From around the end of summer, ads for renting out an apartment for the next six months start appearing on Facebook. This means that people I know and don't know are collectively buying one-way tickets to Bali, India, Thailand, to return in April. Already in October, my news feed will start filling up with photos. I know what it will be: palm trees, sea sunsets, crabs, tropical fruits, and lots of sun.
I will probably become envious, because in Moscow it will be cold and uncomfortable, and in the mornings you need to get up in the dark, while someone just like me is sweetly sleeping in a bungalow by the ocean, and then in flip-flops and shorts traipses to a beach cafe to drink a mango shake. And I'll also remember that two years ago I was sitting on the shore of the Gulf of Thailand in flip-flops and shorts and really wanted to go to Moscow. 'I'm feeling kind of sad,' I said. And my friend photographed me against a palm tree and laughed. And what's so funny?
There are two types of stories from those who have gone to warm countries – for six months, a year, or for life: the first write about how everything is great, and the second about how everything is bad.
In the first case, the heroes boast about how they live by the sea, admire the sunset every day, rent housing for pennies and owe nothing to anyone. In the second, they complain that idleness can drive you crazy, monotonous food gets boring after two weeks, there is too much cheap alcohol around, and motorbikes only bring trouble: it's not too hard to have an accident when you're riding drunk. However, I'm lying, there is also a third type of story: their heroes are adventurous boys and girls who try to visit as many places as possible, spending a minimum of money.
Our story belongs to the fourth type: it has all of the above. Except for drunk riding on a motorbike, perhaps. And, accordingly, injuries.
I was always sure that downshifting was not for me. Friends went to India for several months and sent photos – luxurious sea sunsets in Goa, tanned girls with blissful smiles, long-haired boys in wide pants, lean bearded old men who probably hadn't left India since the 70s.
Others rented a villa in Thailand and told how they go to the market for fruit, do yoga in the mornings, swim in the pool and drink fresh mango juice.
I sat in the office in February Moscow, envied my friends who didn't have to wear tights under jeans, and thought that it would never happen to me anyway. Only free, carefree people – those who know how to relax – can go to the tropics for six months. That is, not me.
And yet, when my friend suggested renting out the apartment and leaving on a trip to Southeast Asia, I agreed quite quickly. For twelve years I couldn't afford to rest longer than two weeks, I had never been to Asia, work brought more and more trouble and less and less pleasure, and in general everything was boring. I wanted to go somewhere completely different. We repaired the apartment, found tenants, and in early January we ended up in Bangkok.
In early January! At the moment when all normal downshifters had been sunbathing on Phangan, Chang and Samui for several months, we got off the metro in Bangkok at Phaya Thai station and started looking around for the hotel that my friend remembered from his previous visit.
We did not plan to become classic downshifters, or more precisely, winterers – that is, rent a house somewhere on an island, settle there for six months, make friends with neighbors and drink beer with them every evening. We were going to travel.
From Thailand to Cambodia. Then to Laos. Maybe to Vietnam. In general, something like that. Only the route was not thought out. What's more – we didn't even bother reading guidebooks in advance. We decided that everything would somehow work itself out.
Everything really worked itself out – over five months we made perhaps the strangest trip through Southeast Asia one could imagine. We had the most crooked route possible. We got rabies and Japanese encephalitis vaccinations at the Red Cross Institute in Bangkok, drove across northern Thailand to Laos to renew our visa (you can't do that now) and returned to finish the vaccinations. We bought a used motorbike in Sihanoukville in southern Cambodia, registered it in our name, drove north to Laos to renew our visa – and returned for the certificate of ownership. We rode our now fully ours motorbike from Cambodia to Thailand hoping to travel around the country and sell our Suzuki there – and returned to Cambodia after figuring in a dreary hotel in Chanthaburi to read the paper given to us at customs and discovering that it couldn't be sold in Thailand. It turned out that we were in Bangkok three times, in Chiang Khong, Chiang Mai, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Sihanoukville, Stung Treng, Kratie, Kampong Cham and Koh Kong twice, and once in some other very pleasant cities and nice islands located in the Gulf of Thailand and in the middle of the Mekong River.
