces were probably too great to be stopped: the stream-roller of commerce, the deep-set traditions, the congenital cruelty.

Joanna, the trainer that died at the Sanctuary, had the same impulse to pray. Her father, Paul Burke, said his daughter often asked him to pray for the elephants. “She loved her girls.”

So, I keep doing it, raising my hand up, blessing things, feeling half-silly, but hoping  there is a little room left for some magic to happen, a collective awakening of the sort that Carol had when she hung up Tarra’s skates for the last time.

I don’t believe much in prayer, but I pray for elephants.

Eating is a sort of love of the world. If you can’t taste the joie de vive in a fresh peach, then your heart is hard. I’ve always taken my free-roaming appetite as a reflection my open-ness to experience. I want to try it all: from oysters to skinning dipping, from tzitziki sauce to sky diving, nothing is off limits. On the occasion that I do run into a hang up—as I once did with eggplant—I don’t blame the food, but chalk it up to some limitation in myself. My approach is to keep sampling the problem food until I “get it.” After enough Baba Ganoosh, and after so many eggplant burgers, I finally understood the purple orb and now cherish it in its many forms.

I’ve prided myself on being the Ultimate Omnivore, afraid of almost nothing. It’s all just protein, arranged into different shapes, I’d blithely tell myself, when confronted into a roasted guinea pig in Peru, or a boiled chicken foot in Nepal.

(Disclosure: I do retain a moderate aversion to canned black olives and crystallized ginger. Also: I have a couple of ethical hesitations with foie gras and squid, or anything from the highly emotional cephalopod family aka squid)

If eating is a love of the world, then being finicky, I’ve always thought, is a sort of rejection of the world. I’ve had little compassion for fussy eaters. Oh come on, I mutter, when someone throws a wrench into a dinner party with some dietary idiosyncrasy, pushing away a plate of a gorgeous bruschetta because they are allergic to gluten or decling a stuffed bell pepper because they don’t do nightshades.  Even if you do happen to derive a certain salutary benefit from avoiding this food or that, surely such inflexibility can kill you–if the inconvenienced cooks don’t kill you first.

I’ll never forget the shock of waking up one morning in college and opening the kitchen cupboard to be greeted by a handwritten note taped up by my roommate, who’d recently turned Fundamentalist Vegan and also happened to own all the pots and pans in the house.

Attention: Please refrain from cooking animal products in these skillets (btw, this includes eggs).

Wasn’t at least a weeks notice was in order?

In Asia, I’m now being put to the test. I have no problem gobbling up the pad thais and the peanuty papaya salads, but also being confronted daily by such an overwhelming amount of new food that I don’t have time to “get it.”  Indecipherable goo balls wrapped in banana leaves for breakfast? Cartoon panda heads floating in my soup? Torn up chunks of white bread soaked in green syrup and ice cubes for dessert? Normally a pleasure, now mealtimes are unnerving–like being blindfolded and shoved into a car and driven somewhere unfamiliar.

Thailand, I figured would be a cinch. I’m crazy about their chilis, their lemon grass.  So, I wasn’t at all mentally prepared for any disappointment. But in the south central part of the Gulf Coast, the mealtimes that I always looked forward to were starting to feel like trials. If there are different Geo-Culinary regions (I think I just made that word up) then it seems that we’d found Thailand’s Nebraska—a region of vast agricultural land punctuated by bad restaurants. There were curries all right, but they were not the coconutty numbers I loved so.Nothing, in fact,  seemed to resonate with my taste buds.  Again and again, I lifted pot lids only to be assaulted by a lethal smelling steam rising from the inscrutable entrees. Rotten fish? Spoiled meat?

Andy coaxed me into eating soups, but the bland bean sprout broths inspired no delight, adding up to about a scant 60 calories and just feeling like a lot of hard work.

With each missed meal, I became a bigger pain-in-the-ass, even more impossible to please, and more adamant in my hunger strike. I was starting to act like my mother on our trip to Italy, with her plaintive cries for the cold chocolate milk that was her morning habit back home. Chocolato Freddo? I begged the confused baristas on her behalf. Exhausted and resentful of her rigidity, I sternly broke the news: Mom, Nestle Quik Chocolate milk is Just Not Done in Italy.

