Beyond the Vapour Trail Read online

  In another part of the city we visited the rehabilitation program for these broken families. Women or men were learning vocational skills such as weaving and making toys or clothes. A woman there showed me the process of creating felt, dyeing it and making items to sell. Among other things, I bought a tiny pair of handmade felt slippers for Molly at home.

  If the families can’t be reunited, the children are helped with education. Formal schooling is the first option, or non-formal education for those who have slipped too far behind the system.

  But still other children end up in prison. Boys as young as twelve can be picked up on the street and put in jail with the men. World Vision saw another opportunity and created a halfway house, right beside the prison building. My colleagues took me there and I found the gate unlocked. Inside were a series of traditional gers surrounded by vegetable gardens, sitting almost in the shadow of the prison compound. A group of teens, who had not so long ago been sitting in cells were now living in this comfortable ger with fresh food, and opportunities to learn a vocation behind an unlocked gate. I looked up at the prison windows. Looking down at me through the bars were some young lads who hadn’t yet earned their opportunity to come out here, to what must have appeared to them as paradise.

  A group invited us in to their round ger, its wooden door and trim covered in colourful decorative painting. There was a beautiful filtered light inside, lovely and airy. The young guys sat in a circle with me. In the past in Australia I had met many teens in trouble with the law, yet this was instantly different to what I had expected. There was no defensive sneer. No sense of attitude. The group responded earnestly and enthusiastically. Whatever the streets and prison had taught them, they were able to see this opportunity with clear eyes and the intention to make it, to build a future. They loved working with their hands in the garden. They each told me about what they were learning and hoped for. They loved the trust they were given, and so were a little taken aback with my next question.

  ‘The gate is unlocked. Do any of the guys just decide to disappear?’

  Pause. One young guy with closely cropped hair answered intently.

  ‘Why? Where would we go? We would be back on the streets. When we are caught we would end up back in there.’

  ‘We wouldn’t get this opportunity again,’ another added.

  I then learnt that World Vision was setting up a similar halfway house outside the women’s prison. It hadn’t crossed my mind that homeless girls were also being locked up. It was a beautiful program for these children who had been abandoned, then caught and locked away, out of sight, forgotten by the world. I struggle with US terminology around the justice system. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, but terms like ‘convicted felon’ and ‘incarceration’ are distasteful to me. They somehow seem dehumanising. So these children, still with bright eyes, who never asked to have their families fall apart, who had to simply survive on the harshest of all streets, when they should have known love and nurture … they were reminders that the world sometimes simply needs to find a place for those whose world falls apart.

  Because when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall …

  This puzzle of fallen children had another piece, which we saw on a different day. It led us out of town again. Back to the unbroken horizon of green, dancing with butterflies and moths, and no fences. What’s interesting about this vast open space is that no-one really owns it. If you find a water source, you can live wherever you like.

  We drove off the main roads into a flat, isolated valley rimmed with hills. In the beautiful randomness of happenstance, a flowing stream meandered gently through the valley as if it had nowhere particular to go. There were no real creek banks; it looked like it was running through someone’s lawn. We passed a group of children, some clothed, others obliviously naked, splashing joyously under the summer warmth. Nearby a little timber building was puffing smoke through its tiny chimney. Horses grazed. We followed the stream until we arrived at a set of four ger, and a group of youth eagerly awaiting their international visitor.

  These young people had also come through the Lighthouse program, rescued from the streets as children. Not being academically inclined, they had elected to farm. They didn’t need to buy a farm. They only needed a ger, some training, some horses and then they could find their own space. Anywhere. There were no adults here, and although this group was supervised and receiving skill acquisition, they were effectively self-managing. The five boys and three girls ranged from about fourteen through to nineteen. They had some decent potato crops on the go, but more importantly to them, they had horses.

  They invited me inside. Within their round white ger the wall lining was blue, and the red painted framework that supported it looked like an umbrella with perhaps too many ribs. A few chairs, beds, a table and a dresser topped with water or milk containers. The teenagers shared their gentle hospitality in the form of their own produce. All were variations on a dairy theme. I mean, this was a serious dairy experience. We began with airag, the fermented mare’s milk which is so widely drunk. It tastes … fizzy. If mare’s milk is not fermented like this, it has a forty per cent higher lactose content than cow’s milk, which is a strain for anyone mildly lactose intolerant. And if that doesn’t worry you, if you drink it unfermented, they told me, it works a charm as a laxative. You can put that in your book of home remedies. Fermentation breaks down the lactose, and this provides a pretty good source of nutrition for people who mostly farm horses. Even if it is mildly alcoholic. That’s a bonus or a drawback, depending on your perspective.

  This was followed by some yoghurt, and finally some curds. But to intensify the dairy experience, the curd was served in little homemade bowls made from dried milk. Try to imagine milk gone completely hard: that was what the bowls were carved from. This came with a little spoon which was also carved out of dried milk. Normally my toleration for so much dairy would have been surpassed by now, but looking up I saw the eager smiles of young people proud of the work of their hands. On the strength of those satisfied faces I found in this moment a celebration of what was once lost, and now was found. I took photos of them with their cat to show my kids. These young people decided this was the highlight of my visit: that their cat was going to be famous in Australia.

