The author's son Orly at the elephant sanctuary in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Picture: Lindsay Hawdon
Source: Supplied
Lindsay Hawdon with son Dow, 8,
and Orly, 5, share a scooter with a local in Chau Doc, southern
Vietnam. Picture: Lindsay Hawdon
Source: Supplied
Lindsay Hawdon with her sons, preparing for their trip to Asia. Picture: Vivienne Blakey
Source: Supplied
THE three of us are cycling along the jungle roads around Angkor Wat
in Cambodia when the storm breaks. There is a flicker of lightning
across the sky, a rumble and a clap, and then raindrops the size of
thumb nails come smashing down against our skin, soaking us in moments.
My five-year-old son Orly is perched behind me, his arms gripped
around my chest as we splash through potholes in the tarmac. Dow, my
eight-yearold, is behind us riding solo, his little legs pedalling
madly; he's shrieking with exhilaration. I've never known rain like it.
It hammers against us, pouring down our faces, filling our boots. We are
still seven kilometres from Siem Reap, the town where we're staying.
We're on bicycles that are rust-ridden and rickety and have seen better
days.
My two children and I have been travelling since November
2011 on a trip that has taken us around Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and
Australia, and in the coming months will take us on to Burma and Laos.
We are officially homeless, shackle-free for a year of boundless
vagabonding. Our first stop after leaving the comfort and familiarity of
home in England was Bangkok. It was confusing at first, a lot for the
boys to take in as they came across scarlet-lipped transvestites and
children who lived in the gutter. Everything was lower to the ground.
Cooking pots spread out over the cracked pavement, filling the humid air
with the smell of fried spices. Men sat on their haunches selling
cigarettes and warm Coke. Women with baskets that hung like weighing
scales across their backs tip-toed from street to street with pineapples
and starfruit. The world around us was poorer, dirtier, a land from the
past, an uneven mix of the medieval and the new.
Within days Orly had fallen into the River Kwai, cut his hand on a
machete, and got trapped in the toilet on the overnight train to Chiang
Mai. Dow had swallowed copious amounts of river water filled with
elephant dung and fallen into a tank full of doctor fish as they nibbled
the dead skin cells from our feet. Food was a game of roulette; we were
never sure until it was too late whether "hot" meant just very warm, or
spicy hot. Sleep was the same. Home was a jumble of tribal lodges,
jungle camps, home-stays where bed was the floor, five-star boutique
hotels that eased the travel tiredness from limbs, and $10 windowless
rooms with stained walls and wiry beds that creaked beneath us.
However,
from the outset the boys embraced the adventure. We have travelled with
the deluded belief that somehow, because we are living life to the
full, we will be rewarded for doing so and kept out of harm's way. I've
taken risks I would never take with the boys at home. We've ridden on
motorbikes, all three of us sandwiched together. We've sat on the roofs
of longtail boats for days on end to reach a destination, squashed into
rickety buses, and shared tuk-tuks with live chickens. We've dined with
Hmong shamans, sailed down the Mekong, ventured into bat-infested caves
and kayaked though the backwaters.
The maternal instinct to
protect has been all the more poignant with the unfamiliarity of the
world around us. But at the same time the world has opened up in ways it
didn't when I travelled alone. People respond differently to children,
and children themselves don't always see things the way we see them. In
the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi we found ourselves standing on the curb,
contemplating the seemingly impossible task of how to cross the road
through the blur of passing traffic. The boys stood either side of me,
grasping my hands tightly, as we stood waiting for a break to appear.
None came. Just when I was about to give up, a young man joined us on
the curb. He sat on a small trolley that supported his twisted, hunched
body, and walked with his hands, using them to push his wasted legs
along the ground. He ventured out into the oncoming traffic, then turned
and looked right at us and gave a small, almost imperceptible nod of
his head, indicating for us to follow. There was nothing to be done but
take a deep breath and step out into the traffic after him. Mopeds,
trucks, bikes sped towards us. Step by step we shuffled forwards. "Don't
stop," we'd been told by the hotel staff. "Keep moving forwards." Our
hearts were hammering when we reached the other side.
Some of our
best experiences have been the simple ones. In a small village near Hoi
An we went out with a local fisherman, setting off on a long-tail boat
to an archipelago where white sand beaches glimmered between palm
fringes. The boat bobbed on the water just off from the beach. He was
about 70, with only one tooth in his upper jaw.
"Sometimes in the
bad weather a fisherman can lose everything," he told us. "Even their
lives. To be a fisherman can be a dangerous job. So we sing to the ocean
to calm it." He showed us how he held the cast-net, one side slung over
his shoulder, the other woven through the fingers of his left hand. He
rocked for momentum before flinging the net out and up into the air
where it splayed like a bird in flight, beads of water in the nylon
catching the light as it fell onto the water and slowly sank beneath it.