I could see that same uncompassionate wariness building in Andy, as he hopefully stopped the bus at every roadside shack only to watch me sputter out Nescafes and fold half-chewed dried shrimps into my napkin. My blood sugar fell homicidally low and I glowered at him from across the table while he alternated between silent judgment and righteously working some weird curly tentacle into his mouth. I knew what he was thinking. Worse, I knew he was right: there are people starving in this world.

I finally broke my fast with a cozy little pad thai served from a collapsing hut in a muddy parking lot. Not long after, I found a latte at a coffee shop along the highway and soon my sour mood lifted. But in its place was a sheepish embarrassment. Posing always as the Intrepid Traveler, I’d revealed myself to be a real pansy.

So maybe it turns out that I don’t love the world as much as I thought. Just like people who don’t do gluten or nightshades, it happens that I don’t do weird looking blobs of meat and Technicolor beverages. But if there is any redemption to be found, it’s that after dinner last night, Andy spent the night in the bathroom reconsidering his Tripe dinner, while I slept soundly, dreaming of the next boring round of pad thai.

When we fantasized about life in the Biotruck, we imagined parking up somewhere along the Gulf of Thailand. Andy would unload the solar disco, crank a little Banco de Gaia while I’d make fruity Mai Tais. We’d easily be the coolest travelers on the beach.

But in six weeks the closest we’d come to this vision was an overnight near a fishing pier where in the morning I stood and watched mudskippers lurch around in a bog. A busload of school children arrived with colanders taped to the end of long sticks and began scooping up the poor creatures.

We posed for photos with the kids and their slimy catches. It was fine. It was cute. But it wasn’t our Beach Fantasy.

We crossed the border into Thailand highly motivated to realize our Biotruck Beach Party vision. We began a marathon drive toward Krabi, overnighting at a bleak truckstop and then continuing on in the early morning until we arrived.

A complicated network of jungle roads thread through the region of Krabi.  It’s easy to get lost, and with our vague maps and sluggish GPS, we made several wrong turns. But we finally found a bit of coastline. It was littered with old tire rims, sun-bleached shacks, and rusted lobster traps.

Great, Andy said, stepping out of the truck and into a scattering of broken styrofoam bits. We found the ugliest beach in Thailand.

We can rent kayaks from somewhere, I said hopefully.  We can paddle around …

He turned back toward the bus. Let’s get out of here.

The extra effort paid off. We soon found our way to the most gorgeous stretch of beach I’d ever seen. It wasn’t our party spot—there was no one around to sip on Mai Tais with–but dramatic archipelagos rose from the water and the sandy shore went on for miles in both directions.

I poked around in the nearby forest, finding an old road that led through an abandoned resort. It must have been a lively place at one time—there were dozens of rotting bungalows nestled between the trees. A dilapidated patio that encircled the front of an old restaurant must have seated 100.  Now, it all looked like a shipwreck.

I wondered if this former resort had been ruined by the 2004 Tsunami that destroyed so many of the beaches and towns in southern Thailand. Every few meters a Tsunami evacuation sign pointed the way toward high land. The coconut palms along the beach were all short and young—the old ones, I presumed, were victims to the salinity poisoning that affected many of the coastal forests around Krabi after the sea water rushed in.

I headed back toward the bus along the shore, noting the debris in the line of driftwood–a plastic doll arm, noodle packets. The tsunami had always seemed an abstraction to me, a newscast sandwiched between fictional television dramas. At that moment, it seemed powerfully real.

We took a late afternoon swim. The water was flat so that the dribble of water off our bodies resounded when it hit the surface, our voices carried. Andy wrapped himself in a sarong collected some wood and made a fire and I boiled up some pasta right there in the sand while the sun set spectacularly.

It’s been almost exactly six years since the Tsunami wrecked the beaches and claimed over 6,000 lives in southern Thailand. In some places, the rebuilding has been swift—especially in high dollar tourist destinations like the island of Ko Phi Phi—a favorite of scuba divers and beach junkies alike. Still, in other places tourism has been slow to recover.