  We stepped outside again to see their animals grazing under the blueness of a vast sky. Suddenly the leader of the horses decided to cross the stream. The rest of the herd immediately followed, breaking up the reflection of sky and mountain on the water into furrowed patterns of light blue and green. The hoofed feet evoked centuries and centuries of horses breathing in and wandering through the vastness of an unfenced landscape.

  Travel Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, Part 3

  It was a long trip with multiple destinations. I arrived at Manila airport and was eager to reach the hotel for some sleep. I quickly changed some money and headed out to grab a meter cab. A kind traveller spotted me waiting for the taxi and told me I had left my passport with the money changer. Oops. I dashed back to get it.

  There was a security guard at the door.

  ‘Passport, please.’

  ‘Yes, sorry, I just came out a moment ago and left my passport with the money changer. I just need to go in and grab it.’

  ‘Passport, please.’

  ‘Um, yes, but my passport is inside. Look, I just arrived and accidently left it there with the money changer. Can I please just go in and pick it up?’

  ‘Passport, please.’

  I stopped and thought. Yes, I’m in the Philippines. This man speaks English.

  ‘I can’t show you my passport now because it’s just over there, inside, at the money changer behind you. I just left it there a few minutes ago. So if you don’t let me in I can’t show you my passport.’

  ‘Passport, please.’

  This was becoming like a Monty Python sketch. ‘None shall pass.’ His job probably didn’t pay much, but at least it was simple: no-one gets in without a passport. He understoo
d that, at least.

  ‘Look, are we speaking the same English language? Why do you keep asking me for my passport when I’ve already explained to you several times that it’s inside?’ I was now turning into a John Cleese character. ‘I can’t magic up a passport out here if I left it inside.’

  Another traveller standing nearby, not Filipino, explained to him exactly what I had said, in English. Somehow comprehension dawned or a bulldog-like commitment to procedure took a back seat and he let me through.

  For travel mistakes, passports deserve their own category. There are things you may want to avoid that might not be listed in the helpful booklet provided by the immigration department.

  Things you shouldn’t do with your passport:

  Forget to take it to the airport. Yes, I’ve done that. Twice. Well, the second time it fell out when I tried to put it in my jacket pocket as I was leaving a hotel. The hotel staff found it on the floor and drove thirty minutes to the airport to give it to me, and yes, I gave that driver a generous tip.

  Don’t give it away to a complete stranger.

  No-one would actually do that, though, would they? Well, OK, that one is good enough to deserve a separate story. Later.

  Don’t get it a little bit wet.

  I don’t know exactly what I had done – perhaps something spilled in my bag – but one of my previous passports looked as though it had coffee stains at the seam. The problem is this makes it look almost exactly like the passports that have fake pages inserted and results in immigration officers eyeing you suspiciously. Don’t do this.

  Don’t get it extremely wet.

  I was in Zambia, only about an hour or two away from the Victoria Falls. When I finished my work the staff kindly drove me down to Livingstone to see them. As we approached the falls, I was struck by the sight of a cloud rising high up from the ground in the distance – ‘The Smoke That Thunders’, the falls were named in local language. In the car park, I asked if I would need my passport. The driver hesitated. ‘Yes, you might.’ So we headed towards the smoke that thunders.

  ‘You should hire a poncho,’ my colleague suggested.

  ‘No, I don’t mind a little water,’ I said, dismissive and ignorant.

  ‘Well, I’m hiring one for you,’ said my patient colleague. ‘You will need it.’

  But really, I had no idea. Around March this grandest of all falls is at its heaviest. It was almost totally invisible under the spray. There’s a little bridge on the opposite side from the falls that stretches between two cliffs, the Knife Edge Bridge. As I crossed, it was like being inside a car wash. Not only was it heavier than the strongest tropical downpour I have ever been caught in, it was coming from every direction: above, below, the sides. Completely exhilarating. The water on the open-sided bridge was ankle-deep as I crossed. I had my camera under the poncho and realised it simply wasn’t protected, so on the other side I quickly removed the batteries. It was too late. My thirteen-hundred-dollar Canon DSLR was fried.

  I was sopping wet, and so was the passport in my back pocket. I opened it up. The photo had turned into an abstract watercolour. It was very pretty, but it was not in any way apparent that this was a photo of a person. I realised the coloured smear would not get me home, and that I would inevitably wind up at the consulate sorting it out. It was still wet hours later when I went to check in for the local flight from Livingstone to Lusaka. Thankfully the staff didn’t even look at my photo, but it was just a local flight. I arrived at Lusaka airport and handed over my passport to the attendant at check-in. Incredibly, she did not check the photo page. I almost began to hope I could bluff my way through, but this was never going to happen with immigration staff.