Then he waited momentarily before pulling it in, hand over hand. He
would cast his net like this for 10 hours a day.
Other experiences
were spectacular. In Thailand, right from the outset we were awed,
terrified and seduced by the elephants. We saw our first one the night
we arrived: a street elephant that came trumpeting out of the humid
night air, its feet shackled in chains, its trunk curled like a
saxophone, led by a man who begged for change. After that we made sure
our experiences were at sanctuaries, where they were looked after. At
Elephant's World near Kanchanaburi we washed the animals in the river
(their hides were the texture of an old leather couch) and painstakingly
fed them balls of sticky rice. Nothing will ever beat the sight of my
two precious children riding elephants bareback out of the water, like
real-life Mowgli-boys, and off into the jungle.
Elephants,
tuk-tuks, cycles, scooters and the old hay cart - getting around was
like a continuous fairground ride for the boys. One of our most
memorable forms of transport was the bamboo train in Cambodia's
Battambang province, the lifeline from one middle of nowhere to another.
It clicked and clanked its way along warped rails, jarring our backs
and rushing the wind through our hair. It was a simple contraption, a
three-metre-long wooden frame covered with slats of bamboo, sitting on
castiron wheels with a motorcycle engine that thrummed merrily at the
back. The boys and I couldn't stop grinning. It felt like flying on a
magic carpet, the ground rushing away beneath us, heading towards a
distant point of hazy heat waves.
It hasn't all been light and life-affirming. There have been places and stories that have challenged us.
At
the Killing Fields outside the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, where the
Khmer Rouge regime carried out many of its atrocities, what was most
apparent was the silence. Tens of thousands of people were murdered in
the fields in which we walked; they were brought in trucks, blinded and
bound; many had been tortured and starved. They were accused of crimes
against the state and summarily executed. Meadow flowers now grew up
from the long grass, butterflies flitted through the air, birds sang;
but beneath our feet lay thousands of bone fragments.
I have not
hidden the harsher side of a foreign land from the boys. You can't: it's
there in front of you. But sometimes the things that have been the
hardest to see have turned out to be the most special. One of my most
poignant memories from this trip is of a street boy in Chau Doc,
Vietnam, who we used to watch from the veranda of our dilapidated
guesthouse. He was no older than Dow and he slept curled by the
roadside, his arm for a pillow. The only objects he owned were a small
battered metal bowl, and a blue string bag that he dragged behind him.
"That's his home?" Dow had asked the first morning we saw him, wide eyed and anxious.
"Yes, sweetheart. That's his home."
"Does no one look after him?"
"No one."
Each
morning this boy crossed to a water tap, where he undressed and washed
himself. Afterwards he shuffled on up the street, collecting discarded
plastic bottles in his string bag and selling them for small change at
the stores that would use them for refills.
One morning we were
already out on the street when he headed off for his daily wash. I could
see Dow watching, could see the allure and the hesitation. In the end
an interaction happened between them just as it would at home, because
boys everywhere are drawn to water. T-shirts removed, my two approached
tentatively at first. The street boy took them in for a moment,
registered that they were different from him; whiter than him, richer
than him. But then his dirt-smeared face broke into an easy smile and he
moved aside to share the stream from the tap. They took it in turns to
fill his bowl, pouring water over themselves, eyes blinking, mouths
gasping for air. They could have been anywhere in the world. Three boys:
two blue-eyed, one brown-eyed, playing in a water fountain to while
away the heat of the day.
Back in Siem Reap, the rain is still hammering
down, the light is fading and the boys are shivering with cold.
Everyone we pass shrieks and waves, seemingly delighted at the sight of a
drenched white woman and her two young children on their bikes. But the
mother in me is taking stock of the situation. People are bruised by
the rain here; the ground can slide away from where one is standing;
houses can disappear down steep slopes.
I see a coffee stall at
the side of the road and pull in to find a group of locals sheltering
inside. They rise from their seats with helpful inquisitiveness. As the
boys are being wrapped in blankets by a group of smiling women, a man
rushes to our aid, offering to fetch a friend of a friend who owns a
tuk-tuk.
There is a lot of cheek-pinching going on but the boys
are in good spirits, basking in the delight they are creating.
Eventually the tuk-tuk arrives, they load up our bikes and the crowd
waves us off, all cheers and grins. So we make it back through the
downpour and the flooded roads, the darkness and the traffic, to the
safety of our guest house. We had been dancing with death in our own
little way. But it hadn't felt like that. It felt like we were living
life to its utmost, with our heads held back, drinking water from the
sky, and the world passing by in a blur of watercolour.
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