Protected by the island of Phuket, Krabi wasn’t the most effect deeply affected, but the memory of  Khluen yaak—the Great Wave– is still fresh in people’s memories. The area served as a center for refugees and hundreds of bodies were taken there for cremation.

People still talk about the Tsunami as if it happened yesterday–a common impulse, I think, for humans to live in reference to their last tragedy. Perhaps it is somehow healing to repeat these stories again and again. They remind of our tenacity—of how we were down but found our way back up again.

I don’t normally get spooked anymore. I thought I left that feeling behind at slumber parties where we freaked out to Friday the 13th movies. But that night in Krabi was eerie for me. I woke several times in the night feeling like I’d entered a sensory deprivation chamber; the darkness was so total I wasn’t sure that my eyes were really open. I couldn’t hear a sound.

Questions kept me awake. What was it like here on Boxing Day when the surf came in and didn’t stop? What’s it like not trusting that the ocean to stay in its place?

We drove away from that silent paradise the next morning, leaving behind the ashes from our cookfire and a few waterlogged coconuts rolling around in the surf. We passed down the rutted road, past a bog dotted with several emerging pink lotus. We didn’t realize our Big Biotruck Beach Party there, but it was hard to complain. We may have lost a fantasy, but people had lost their homes, even their lives.

In all my rainbow-chasing I’m seeing that whatever I think should happen inevitably doesn’t. I nestle into the beach chair of my dreams and open a good book and then someone starts blaring bad music through a scratchy speaker. I think when I see Everest, that I will bask in glowing achievement, but instead I brace against the other tourists that are nearly elbowing me over the edge of a boulder.

What really drives a place into our marrow is not the fantasy of what will happen there, but what actually does happen. The connection usually sets in after-the-fact, when destinations are no longer oppressed by our fantasies, but allowed to become the old storied places where you can’t but help and walk around pointing:  This is where I first learned to ride my bike, this was my favorite tree, this is where we met …

This time the Biotruck broke down near Bidor–a small, dusty Malaysian settlement lined with unremarkable storefronts. As I kicked around the parking lot of the mechanic shop, I asked myself: why can’t the truck spring an oil leak at places like the Taj Mahal or Angkor Wat?

I surveyed the lay of the land: a fruit stand, a hardware store, a hair salon. For the next few days I’d be exiled from the truck as it filled with mechanics, oily rags, and expletives. There was really only one helpful thing I could do: keep out of the way.

Bidor appeared to be the Middle of Nowhere. Of course, the last time I thought that—in Galang Patah– we ended up on a Dionysian jag with influential politicians uncorking champagne in our honor, celebrating our journey and the Biotruck.

I needed to give Bidor a chance.

I am fairly useless in breakdown situations. It’s not that I lack the brainpower to figure it out, or that I’m too girly to get my hands dirty. That isn’t it. It’s just that I’m so completely uninterested. Car parts to me are so boring. Thankfully, Andy feels otherwise. It’s like having a conversation with the engine, he explained.

Days passed while he carried on heated conversation with the fuel filter and the injector pump. I filled the blank hours drinking tea and submitting myself to inane things like having my hair flat-ironed just so I could wait out the brutal Malaysian heat in the air-conditioned salon.

No doubt, it felt wrong that while poor Andy should be covered in grease, I strolled around the parking lot all day with great hair.  So I went over to a fruit shop, deciding that I would bring refreshment to the oily crew. I selected a few mangos, bananas, and a watermelon. I knew the counter space in the Biotruck would be covered in wrenches, so in a clumsy mix of English and charades, I asked the owner for a knife and a cutting board. I sat and chopped the fruit on a mat near the register, balancing a plate on my knees while runnels of watermelon juice ran down my arm. Her son set a box down by my feet to catch the peels, her husband came over to watch and soon, cutting up the fruit became a family effort.

