BAIL, MULE, SAIL

Taking the geographical cure means leaving psychic baggage in various ports of call. Anne O’Hagan changes her state of mind

STRUGGLING THROUGH INTERNATIONAL DEPARTURES with one big, bulging duffel bag heaved over my shoulder and wheeling another, embarking solo to parts unknown, I thought that at least I wouldn’t be returning with the same baggage I was leaving with. It wasn’t until hours later, after take-off and a large glass of wine, that I realized – not to overstate the obvious – that was exactly the point.

Running away is many people’s default method of dealing with problems, me included. Call it travel therapy or more romantically, more Henry James heroine, the geographical cure. But I prefer to think of it as the French do: pour se changer les idées. Travel is for changing one’s ideas. I was due to change a few of my own. And since psychic baggage is more cumbersome than Samsonite, especially when heartache is involved, I was doubly burdened. Leaving Toronto for Bangkok via Tokyo, my baggage wasn’t just emotional; it was also heavy with trafficked goods. That’s because I was a mule (admittedly, with rarefied cargo). I was a sailboat parts mule.

It wasn’t my idea, muleing. I was doing a favour for friends I was meeting in Bangkok, the starting point of our Southeast Asian travels. My friends, three years into circumnavigating the globe, were taking a break in Thailand to work on their sailboat. Twelve time zones away, in Toronto, I was recovering from a ruptured romance and, with the dark days of November bearing down, madly working to loosen the chains that bind, wrap the gigs that pay and bail on my family that expected me for Christmas.

The new idea I did have fell in the category of “moving on.” As clichéd as that sounds, it was literally thus. Having licked my wounds postbreakup, I knew it was time to simply snap out of it. I needed to stop cataloguing my mistakes, examining my misdirected hubris, wailing over the wasted time and start coming up with, well, some new ideas. This, I decided, should take 15 days. My sailing friends said 30. Not possible, I said: work, dog, money. “There’s something powerful about 30 days,” said Peg. It turns out, there is.

The timing of this trip – absenting myself over Christmas – hadn’t been intentional. But once our dates were set, the concept of sitting out “the season” began to have distinct appeal. It seemed to inspire, as well. “Your father and I should take off over Christmas one year, too,” my mother said – decidedly not what I had expected. The truth is it’s just straight up refreshing to break patterns, and it’s a bit of an adrenalin kick, too. As holidays go, it’s not just Christmas that has a hold on us. It’s the clichés of Valentine’s Day, the tyranny of the New Year’s Eve countdown. It’s release from expectations, a time-out from our individual, personal worldwide webs.

For months, we’d been planning this trip via email and fractured Skype exchanges. Throughout the process, our collective mantra had been pack light. At least, it was until I was asked to bring “a couple of things.” Then the FedEx deliveries began and eventually this: To: Anne From: Peggy

Subject: Weighty part warning Sorry, but the part we need you to bring is heavy! It’s about the size of your arm? It weighs about 10 pounds. We suggest you put it in your checked bags … sorry about that … Everybody I told about the “weighty part” had one thing to say: UPS. Nevertheless, I dutifully packed up the assortment of mysterious sailboat thingies, threw them in a duffel, went to the airport and checked my bags through to Bangkok. Air Canada didn’t mind; they didn’t even notice. But my layover was in Tokyo, and it was there, 15 hours later, that I found out what the Japanese do with mules manqué like me.

It was a civilized apprehension. As I blithely handed over my boarding pass, I was motioned aside to where a gaggle of All Nippon Airways staff encircled my duffel bag, its odd contents laid bare on a table. I can’t say I broke into a cold sweat; in my jetlagged haze, I’d pretty much forgotten I even was a mule. The weighty part, a metal cylinder – in fact, a hydraulic pump – had been removed from its box.

“Gas?” one official asked, pointing at it as if it were alive. Her colleague meanwhile studied the owner’s manual, written in every language other than Japanese. “Just air – for a sailboat,” I responded, making whooshing sounds and waves with my hands, unconvincingly. But their faces said “bomb,” and since my sign language and mule’s sangfroid were getting me nowhere, I resolved the situation in a way that surprised even me. I gave in, provided contact information and simply left it there.

It was the right call, too. In Thailand, at the time, political unrest had been building in the weeks before I arrived and, while I’m not normally cautious (ever), flying in with something that looked like a bomb in my bag didn’t seem wise. It was bad enough having to tell my sailing friends that their expensive sailboat part was stuck in Japan. Having to be bailed out of jail, too, wouldn’t have been cool. On the upside, I was unburdened, literally. That was a start, at least.

I tend to deal with psychic baggage by physical means. Basically, I run my problems to the ground, sweat out the noxious thoughts. But shoes are bulky to pack and, since I was breaking patterns with this trip, why not let go of ritual runs, too? That said, the first morning after arriving, Peg and I

set off for an early morning walk, the heat stunning even before 9 a.m., and found ourselves at Lumpini Park, an incongruous burst of urban greenery in the centre of the chaos of Bangkok, heavily populated at that hour with tiny grandmothers doing Tai Chi.

