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“You’ve got this” I reassured myself. I lay on the bottom bunk of an eight-bed dormitory, 11,500km away from everything that I knew as home. I’d just landed in Bali a few hours earlier. I was the traditional backpacker everyone writes about, inspiration and aspiration sucked dry by a corporate desk job I’d studied so hard for throughout my youth, a failed relationship, and a million burning questions about life’s meaning. I was the same backpacker who travels across the world in the hope of finding a purpose, living like a renegade, looking for answers. Right now though? Right now it was hard to breathe, purpose surrendering to paranoia, alone in a room with seven other people who didn’t care about the two hands of fear wrapped around my neck. A couple of hours later, just past midnight, I drag myself unwillingly out of bed and stumble to the foot of Mount Batur, Bali’s second-highest mountain top. “You’re probably going to need this” Ari says with half a giggle as she hands me a makeshift bamboo walking stick. We begin our trek up the mountainside when I realize that whilst I’m in full hiking gear, the locals trek up the mountain in sandals and a bamboo stick. Ari is a woman in her early twenties. She’s lived her entire life in the secluded village of Terunyan, a village still hung on the tradition of the Bali Aga people. Her parents couldn’t afford to send her to school, so the only choice she has is to take a boat every day during the unwelcoming hours of the night to climb the mountain with tourists and their expensive iPhones looking to capture the perfect Instagram moment. She does this day in, day out, in order to make a living. Despite this, she seems happy. She’s learned English by talking to tourists climbing the mountain. “Where are you from?” She asks, realizing I needed time to catch my breath. “Malta” I reply between breaths, not expecting her to know where on earth that is. She replies with a grin across her face “Near Italy?” I’ve been to places and spoken to people in Europe who don’t know where Malta is, yet unschooled Ari, from a remote area in Bali, knows where we are on the map and what language we speak. She laughs at my look of astonishment. I look up at the towering mountain top, it feels like we’ve been walking for hours, yet I look at my watch and we’re only forty minutes in. I’m breathless, all the photography gear on my back clearly not one of my greater ideas, my feet slipping through the burnt lava dust covering the mountain in a thick blanket. Ari, in her sandals, a good 10 meters ahead of me. “Halfway there!” she calls out, noticing I’m falling back. As we reach the top of the mountain, the first arrows of light seep through the numbing black night. The clouds beneath us creating a creamy orange hue, circling the base of the mountain. The sun starts to peek over Mount Agung, just opposite our vantage point atop Mount Batur. It casts an extravagant shadow over the smallest of villages cramped in the valley between the mountains. “Do you want a picture?” Ari asks, breaking the silence. “Yes, yes please” I reply, realizing just how lost I was in the moment. I stand with my back to the most spectacular backdrop I have ever laid eyes upon, I look at Ari, who by now knows how to use a phone’s camera better than I do. As I wait for her to take the picture, my mind races. How is she this fulfilled with her life? What are we so desperately missing back home? How have I just been taught a life lesson by someone who probably doesn't even realize it? We walk back down the mountain, I bid Ari farewell as I hand her a small tip. She will go back on that boat and do this again tomorrow. Me? I have more questions than ever before. However, I've realized this is why people travel, not to find answers, but to uncover deeper, more purposeful connections.