What is interesting about breakdowns isn’t what went wrong, but the question of how to get rolling again. A disintegrated fuel filter can throw you at the mercy of strangers. Who will help you? You invariably meet people you would have never met, and in some places walk away with the strong sorts of friendships that sometimes get forged under duress. In our case, the truck quit on the highway and Andy had to guide it onto a narrow stop on the shoulder. While he poked around under the hood, I laid a blanket on the grass near the highway and, setting up our laundry hamper as a backrest, resumed reading the literary megalith that is Shantharam. The day dimmed, the mosquitoes bit and it started to worry me that maybe we would have to spend the night right there on the shoulder. Thankfully two laughing Chinese mechanics from Kim Lim’s towing happened to drive by with a tow truck and stopped to give us a hitch. That’s how we got to Bidor.

Mr. and Mrs. Fatt owned the fruit shop. The morning after our collective fruit slicing session, they idled their car up to the bus and asked us to breakfast. We sat at an open-air Chinese market,  poked breakfast dumplings with chopsticks, and did our best to make conversation. We must have done well enough because they took us out to dinner again that night.  We got on with them well. They were fun loving– Mr. Fatt liked to tease and in return his wife delivered him regular impish punches to the arm. Over the next couple of days while the Biotruck was in surgery at Kim Lim’s shop, we started hanging out at their house, watching their TV, using their shower, and internet. They showed us a nearby waterfall where we waited out a long hot afternoon in the mist. Before long, Mr. and Mrs. Fatt begin to feel like family, and that dusty block of Bidor storefronts started to feel like home.

On our last night, they took us out to dinner. While we sipped from our beer bottles, Mr. Fatt pulled out a pen and a napkin. He scribbled out a Chinese character and drew a big circle.

Yuan Fen he said, pointing to the Chinese symbol. The he retraced the circle. Big world, opposite sides, but still we meet. This friendship is a special privilege.

Later I would look up the meaning of Yuan Fen and begin to love the word for the way it filled a gap in the English language for a phenomenon that I had experienced, but had never had the verbal tools to articulate.  I think ”chemistry” might be the closest word we have.

Simply put, Yean Fen is the “binding force” that links two people together in a relationship. The amount of Yuan Fen you share with someone determines the level of closeness you will achieve. It’s not just about proximity; you can live next door to someone all your life and never get to know them. This just means you have thin Yuan Fen. On the other hand, you can fall madly in love with someone, but just can’t stay together. “Have Fate without Desinty” is  a Chinese proverb used to describe this tragic condition.

The meaning can get more complicated. Some believe the phenomenon is tied to past lives and karma. As another Chinese proverb goes: It takes hundreds of reincarnations to bring two persons to ride in the same boat; it takes a thousand to bring two persons to share the same pillow.

But for me, it is enough that Yuan Fen explains how sometimes people who meet get along, or don’t get along, why friends become friends, lovers become lovers, and also why sometimes relationships break apart. It puts a word to the phenomenon of why there are people I’ve lived near for so long, yet consistently fail to maneuver the conversation passed a “hello” and yet at the same time manage to make a heart connection halfway around the world. It explains how we should find Kim Lim’s shop, and then intersect with Mr. and Mrs. Fatt, who don’t speak our language, who live thousands of miles away, and run a fruit stand in a dusty little “nowhere” town called Bidor.

In certain ways, pilots are the same the world around: friendly, eager to share their local site, their passion for flying, and just generally high-on-life.

All this could definitely be said about Yati and Nafi, our site guides in Malaysia. The couple get out to their hill every weekend and are always eyeing the clouds.  Still, one thing really sets them apart from the tribe of the semi-nomadic pilots I hang around.

Nafi and Yati have five children. One, Two, Three, Four, Five.

Fortunately, like most Malay families, theirs is a close knit one so they have a lot of support when it comes to getting out to fly. Grandma lives nearby and is happy to watch the kids—right along with Nafi’s brother’s five kids. Still, I had a hard time reconciling this carefree and daring couple with my ideas about parenthood. Shouldn’t they be a little more uptight and frazzled? At 31, Yati still looks like she just got off the school bus. I marveled as she loaded three ballasts in her harness to keep her tiny person in the hemisphere. I’ve honestly never met anyone like her.