We managed to miss a bunch of attractions, including Tad Fane waterfall in Laos (couldn't find the turn), bamboo bridge in Kampong Cham (rain was coming), river dolphins in Kratie (too lazy to go), and mangrove forests in Koh Kong (too dry to boat). But we taught Thais Russian in Chiang Khong and the next morning suffered from hangovers on the banks of the Mekong River.
We bounced along a terrible road along the Mekong through Cambodian villages between huts hung with tobacco leaves, mosques, cows, ox-drawn carts, and rice fields, accompanied by endless 'hellos!'.
Participated in the celebration of Buddhist New Year on Don Khong island in the middle of the Mekong. Swam at night in the Gulf of Thailand among glowing algae. Listened to my favorite Led Zeppelin album in a beach bar on the most beautiful beach in Sihanoukville. Hid from a thunderstorm at a gas station on a mountain pass.
Over these five months, we realized: to travel freely, you don't need to be some special person. You just need to have a smartphone with GPS and internet access, a map to plot a route, money, sunscreen, and shorts with lots of pockets. This doesn't mean everything went smoothly. There were many problems. Fortunately, none were unsolvable. Often we managed to get out of them, even more often we were lucky, and usually we just decided we would never do that again.
We realized:
1. Several times we made a mistake in choosing a guesthouse and ended up staying in stuffy, uncomfortable places with stale linen. We didn't get enough sleep, drove the next morning completely exhausted, and felt like crying from fatigue. That's how I realized that when choosing accommodation, you need to be picky and not settle for the first place you come across. You can judge the cleanliness of the room already from the hall, you'll have to ask about the availability of a window, and they'll tell you about the air conditioner anyway. By the way, it's also not worth saving on air conditioning: the difference in money is small, but you will sleep much better in a cool room.
2. After two months spent in Thailand, we could no longer tolerate Thai food. We felt sick from the actually wonderful aromas of jasmine rice, fried vegetables, and chicken skewers. We craved kefir, potatoes, cucumber and tomato salad. Oh, forget it! An ordinary hamburger – that's how the phrase "let's spare our stomachs and go to McDonald's" was born. Digestive enzymes, which we bought at the pharmacy, saved us. That's how we realized that in Asia we were not at risk of food poisoning – we simply lacked the enzymes to eat like the locals, without dairy products and bread. In Cambodia, where Western-style cafés are in all cities, there were no such problems at all.
3. Finding a guesthouse on the spot in an unfamiliar place is almost impossible – that's why, before moving from point A to point B, I tried to read as much as possible about it. I was helped by the "Lonely Planet" guidebook, which we downloaded, and the website of independent travelers wolfson.ru, where there was a lot of unique information – the kind you won't find anywhere else. There I would read about which places are really worth looking for in Cambodia, what to be prepared for in Laos, what the customs and traditions are in Southeast Asia, and whether there is anything to be afraid of. And where to stay, of course.
4. What you definitely should not do (and we didn't realize this right away) is to rush at full speed, not staying in one settlement for more than one day. The worst quarrel happened when we covered 220 km on a motorbike (which goes no faster than 80 km/h) – from sheer fatigue. By that time, we had been on the road for a week, moving from city to city, and were completely exhausted.
After that, we realized two things: first, you should only sleep in rooms with air conditioning, and second, you need to give yourself a rest.
5. But what we shouldn't have feared was problems communicating with people. You just shouldn't strain yourself and try to speak correct English. It's enough to observe basic rules of politeness, for example, not to shout, and to smile. When you want to ask, request, or explain something – smile. When you accidentally bump into someone on the street or just meet their gaze – smile. And the world turns out to be friendly. That's probably the main thing I realized during these five months. And it's very valuable.