“I love travel days. I love getting my passport stamped. I love being with our whole squad. I love eating a whole can of Pringles. I love looking out the window and talking to God about everything I see. I love the kinds of conversations with random friends that go on over the course of 30-some hours. I love crossing a new border and starting a new month.”
That was what I wrote in my journal on August 30th. I was such a cute rookie Racer.
The following is the story of a long chunk of days on the Race that I did not love. I considered either not publishing this blog at all or at least only giving the simplest details like times and forms of transportation and a few fun thoughts…but I think it’s fair to admit that sometimes the World Race sucks. Sometimes you’d rather be on your way home than on your way to yet another country that doesn’t have Chick-fil-A. Good days far outweigh the really really bad, but the bad ones do exist, so I’m sharing those too.
PS, future Racers, they get better. Every time.
Part 1-January 27th-28th, Phang Nga to Bangkok
5:14pm
Arrive at bus station and eat what I’m sure will be the last peanut butter and jelly that I’ll get until I’m home. That’s in less than four months. Today I’m so tired that I’m not sad about that fact. I will be when I wake up.
This has been the most emotionally exhausting month, and while it was a good one, I’m pretty ready to sleep for three days.
6:15pm
Get on the nicest bus we’ve been on the whole Race. It’s a double decker but we have our own closed off little room on the bottom floor. Which we share with one random Thai man but he speaks zero English and sleeps the whole time. Also cockroaches. Dozens of baby cockroaches. But we have enough leg room that my feet can’t reach the wall in front of me, which is a rare little treat.
6:32pm
Bus stops because the smell of Tina’s tea tree oil(which she used to deter above mentioned roaches) somehow reached its way to the driver and freaked him out. We laugh about this incident for the next 20 minutes.
9:50pm
I’m so deliriously tired and so unable to sleep that I find myself listening to the soundtrack from Twilight. I’m clearly losing my mind.
10:38pm
Stop for 25 minutes. I’ve been trying so hard to sleep for three hours but can’t, while the rest of my team has been out like rocks that whole time and now they’re wide awake while I want to scream until it makes me pass out.
Then I realize that this might be the last time I’m ever with only my teammates, because we’re coming up on another team change and what if we’re working with another team this month? This makes me want to stay up all night and talk to them because I’m not ready to let them go, now or ever.
5:14am
Arrive 45 minutes early, grab all our stuff in a rush and stumble off the bus praying we’re at the right stop.
5:21-5:39am
Take taxis to our hostel. Write all of this while waiting to check in so we can crash in our beds for the entire day.
Wait nine and a half hours to get rooms. Life.
The rest of the squad arrives throughout the next day and with them comes the dreaded question “How was your month?” By the time I crawl into bed that night I feel like I never want to talk about Thailand again, because explaining my month is just too hard. One dear squadmate actually had to ask, after my attempt at an answer to how my month was, “So wait…was it your best month or your worst?” I literally do not know. I do know that it was the most draining month, and that even with my insane level of extroversion, I’d be happy to lock myself in a closet and not see anyone for 72 hours.
Instead, I stay up til 1:30 talking to my mom and go to sleep in tears because seven months is just a really long time to be gone and four more feels like an eternity.
Part 2-January 30th-31st, Bangkok to Phnom Penh
8:00am
The 41 of us split between five 15-passenger vans to ride to the border. It kind of felt like a high school youth retreat, which made me smile.
12:02pm
Arrive somewhere near the border, walk a half mile or so to the place where we get our exit stamps. It’s times like these when I regret my giant sleeping pad that has to strap outside of my pack, but I’d still recommend it to future racers in a heartbeat because that thing is as comfy as my bed at home.
I always love the part of travel days where we’re legally nowhere, after we’ve been stamped out of one country and haven’t yet reached the next one. It’s like we’re all Tom Hanks in The Terminal. Except today we were swarmed by street kids who followed us the entire way, and we don’t know how to say “I don’t have any money but you’re super cute” in whatever language they were speaking to us, so it was less fun and more sad.
I’m so unbelievably tired in every sense of the word that I don’t even care about getting a new stamp in my passport; I just want to find water and sit down for a very long time.
3:30pm
After 3 hours of fighting from passing out(it was hot and I was thirsty), we get on our next bus and I find that my strategic efforts at dehydrating myself for the past 3 days have paid off because as I’d guessed, there’s no bathroom.
Cambodia is already my new favorite country. It’ll be hard to beat Ecuador as far as the whole month goes, but as a country itself, it’s tied with Thailand for the most beautiful yet. The road is too bumpy for me to read my books, but I don’t mind that right now; looking out the window is much better.
4:40pm
Stop for dinner. The bathrooms at the little restaurant not only have real toilets(as in the kind you can sit on), there’s actually SOAP at the sinks. No toilet paper, but two out of three isn’t bad(plus by now I never travel without my own stash anyways). When I come home I will laugh at people who complain about American gas station bathrooms.
5:35pm
Back on the road. As it gets dark we keep passing these fields full of fluorescent lights, like someone planted lightsaber seeds in the ground and they’re ready to be harvested. I know there’s probably some actual practical reason, like keeping bugs from eating whatever’s really growing or maybe the farmers would just rather work at night and don’t want to have to wear headlamps, but the lightsaber theory makes me laugh the most so I stick with that. I miss my brother because we’d have a field day imagining more things.
I entertain myself with these possibilities for the next half hour. As much as I prefer company to being by myself, my thoughts are pretty great to hang out with now and then.
8:41pm
Stop at a gas station. I am so tired. Time is crawling. I’m thirsty. I’m almost out of toilet paper because I keep sharing it. I miss my brother. I’m not even bothered by how much of a brat I feel like right now.
12:23am
At long last, we pull up to our hostel. It’s called the Lovely Jubbly Place, I kid you not, and that name would make me laugh if I could take a split second break from hating my life.
We climb three flights of steep stairs, with our big packs on, and I haven’t taken my inhaler, and I’m about to pass out both from dehydration and general sleepiness, and I drop my stuff and climb on the first top bunk I see without a word to anyone.
And then I barely sleep all night because our room is freezing cold.
——–
It’s now February 2nd. We stayed in our last hostel for three nights waiting to start ministry and I spent almost all of that time sleeping(turned out I wasn’t kidding when I said I needed to crash for 72 hours), so I’m slowly finding my energy again.
I missed the Super Bowl and today is one of my dear friend’s birthdays. Homesickness has obviously not improved in the past few days.
Our ministry contacts are so sweet and our whole month will be spent building relationships with college students by teaching English classes. Our English class in Ecuador was my absolute favorite ministry so I’m really really excited for this.
Keep praying for my constant aching for home and generally apathetic spirit. Having no attitude at all is even worse than having a bad attitude. Most likely I’m speaking too soon(because again, with clashing travel and ministry schedules, we’ve been in limbo for six days now) and will see a drastic turnaround as soon as we meet our students, but pray anyways.
I’m endlessly grateful for all of your prayers and support, on great days and harder days. Thank you for being in my corner even when I complain too much.