We were at Seremban, a ridge soaring hill that rises above the palm plantations of central Malaysia. The October day would turn out to be a bit of a struggle for me; it was the hottest flying I’ve ever endured and the only time I heard my vario beep was when I stood up after going to the bathroom. Still, we were in great company. The flying club from Borneo was visiting and come evening they joined us for a post-flying dinner.

Nassa, a local pilot, had the backyard grill on full flame and was churning out an endless feast of lamb chops, chicken wings, and fish fillets. We nibbled on meaty bones and gathered around a laptop to watch a slideshow of the days’ flights. Like everywhere I’ve ever flown, the pilots were welcoming and happy to speak English with us. As it got later, the party grew larger and an extended family of friends and relatives arrived. Children ran around on the lawn, babies were passed around. Soon, the Malay language filled the balmy night. My companion Andy and I sauntered away from the table and reclined out on the lawn.

This is the only time of year I get homesick. Andy said. Today is bonfire night back in England. He reminisced about his neighborhood, the cool nights, the fireworks.

Having organized over 15 vehicle expeditions across Africa and throughout the world, he’s spent the majority of his adult life on the road. He’s had cinematic adventures, met lots of characters, and flown a ton of sites.  But great as it’s been, all the vagabonding can take a toll. One Christmas he spent on an airplane between San Francisco and Sydney. Birthdays can be a let down, too. People always forget, and it’s a reminder that in some ways, I’m sort of a loner.

It’s a sensation I can to relate to more and more. For three years I’ve avoided the expenses of maintaining a home in order to chase paragliding, writing assignments, and whims. The adventures I’ve had are unsurpassed, yet there are moments when all the moving around feels starkly empty. And as time goes on, I return to my “home” in Ashland, Oregon less and less. My friendships adhere with the feeble glue of Facebook status updates and infrequent emails.

To have a real home—a Place—you need to return to the places you departed from and stay for a while. You have to cultivate history, memories, and connections. But these days, my life is starting to resemble less the ancient circle of coming and going, and more a line—and a somewhat solitary one at that–disappearing into the future.

Nassa’s party turned off around 11:00 and we climbed into the car with Nafi and Yati.  It was late and they needed to pick up children One, Two, Three, Four and Five from Grandma’s house. As Nafi steered the glider-stuffed car down the dark highway, Yati turned around and peered at me with curious eyes, her face framed by a red hijab:

Christina. You are 35. Why not married?

I wanted to give her some thought-out explanation, some philosophic explanation. But the truth is that it never really felt like a decision. For a long time, I thought I was just simply too young to be married—that I just needed to have one more adventure before settling down. But one more adventure has turned into a lifestyle and at 35 years old, that excuse has long out of steam.

I floundered around for reasons. I explained that it wasn’t uncommon to stay single in America and that through some process of social-selection, I’m surrounded by a set of friends who live the same way. It just seems normal. I didn’t bother with the other complicated reasons–that my family had a legacy of divorces that made me wary of the whole institution. That I was deadest avoiding the suburban afflictions of Quiet Desperation and The Problem That Has No Name.

Maybe they are more into Self? Yati asked.

I’m afraid she was right, but I hated to think of it that way. Most of my friends led really active meaningful lives, I explained. They had a passion for flying or for travel. And many had taken up terrific causes, working on behalf of others–restoring wetlands or assisting in disaster relief.

But there was no denying, I suppose, that there was a selfish aspect to not settling. Like many pilots, I enjoy my freedom. I love the novelty of new places. I love how I can re-invent myself again and again. With no children, my mornings are serene; my mind is my own. If the flying is good, I just get up and go. In some ways, it seems like the ideal life.

Yati was trying to understand, but confused. But we need someone to take care of, and to take care of us, no?

I knew she was right. But my friends and I did form our own family of sorts. And in the flying community, pilots form their adrenaline-bonds and have their own particular way of looking after each other. Romantically, I’ve had a few relationships. We took care of each other for the time we were together. Of course, when our paths start to diverge, we are quick to call it a day

Is it ego? She asked.