There, in a leafy corner of the park, we came across a little alfresco gym, a curious jumble of antiquated Nautilus machines and racks of old hand weights. A couple of guys lounging astride the benches were the only people on the scene, which was quirky by any measure. Visually, it was too good to pass up for a cellphone selfie session. But it was also a reality check. In the heat of the Bangkok morning, we might’ve managed a few random bicep curls, a few minutes pedalling a rusted-out LifeCycle circa 1984, but the slow motion of Tai Chi was quickly starting to make sense. And doing nothing at all appealed even more.

IT WAS A GOOD TRANSITION to the complete state of inertia that life on a sailboat in the tropics can represent. Peg had warned me. Once aboard, I finally got it. “Escaping” by sailboat is a paradox in itself: free spirits on the open water, you’re at once captives aboard. Space is limited, your movements confined; you talk to each other, you eat what’s there. And that’s the challenge – it’s up to you to liberate yourself psychically, regardless of the physical reality. Life is entirely defined by the elements. The slap and chop of the waves on the hull, sounding almost menacing at times, deliver that message: nature is in charge, not you – nature and the captain.

On a sailboat, there are two immutable facts of life. First, there is only one captain. Second, conserving water is a religion. “Once we’re underway, I’ll give you a little tutorial about using water,” the captain said to the neophyte (me). I read into this a great deal of portent. It was Day 1, and already I was washing dishes the wrong way. Fresh water – pumped into the holding tank, lugged aboard in gallon containers – is finite, precious, to be conserved at all costs.

In fact, there’s a methodology for all things water-related and even once fully briefed, the topic just generally made me nervous. I never did master David’s fresh water/salt water dishwashing system. Do you wash your face? Not really. And your hair? In the ocean. But then there’s the salt issue again. “Salt is toxic. It corrodes the boat’s decks,” David tells me, as I pull myself up out of the water, feeling quite the opposite, in fact. “You have to rinse and dry your feet,” he says, reaching for a little hose attachment. “Just little squirts though.” The Captain of Water Conservation is also the Chief of the Salt Police.

Some things are harder to control than others though, in life and on sailboats. The day we anchored off Railay Beach, an island paradise in southern Thailand, what we had in mind was a swim, a tan, cocktails on the bow and New Year’s Eve fireworks viewed from our own floating gallery. Instead, we might as well have been having cocktails in bikinis on a runway at Heathrow. Long-tail boats, as they’re called – wooden skiffs with old car engines rigged off the end on a pole – roared and howled within inches of us on either side, belching diesel fuel, shuttling tourists back and forth to the beach. In Thailand, emissions aren’t regulated, and neither is torture by long-tail boat. With dusk came the realization that our co-ordinates were off, too, and the fireworks would be almost completely obscured by the hills surrounding the bay where we’d anchored. It was a short night. By sunrise, the long-tails were back. We all wanted to escape our “escape” at that point.

Four weeks on the lam in Southeast Asia – Thailand, Laos, Cambodia – and not a hint of illness. It was almost anti-climactic. I was taking the full run of anti-malaria pills, half-wishing for mosquitoes to justify the expense. But no, instead, I managed to get injured having a massage.

If there is one single well-worn image associated with Thailand, it is the ritual of massage. Massage on the beach, couples massage, two-masseuses-at-a-time massage, candlelit massage, super cheap massage – all harmless. But Thai yoga massage? It’s another matter, particularly if you have an overzealous young ’un, a mini-Sumo wrestler, sit on your back while turning you inside out. Thai yoga massage is bodywork in which a therapist puts you into yoga poses accompanied by breathing instructions. You’re meant to leave feeling lighter, clearer, less stressed. “Much tension, Madame!” is what I heard repeatedly as my legs were being directed to points unknown. Yes, and much pain to come.

In the last week aboard, what had originally felt like a pulled muscle got worse. But as I lay in my berth in the morning, stretching my back, trying to figure out what it could be (no Internet, no WebMD), I became aware, instead, of what I wasn’t feeling – the other pain, the one I’d left home with. After close to a month spent off the grid, with eyes wide open absorbing so much newness, being present, being in the company of people you’re truly connected to – that is travel therapy, and it does change your ideas. It also brings things into perspective.

I spent the last 48 hours before my return flight ensconced in a really good hotel in Bangkok. By now, the anti-government activists had stepped up their activity, traffic guards along the city’s broad, teeming boulevards were armed and Twitter was telling me, I’d be smart to stay put. So I lay by the pool, my back in spasms but my stress levels remarkably low. You can choose to be happy or not. And choosing to be happy, that’s powerful.