Ayun Halliday - No Touch Monkey!: And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late

Copyright 2003, 2015 by Ayun Halliday

Illustrations 2003 by Ayun Halliday

SEAL PRESS

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

1700 Fourth Street

Berkeley, CA 94710

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

On the Road originally appeared in The Unsavvy Traveler as Carry Me Out of Africa, published by Seal Press in 2001.

On Local Custom originally appeared in A Woman Alone as Dog Master, published by Seal Press in 2001.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

No touch monkey!: and other travel lessons learned too late/ by Ayun Halliday.2nd ed.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-58005-602-1

1. Halliday, AyunTravel. 2. TravelAnecdotes. 3. Voyages and travels.

I. Halliday, Ayun.

G465.H345 2003

910.409049--dc22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover design by Faceout Studio, Jeff Miller

Interior design by Domini Dragoone

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

For Greg, India and Milo

Contents

FOR YOUR ENJOYMEN AND SAFETY PLEASE OBSERVE THE FOLLOWING INDIKATION!

DO NOT TOUCH OR TEASE THE MONKEY AS THE MAY REACT WITH UNPREDIKTABLE MANNERS.

FORBIDDEN FED TO THE MONKEYS. SUPPOSING YOU HAVE SOOM FOOD FOR THEM. PLEASE LEAVE TO OUR MONKEYS EXPERT.

IF THERE IS NO MONKEYS EXPERT WITH YOU TOSS THE FOOD TO THEM FROM A SAVE DISTANCE.

DO NOT HIDE FOOD ON YOU. THEY WILL FIND IT, EVEN IF IT IS IN YOUR POCKET OR A BAG.

NEVER GRAB A MONKEY. IF A MONKEY GETS ON YOU, DROP ALL YOUR FOOD AND WALK A WAY UNTIL IT JUMPS OFF.

We Trust Your Visit Will Be Memorable One.

sign in Ubud, Bali

I wrote this book so long ago that the effects of traveling through Africa and Asia without sunscreen had yet to manifest on my face or in the public consciousness. Even more shocking, the Internet hadnt been invented yet. That meant no email or social media. No Facetime, travel blogs, couch surfing, or Internet cafs. The guest houses I stayed in didnt have websites; nor were there discussion boards where expats and recently returned travelers could share their experiences, good and bad.

With the internet as yet uninvented, I couldnt very well double-check the accuracy of whatever information I managed to come by, whether in advance or on the road. Most of it proved dated. Calling ahead was no solution when you consider pre-millenial, pre-cellphone international rates. Once in a country, phones meant long waits in lurid international call centers and massive cock-ups involving the American ambassadors wife... (More about that escapade when we get to Singapore, dear reader.)

Simply put, inconvenience was built in to the low-budget travelers philosophy. It became our creed, the source of a thousand jokes in the second-class carriage.

Our mothers counted themselves lucky if they received a postcard every other week. It was confirmation that we were alive... or had been when we mailed the card. (Dear Mom, Ive got malaria, but my tent mates an Australian nurse. She made me take Fansidar. No worries. According to her, the American medical authorities are overly cautious about blindness and kidney failure...)

I remember the thrill of pawing through the poste restante boxes in a sleepy post office guarded by an old man with a musket. Even then it was a charmingly antiquated system. It made me feel like something out of a W. Somerset Maugham story. After sorting through the Hs, Id check the As, then flip through the entire alphabet, admiring the handwriting and stamps, imagining how happy the recipients would be when they rolled into townif they rolled into town. Our itineraries rarely stayed the imagined course. Shortly after Id touched down after one extended trip, a friend presented me a yellowing Sunday Tribune the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic had returned to her after Id failed to pick it up within the allotted year. Now thats what I call a functional postal service!

As to postcards, I cant imagine the tourist industry phasing them out any time soon. How theyll reach American destinations once our post office does a dodo... well, the futures always uncertain to a degree.

Id far rather write a postcard, then take it to the post office to be franked in front of me (thus thwarting the nefarious insider whod peel and resell the stamps) than gawp at the screen of an international SIM-card-equipped iPhone, waiting for my loved ones to reply to an electronic message sent a few seconds earlier.

Not that I didnt do my share of zombified staring at screens, pretty much every time I rolled onto Khaosan Road, a cafe-lined Bangkok strip luring bush-fried backpackers with complimentary showings of Rambo III. I regarded it as a lotus eating hellhole on my first visit, but the longer I stayed out, the more the place grew on me. Its ridiculous action movies, delicious fries, and abundant pirate goods offered temporary respite that energized us to keep pursuing the bigger escape. Thought who could have predicted that that tawdry scene would also come to feel a bit Maugham-y? The jewels that comprised its booming black-marketbootleg cassettes, tattered English-language paperbacks, extremely-fake-looking fake IDshave become obsolete to the point of romance.

I know there are parents out there, the same age that I am now, going crazy because their young traveler inexplicably failed to keep their daily Skype date, but I encourage that kid to keep pulling the plug. Unchain yourself from the grid. Stop Instagramming your damn banana pancakes and checking Twitter. Kick it old school. Sit around the guesthouse breakfast table for hours, trading graphic descriptions of your intestinal workings with the people you met last night. Pay attention. Its either the beginning of a beautiful friendship, or youll never see them again. Either way, everybody wins.

This book is a record of what it was like to be young, foolish, curious, unfettered, stupid, hungry, untethered, amazedand offline.

Ayun Halliday

New York City, 2015

T hings really went to shit in the Munich train station mens room.

Nate and I had failed to plan carefully for our first trip abroad without parental supervision. My theater degree from Northwestern University still warm, I had spent the summer in Scotland, acting in the famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The experience left me feeling worldly, despite the fact that the company under whose auspices I performed was a barely disguised con, casting every starry-eyed undergraduate who auditioned back in the States, provided she could cough up airfare and the inflated rent for a short-term apartment. Ten of us lived crammed in a rundown flat with no phone and no living room. But the bedroom I shared with three othersfour if you count Nate, who rarely slept in the B & B where his band was billetedboasted a romantic view of the Edinburgh Castle, so I loved it. Nate had arrived in Scotland with two hundred dollars, a briefcase of harmonicas, and no backpack. His unpreparedness for our upcoming tour of Europe provoked feelings of anger, which I quickly squashed when he suggested that maybe, since he had no money, he should return to Chicago and let me do the trip alone. What did his reluctance signify? If the shoe had been on the other foot, I wouldnt have let anything so dreary as underfunding come between me and Eurailing with my beloved. I was a year younger than Nate, but much more advanced in my determination to force reality to conform to the future I envisioned. Why would you want to back out now? I argued, conserving our resources by eating packets of unrefined sugar in lieu of dessert in a vegetarian cafeteria near the theater. Dont worry about your Eurail pass. Ill buy it and you can pay me back later. We can save money by sleeping in the train stations. As long as you have a ticket, they wont arrest you! Alarmed by Nates frown, I pressed hurriedly on, Or you know, we can work it so we only take overnight trains. That way we never have to pay for a hostel. Look! I dug in my bag for