Probably, I admitted. No doubt I was living out a very Western idea that it is our birthright to uncover Who We Are and express it.  My destiny, I was taught, is entirely my own and I should never compromise it for anyone. As a result, there are just some things I don’t know how to do. Like stick with a job I hate, or move to Texas for love.

Nafi and Yati dropped us off at the bus that we’d been traveling and living in for months. Andy stashed our wings away in the back and expressed his admiration for Nafi and Yati’s close-knit family.  If were not here for each other, we might as well not even be here.

As much as I’m always espousing the benefits of the free and easy nomadic lifestyle, I couldn’t help but agree.

Nafi and Yati had us over for dinner before we left town. Grandma made a feast of boiled greens, chicken curry, and ox tail soup and the house was so crowded we had to eat in shifts: Nafi, Yati, Andy and I, then the ten grandchildren, then all the aunties and uncles.

As usual, Nafi and Yati made sure we were well fed.  Malaysian hospitality is often overwhelming. This might be the last time we see you, Yati explained. This is our only opportunity to treat you. It was true. They had firm roots here, five kids to take care of. As for us, the likelihood of ever returning was slim.

By the time we left that night, the children were wrestling in a pile of the floor and the house was so noisy and chaotic that it was hard to have a clear thought. It was also full of a ton of love. Andy and I said goodbye and walked out the door into peaceful night, into the big open world. We’d soon discover our next friends, the next flying site. Just us and the big world, with lots of space to move around in. Lots of space ….

There are rules to being a good guest. In Malaysia, we broke them all.

This past week we’ve been living outside SM Success Mechanic shop in the town of Gelang Patah. The shop-owner, Jason Teoh, immediately took a liking to the Biotruck, admiring Andy’s ingenuity and, even more, his audacity to drive the thing around the world.

All the repair work he said For free.

With that, Andy and the team of mechanics spent a week under the bus, replacing wheel barings, filling the tires, repairing the wiring, changing the gearbox oil, and a whole lot more.

Each morning, Jason would idle his car into the lot and rouse us for breakfast. One morning he arranged a press conference and uncorked a bottle of champagne in  honor of the expedition. Come afternoons, when we were hard at work on the Biotruck, one his crew members would invariably show up to drop off some take-out chicken and rice.

The shop crew knew how to work hard and played hard.  Late evenings, they sat us down to Dionysian feasts. At their goading, we hammered our way through plates of crab, popped the caps off cold Heinekins, and navigated our palates through heaps of inscrutable but delicious Chinese entrees. Around midnight, when we’d leaned back in our chairs clutching our guts in surrender,  the waitress would mercifully upend all the plates and platters, dumping all the leftovers into a mountain on the table. She’d then gather up the cloth and haul away the fall-out.

The gorging was taking a toll, but throughout the week Jason served us a few rounds of an ancient Chinese beverage called Birds Nest. The potion—literally made from a bird’s nest—is known to boost vitality and clear up the worst cases of hang-over complexion.

Having not had my own place for nearly three years, I’ve grown accustomed to being in the role of “guest.” I have stayed long stretches in other peoples’ houses, visited their towns. It can be precarious—striking that balance between being a novelty and overstaying. But there are three rules to maintaining goodwill of hosts, which I’ve tried to implement, however imperfectly.

1. Bring your own bedding and towels and a gift.
2. Be an attentive conversationalist
3. Make yourself indespensible.

During our time in Galang Patah, this little set of bylaws which have served me so well in the past, proved to be worthless.

The problem wasn’t so much that we didn’t have our own bedding and towels; we did. But in the Biotruck living space is tight, and we keep nothing that isn’t absolutely functional. Mourn-it-and-move-on is the motto. In this lean spirit, Andy recently had to discard his map of the Annapurnas, and I have to box up several cute, but extraneous, sundresses and send them home.  There is no room to be sentimental or aesthetic. Unfortunately, this also means that we have to break Rule Number One: we can’t carry gifts to offer our hosts. As a pathetic substitute, we over-smile and pester them with thank-yous. I sometimes enlist my 3rd-grade level art skills and draw up a  crappy thank you card.

