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The ferries had stopped running from Ban Phe to Koh Samet for the night, and I found myself walking down a rickety pier, stepping through a minefield of dog mess. The man at the booth had convinced the small group of us to pay the higher fare for the speedboat. Once at the end of the pier, we were led over a narrow, swaying plank, and stepped onto the boat. “This looks an awful lot like a ferry,” I thought to myself. I soon found it was the ferry — we walked its width and I could see, in the water below, the speedboat. We got in and the captain gunned it. In a short time, Koh Samet — a resort island in the Gulf of Thailand — came into view. Then the engine stopped. We were bobbing on the open water. The captain checked the engine, put more gas in, turned the ignition a few times. Nothing. A British man started to joke about sharks feeding at dusk. I thought I was going to be sick. Several scenarios played out in my head; I wondered how far I could swim if I had to. After a tense half-hour, the engine started, and we were off again. The captain didn’t want to risk it again, so he idled the engine as we anchored about fifteen yards from the beach. We all waded to shore, holding our bags above the surface. The Koh Samet fire-shows were just ending. In the morning, the island looked different from the night before. ‘Farangs’ — the Thai word for foreigners — were everywhere: tanning, posing for photos, getting massages under bamboo tents, in loose colorful clothing. It was a shock compared to what I had become used to in the small city I lived and worked in, just near the port town of Ban Phe. But I had to admit to myself, I was like them — I was a visitor. After college, I decided to teach ESL in Thailand for six months. I had never studied abroad, and I wanted to travel. I arrived in Bangkok, had a crash course in ESL, then was shuttled off to a town in the Rayong province where I taught at a school with 2,600 students and lead classrooms of up to 50 kids. I didn’t have time to process everything, but all my senses were wide open. It is still one of the richest periods of my life, and there are so many memories from those six months, but this memory — walking down that pier, unsure of what would happen — often comes to me. Why? And why does it feel so elusive? Something about the pier, what the dogs had left and no one had bothered to pick up, the moon off the water, a mixture of fear and excitement coupled with a sense of drab reality, of somehow being fooled? I remember paper lanterns floating over a river — a thanks to the water. I remember Bah Deet — Auntie Deet — one of the older women at the school who served as our mentor. I remember the three siblings I’d tutor and their parents who owned the car dealership in town. I remember my bike ride home and the family who ran the chicken stand, their son who’d they’d have to look after for the rest of his life. I remember the abrasive sound of fireworks against the tin door beside the apartment, how I thought I’d black out from that first Papaya Salad, the morning routine before work of eating rice soup with taxi drivers and students while stringy music played from a radio. The mountaintop temple and the hum of many people. The colors. Many funny and interesting and beautiful and sad and new things. But then there are a few things — like this pier — that I can’t quite place: sitting on the balcony and seeing that same cat in the courtyard, darting in and out of the fence; the translation I could never find of that local myth; what I only walked through. These details rise up in me and escape my grasp. And I suppose this is the bittersweet gift of travel, when all our senses are wide open.