  I handed over my passport to the immigration officer and waited for her to notice. She did not check my photo page. No-one did. I began to think I was the ‘victim’ of reverse discrimination. Surely if I was African they would have scrutinised my photo. But when I got to Dubai, the official immediately spotted it.

  ‘What’s this?’ he said, not impressed with my watercolour.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, it got wrecked. But I’m on my way home now to get it fixed. What else can I do?’

  I was trying to do a Jedi mind trick, hoping he’d just agree with me. Amazingly, he shrugged and let me go. When I finally arrived in Australia, thanks to the miracle of electronic passports, the chip allowed immigration to view the original image. The official wasn’t particularly impressed with my watercolour photo page either, but hey, I made it home.

  Travel idiot warning #235: Don’t saturate an Australian passport. The ink in the photo runs.

  Getting through an airport quickly is a set of skills you can develop. I’m a very fast walker – I mean, when I walk beside a moving walkway I’m much faster than the people standing on it. Yes, standing on it, blocking the way. They always stand in pairs, blissfully oblivious, just as people do on escalators in the lead-up to Christmas when you just want to get in quickly and get out again. Why do people stand still on walkways and escalators and then pay to exercise at the gym? (Are you allowed to tip them over the edge?) But when I get off a plane I still usually pass most of the people from my flight in a large airport, without tipping anyone over the edge of anything.

  Security is a pain, though. It can slow you down. Being organised, I walk up to the X-ray machines with my phone already slipped into a side pocket of the bag, slide out the laptop in a single move, and pass through metal detectors without a thought because I don’t wear a belt or carry anything metal. The laptop slips back in, and I zip it up as I walk. Gone.

  Unless there’s someone in the way in the midst of a sudden realisation that the queue they have been standing in is for an X-ray machine. And since they are now next, it might require some kind of action.

  In Addis Ababa airport, there is a final security check at the gate. I never line up at that point if I’m travelling to west Africa. I sit back, watch and enjoy the show. You might as well, because the line can take an hour, and you have nowhere else to go.

  It goes like this. The first man in a big colourful west African gown will go through the detector. Beep! He will look a little confused, then under instruction take off a big gold chain from around his neck. That must have been the problem. Then he tries again. Beep! He will pull a phone out of his pocket and try again. Beep! Now he decides to take off his watch. Beep! This time he takes off a gold chain from his other wrist, and this continues until the security guard checks him over fully, and he winds up pulling out an assortment of bling and an amazing amount of other metal in the process. It’s quite amusing.

  Amusing, except that the next woman to go through does the same thing. Beep! She takes off one item of jewellery and beeps again … So now you become curious and look at the people waiting in the line behind her. None of them are looking ahead and preparing by taking off their bling. It’s like some kind of incomprehensible intrusion into their world when they reach the metal detector, because, unexpectedly, it goes beep! Yet none of the staff think to instruct them to take off their metal before they go beep! Only when that line disappears do I finally bother to go through.

  You might be getting the impression that I spend too much time at airports.

  But getting through immigration is a challenge if you have to purchase a visa on arrival. Make sure you get off the plane quickly because the queues … move … slowly. Sit near the front of the plane if you can, and if you have the forms already filled out you’re well ahead. It’s a process in many countries that feels like it was instigated in the 1940s and no-one has since thought about whether it’s efficient or even all still necessary. Whatever they do is because that’s the way things are done. One person takes your passport, someone else takes your money, someone else sticks the visa on and gives it to you. In some countries each of these processes means you stand in a separate line to get your shiny, often one-page visa. (Ah, curse them for taking up a whole page. It’s as if some bureaucrat got all patriotic when the graphic artist pro
duced their big eagle or lion and wanted it enlarged. Yes, they look great, but they fill up your passport.)

  When I arrived at Baku airport in Azerbaijan after a very long flight, I was keen get through the airport procedures so I could hit the hotel for some sleep. My line took forever and then I discovered it wasn’t the line for visas. That’s when the nice immigration man suggested it would be much quicker if I just left my passport with him – who did I work for again?

  ‘World Vision.’

  ‘Ward Vision.’

  ‘No, World Vision.’

  ‘OK, Ward Vision. I will send your passport and visa to Ward Vision tomorrow.’ And with that he waved me through to Azerbaijan.

  He looked sincere and had an honest, helpful face, so I agreed. So I walked into Azerbaijan without a visa.

  Or a passport, come to think of it.

  It felt a little naked. Of course, no experienced international traveller would ever just give their passport away. It’s property of the Australian government, it might be sold on the black market, and you need it with you at all times.

  I must have been completely jetlagged. What the hell had I just done? I now couldn’t leave the country. I had no evidence that I had entered legally. This wasn’t good. I didn’t even have his name.

  Travel idiot warning #404: Never give your passport away. Even to someone who looks nice.

  I took note of the time so I could complain to the police as part of my explanation of why I was in their country without a passport. They must have records of who was on shift, I thought. But then I realised my self-righteous indignation wouldn’t cut it. I had entered their country without a passport.

  As it turned out, my passport turned up at our office the following morning, with the visa inside, just as he had promised. Nevertheless, never give your passport away.