So, the least we can do honor Rules Number Two and be good conversationalists. Malaysians are a highly social bunch, holding court in cafes easily until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m.   Andy and I, however, couldn’t keep up. The language barrier always created a distance that our clumsy charades could not breach. Our rapport could be strained and difficult and we sometimes just sat there nodding our heads and dumbly gumbing our sea cucumber.

That leaves us with Rule Number Three: make yourself indispensable. Pick up their mail, take out their trash, maybe do a little weeding in the garden. If you do a good enough job and they’ll start to wonder how they ever got by without you. But between Jason’s many businesses, we were of no use to him. He already had a workforce of 2000 at his bidding. We’d have offered him cash, but he beat us to the punch, handing us a wad of bills to support the expedition.

During our week there in Gelang Patah, our every single need was met. I could hardly pry a sprig of tarragon from my teeth without someone handing me a toothpick.  If I drained my water glass, it was filled.  If I yawned at the dinner table, the driver would stand up and shake the car keys.

I’m still trying to figure out why they liked us so much. Who knew that a couple of hippies in a bus could ever inspire such royal treatment? No one here sneers when we park outside their business, or at our rumpled clothes. When the police drop by the bus, it’s not to tell us to park elsewhere, but to say hi and wish us well.

It all speaks to the relativity of perception, doesn’t it?  What one person calls “living out of a car,” another person calls “traveling.” What one person dubs “cheap,” another calls “environmental.”  One person’s “homeless person” is another’s “spiritual seeker.”

But it may well just be that our experience in Gelang Patah was less about us and The Biotruck and more about the intrinsic manners and hospitality of Malaysians. This is a high-energy country and economy is good. People are optimistic and there’s enough to go around.

They say that guests are like fish: after three days they start to stink. But if we were starting to smell, Jason and the crew at SM Success didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe they did, but chalked it up to too much Tom Yum. Whatever the case may be, we pulled out of the shop in Gelang Patah in good repair and good spirits and, as we turned onto the road to continue our long journey, our new friends set down their wrenches and air compressors and waved us goodbye. By the looks of it, they were actually sorry to see us go.

For pics of some of the best food and happiest mechanics in the world, click here

Until last night, I’d never given much thought to shipping containers. And if it weren’t for Andy’s Biotruck I don’t think I ever would. But yesterday the Biotruck arrived at the port of Tanjun Pelibas, Malaysia after an extended and inadvertent tour of Southeast Asia. We’d been long been awaiting this day, especially Andy, who had no idea when he loaded it on the ship in Calcutta that a series of miscommunications would result in it being lost at sea for over two months.

We arrived at the shipping yard early, cleared security, and embarked on a series of proceedings that would keep us there until after midnight. Unloading the container from the ship, the bus from the container, and ushering the bus through customs was No Small Deal and gave me about 15 hours to soak up the ambiance of the port.

It was hard to get comfortable there. The container yard employed a pretty much all-male force, and I was troubled that it was That Time of the Month and there was  no one around to empathize with my cramps, much less bum a feminine product off of. It was really hot there and–except for the oily unloading dock–there was really no place to sit, or anything to eat, or read, or do. I’m happy to concede that the problem might be mine—that maybe I just don’t have sufficient curiosity to appreciate a container yard. But it reminded me of a sensation I had on some of my in elementary school field trips to sewage plants or recycle centers: I was learning something for sure, but only sluggishly.

But just because I can’t relate to the shipping port, doesn’t mean it doesn’t relate to me. In fact, as I was watching the huge cranes raise and lower the containers against the skyline, it occurred to me that many, if not most, of the products I consume come through places just like this, that what I was witnessing was a behind-the-scenes look at global consumerism.

Maersk was the container company that was sponsoring the expedition by shipping Andy’s truck between continents. One of the nice things about Maersk is that they keep scorecards that feature a CO2 dial that is based on actual volume, routes and vessels making it easier for companies to monitor their carbon emissions. According to this scorecard, Andy’s transport footprint was 1/10th of what it would be if he were driving.

