Train for Adulthood

by Dave Baldwin (Australia)

A leap into the unknown Indonesia

The train was packed in a way that doesn’t happen in the western world. It had a rickety feel to it that permeated at my wellbeing. I was the focus of everyone’s stares and attention; I was deeply out of my comfort zone. In the absence of an empty seat I was placed between the carriages, in the locomotive equivalent of no man’s land. The train loudly churned out the brash rhythmic notes of travel, periodically bellowing and clattering all around me. A cauldron of aroma’s imposed a high tax on my senses, stretching my sense of smell far beyond its means. The cluster of confined bodies on a long journey in a tropical climate ensured the smells were primitive, challenging and diverse. Economy class meant no air-conditioning, the circulation of sour air by the fans offered little relief. When the train stopped food vendors embarked and tempered the environment with the smell of shrimp paste and fried food. The toilets were unusable; their only contribution was to the train’s odor. I lay on backpacks in between the carriages and utilised the escape of sleep. It was 1995 and I was 8 years old. While I slept, my parents stood the entire journey. I’m told it took 16 hours. The overnight sleeper train from Yogyakarta to Jakarta was just one element of the first and most important travel experience of my life. It was part of a six-week journey that took my parents and I around Southeast Asia. We travelled around Java in Indonesia, onto Ho Chi Minh and down the Mekong River in Vietnam, through to Thailand where we travelled from Bangkok down to Koh Samui. We travelled on a budget, choosing economy class overnight trains over speedy domestic flights. We stayed in cheap guesthouses, we ate mostly local food, and avoided many of the luxuries available to more affluent travelers. Now as I look at photos of our trip I can’t help but chuckle at our general shabbiness and 1990’s tie dye style. Our ruffled laid-back aesthetic suited our lazy beach shack in Koh Samui, but was a stark contrast to the splendid surrounds of the Royal Palace in Java. We were in Koh Samui one year before Alex Garland’s book The Beach was released, and five years before Leonardo DiCaprio put Thailand on every backpacker’s bucket list. While Thailand offered a tiny taste of a languid beach life, Vietnam provided me with a very different set of experiences. Visiting the exhibition house of Aggression War Crimes in Ho Chi Minh instilled in me a lasting imprint of war and conflict. I’m certain it was significantly more visceral and accurate than anything I could have learned in a classroom. There were many challenges for me on the journey. As an 8-year-old westerner kid with light colored hair and freckles I was subject to an intense level of curiosity from the locals. I encountered open sewers, hungry leeches, painfully spicy food, stifling humidity, and the frenzy of Southeast Asian traffic. It was a complete culture shock and I hated it. I blamed my parents for subjecting me to such hardship. I just wanted to be in school doing normal 8-year-old things. I didn’t understand why I was there. Why was this happening to me? Why would my parents bring me through this? How could they! Looking back now I get it. It was an adventure, a leap into the unknown and an embrace of uncertainty. Given that they were young parents I have incredible admiration for them. I believe it was this expedition and their heartfelt approach to it that forged in me a love of travel, so I’m deeply grateful. To this day, my soul is nourished by the fact that my boundaries and horizons can be stretched, altered, and changed by embarking on another travel experience into the unknown, just like that first one. So, that’s exactly what I’m about to do. I’m gearing up to re-do that first travel experience: same route, same countries, same itinerary, same train. 25 years ago my parents leaped into the unknown, now it’s my turn. Hopefully I’ll get a seat this time.