The Good, the Bad, and the Inconsequential

As I travel, I find that my day is full of doing in a way it only rarely is during my daily life at home. Once I have lived someplace doing the same thing for more than a month, I often get into a rhythm, with the regularity and predictability of the National Anthem. Sure, you can emphasize different words and sing it with different accompanying instruments, but the words and the tune remain the same.

Oh say can you see by the dawns early light... I wake up to music as my alarm goes off. Sometimes I snooze it and sometimes I just listen to the song before getting up to take a shower and eat breakfast. ...What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming... I drive or walk or moped to work. ...Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight... I begin my morning work and prepare for the day ahead.

And so on and so forth. I have a routine that stays more or less the same day by day until the last hours of the evening, where I sometimes go wild and change things up, like singers so often do with the last note of the Star Spangled Banner.

But not so during travel. There is no cruise control. Doing anything requires doing something. Finding transportation requires research and booking. Reading requires finding a comfortable, hopefully bug-free place to do it. Even eating requires searching for a good, clean (enough) restaurant if you don't want to just eat packets of chips or McDonalds.

I generally enjoy this doing. It can endow a small but significant feeling of accomplishment with each successful doing. The taxi is using the meter? That is what I am talking about! I found a nice cafe to read? Well done! I didn't get sick after that meal? High-five!

For me, this doing corresponds and interacts with happenings (meeting people, seeing a show, missing a plane), and together I find they form my memories of a place.


Over the past three days, the happenings have been playing a much more pronounced role in my travel than usual.

After I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, I made my way to meet up with Heng, a friend of mine who I met years ago in Hong Kong as we couchsurfed together and traveled around the city. He lives a ways outside the city, so I had to change metro lines twice to get there. As I arrived at the last interchange, sweating from the sweltering heat and the weight of my pack, I was told there was a train malfunction and I would not be able to get to Heng by metro. When I asked where I could get a taxi around there, they suggested I go back two stations to where I had just come from.

Frustrated but resigned, I got back on the metro and buried myself in my book. At the station, I finally found the taxi cue and lined up, glad to be close to an air conditioned car, with my nose still as close to my book as it could be without dripping sweat on to it. I finally got to the front of the line and dumped myself and my things in the cab and told the driver where I wanted to go. Only to find out that I had to get a ticket at another counter and then come and get in the taxi line. I dragged myself and my things out of the car and dripped my way to a second line at the taxi ticket counter. Feeling ready to shower and sleep and be done, I opened my backpack to get out my book and read my way through one last line. Only it wasn't there. I looked again, checking every pocket in the backpack and even in my wrinkled linen shorts. It was gone, left behind in that beautiful, comfortable, damned taxi that was already speeding away to someone else's destination.

Thus I lost my Kindle. Here, certainly, was a confluence of doing and happenings that would undoubtedly be remembered as "The Bad." The evening of sweat and a missing Kindle. It sounds like an Encyclopedia Brown story.


The next day I resolved to find a way to get a new Kindle. I was reminded of endeavoring to do the same thing five years ago when I first met Heng after my Kindle of the moment had broken during a hike outside of Hong Kong. Well, I had succeeded then, and I would find a way to do so again. With more than three months left of travel and many books left on my reading list, failure was not an option.

Online I found that there was one main company selling Kindles in Kuala Lumpur. It could send with one day shipping, but with my short stay that wouldn't be fast enough. I got in touch with them and was happy to hear that I could go to their office and pick it up there. I got a GrabCar (Malaysia's response to Uber) with the help of Heng and headed to a technology complex on the far side of the city.

The shop was far from obvious. The complex seemed more like an industrial park than anything else. I searched for the company, seeking out the words "Kindle Malaysia" on all the buildings. Nothing. I looked for the color patterns from their sleek website. Nothing. Well, nothing but the familiar sweat streaking down my face. I shouldn't have worn my light purple shirt, I decided, as dark splotches appeared around my neck and armpits. Finally, though, I find it, tucked away inside another office building and completely hidden from the outside. I approach the door only to see a sign on the door: "Out for Lunch 1-2." Another half hour of sweat never hurt anyone, right?

Once I finally get in to talk with the owner of the shop and his assistant, everything goes smoothly. More than smoothly, really. It takes a while because my card doesn't have the chip in it that most everywhere else in the world besides the US has already mandated. Nonetheless, it is a fun and memorable experience, as we shared our tastes in books and video games, suggesting authors and games to each other and making connections that I had neither sought after nor expected. After everything was finished, the owner took a picture (below) and helped me get a taxi into town.

The next day, I took the metro to the airport from Heng's apartment without any trouble. It was smooth sailing as I checked in for my flight to Penang, Malaysia and was pleasantly surprised to find out that they offered a free checked bag. I zipped off my day pack and positively flew through security, happy to be much less encumbered than normal. On the plane, my good fortune continued as I found my seat to be an aisle emergency row seat. After a short flight, I had no trouble getting on a bus to my hostel in George Town. It was only then that my luck failed, leaving me feeling like I had gotten punched in the gut and could only splutter and gasp in response.

While my bag was checked, someone had gone through it and stolen $251.70. Two countries earlier, in Thailand, I had taken out money in USD in preparation for Myanmar, where, until recently, the US Dollar was the only currency you could use to pay for tourist-related industries (you can, it turn out, now use either the USD or the Myanmar kyat). I had kept it perfectly flat (in Myanmar, people regularly refuse to accept USD if it is too old or blemished in any way) in a red envelope in my backpack, mostly forgotten now that I had arrived in Malaysia. I kept my USD, my credit card, and one USD worth of the currency of every country I had visited so far (Vietnam, Thailand, and Myanmar) in the envelope. And now it was all gone. Well, all gone, other than my credit card, 22,000 Vietnamese Dong (=1 USD) and a 10 Thai Baht coin (=.30 USD).

Gone was all of my US currency, 1,200 Myanmar Kyats (=1 USD), and 25 Thai Baht (=.70 USD). The rest seemed to have been stuffed carelessly back into the red envelope and shoved into my bag. It felt like my privacy had been violated and my trust betrayed. My trust in checked baggage, my trust in Malaysia, my trust in people. For some reason I cared about the lost USD least. It was the Kyats and Baht that really got to me. I had carefully set aside my favorite bills in both currency, planning my last day in each country meticulously so that I would have a single dollar's worth of currency left. I had kept the bills that, in my eyes, were the most interesting, the ones that had the most character. All for nought.

Thank goodness I had moved the collection of stamps I have been purchasing for my grandma into another location.


As I dealt with airport and airline bureaucracy for the next hour in order to file a report for the stolen money (only to be told, unsurprisingly, that I would not be reimbursed because I had not reported it when I was in the baggage area - even then I doubt I would have seen any sort of reimbursement since it was cash that was stolen), I pondered at how trips and travel are remembered. Looking back at these past few days in a month or a year, what would I remember? Staying with Heng, sure. Losing and buying a new Kindle, definitely. And certainly having my money stolen. Everything else, though, would be more or less forgotten. Not completely, no. But their individual memories would fade into a general feeling of place, not time. I will remember Malaysia as good food, hot, humid weather, and terrific diversity lacking throughout much of the rest of Asia. But the memories that make up that place will merge and meld and generally be forgotten.

All that is left is the Good, the Bad and the Inconsequential.