After waiting five hours for the container to be unloaded from the ship and then hauled over to the unloading dock, the real fun began. Because the Biotruck was the first private vehicle Maersk had ever delivered, there were a quiet a few snags.  For one, the truck was too wide for their loading dock ramps. So the trick was this: somehow they had to get it off the container platform, which stood a few feet higher than the dock. Preventing it from toppling off the narrow ramp and crashing to the ground would take a pretty steady hand; there was only about a 4-inch margin of error. At first Andy seemed willing to give it a try. He fired up the ignition, let it idle for a few seconds, and but then turned it off again. The risk was too big.

A team of ten stood on the loading platform scratching their heads as the sun began to go down in the Strait of Melacca. The workers hauled out wood blocks and beams and hammered together a makeshift extension to the ramp. It was a little doubtful whether wood was strong enough to support the six-ton truck, but it did widen the ramp by a few precious inches.

Andy revved the engine and the bus lurched forward slowly. Just as the front tires sunk onto the ramp the truck bottomed out and hung like a seesaw on the edge of the container. He shifted into reverse and backed up, shredding the makeshift wood ramp.

The workers set about rebuilding the ramp while a fork lift drove around to the back of the container and hoisted it up, tipping the platform forward so that the angle was less severe. Andy climbed back in the Biotruck and turned the key, only to find that battery was dead. They stretched a pair of jumper cables between the truck and the forklift and fired up the engine again. Andy pulled forward. The exhaust pipe peeled off the bottom with a huge ripping sound. Andy shifted back into reverse setting the front tires back onto the container.

By now it was dark–long past dinnertime–and we puzzled together under the yellow glow of the shipyard lights. Someone had the idea to drive the forklift around to the front of the bus and hold it up by the bumper and then slowly lower it as Andy steered the bus forward

Andy fired up he engine again and eased it forward onto the prongs of the forklift.  It looked precarious, but worked, and once the forklift got out of the way, the bus came flying down the ramp. Andy floored it down the aisle of the warehouse and peeled around the corner leaving a wake of chip fat smoke. I met up with him on the other side of the building where he was pushing the bus door open with his eyes wide.

“Let’s go save the world Christina!”

His sarcasm had clearly returned, but I was happy to see him revitalized. His sense of mission had been flagging after the truck got lost at sea and I was discouraged when he talked about abandoning the whole idea, dismissing the entire trip a failure, and in his darkest moments, declaring the planet’s future as completely doomed. I tried my best to buoy him by making our days dynamic and busy. I scheduled a compulsory boat ride through the Melaka canals, and prodded him through the night markets to ogle all the cool trinkets–childhood toys like slinkies and sidewalk pops.  While he played along, even lit up when I purchased two wire head-scatchers, somehow all the plastic-y tourist kitsch was only make him feel worse about the world. Even the man who held a crowed captive as he pierced his index finger right through a coconut was not enough to impress him.

Andy just grew increasingly despondent and rhetorical: Why bother? What’s the point?

I’ll admit I was starting to have trouble myself. Reports of crisp nights and crackling woodstoves had me longing for home, longing to escape the weighty humidity of Asia and walk under the big leaf maples of the ditch trail that I was sure by now were turning yellow.  Despite my ability to derive contentment from the smallest things—afternoon coffees and little walks– lounging on Facebook in cheap hotel rooms was not exactly my idea of an Expedition. My own disappointment was starting to mount.

I climbed down from the unloading dock and stepped up into the Biotruck to join Andy. After two months at sea, it was full of mouse turds and the dank smell of neglect, but for now we were just happy to be driving it away from the shipping yard it into the long dark. Behind us the huge cranes lit the horizon, facilitating the nonstop work of importing and exporting freight containers and enabling to the massive global transactions that make the world’s economies spin.

The next day we’d strip the sheets off, take them to the laundry, and procure cleaning supplies. We’d fire up the solar disco and get to scrubbing. There was a lot to do: We had a Biotruck to resuscitate, our idealism to reclaim.

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