My neck hurts.

It’s been hurting since three days ago when I awkwardly swung my backpack – which is the size and weight of a very fat five year old – onto my shoulders.  “Use a chair,” David had advised before we parted ways in Phnom Penh.  He, a veteran of back injuries is also acutely aware of my backpack’s mass, having helped me pick it up countless times over these past six months.  But as luck would have it, there was no chair near the baggage carousel in Chiang Mai and so swing away I did, incurring this neck injury that no Thai massage has been able to help.  Yet.

So that’s the story of my neck.  Now how about the story of why I was alone in the Chiang Mai airport to begin with?  Yes, that one is (slightly) more interesting.

Travel, it seems, is drawing to a close.
I could caveat this with all sorts qualifiers and loopholes (because never say never!) but the fact of our present status remains the same: David is in San Francisco exploring some serendipitous and appealing employment possibilities and I, no career prospects to speak of, am in the ponderosa-studded mountains of Northern Thailand.

Since the very beginning I’ve had a curiosity about solo travel.  Perhaps a product of Eat Pray Love, which I never read nor watched but whose message was adequately delivered via the film previews: woman + travel + hyper-colored culture = personal transformation.  And, well, I’m always up for some of that.

So it is with visions of grandeur that I land in Chiang Mai, a destination selected as much for its cooler temperature as because it is previously charted territory and thus sure to provide a soft start to this venture.

I want to feel exhilarated.  I want to swell with independence!  But instead I’m standing in front of an ATM in the Chiang Mai airport with a sore neck and a calculator in hand feeling unreasonably stymied by the exchange rate.  I hear David’s voice in my head advising me to take out as much as I can so as not to squander the ATM fee but not more than I think I’ll need because those currency exchange shops are a screw!  Thai Baht: 31 to the dollar.  I do the best I can.

The cab ride is lonely and that it follows familiar streets only seems to exacerbate this feeling.
The guesthouse is well-placed but too quiet.
The room is clean but feels empty with the contents of only one backpack spread across the floor.
The cafe next door where I head for a nightcap is lively but the empty seat across the table leers at me.

This state of melancholy spills over into the following day.  To distract myself I Skype my sister in Boston, who graciously entertains me with tales from her Friday night (she is 23 – every Friday night is a story).  And when that ends, I’m still alone.

Which, again, is the point.  I get it.

If I don’t have your sympathy yet I’m not surprised.  I barely have my own.  I consider throwing in the towel and heading back to Bangkok where SFO-bound flights are a dime a dozen, and then I feel ashamed of myself.  The whole thing has me facing a rather embarrassing truth, and it’s this:

Travel is not what I have liked most about Travel.

Yes, the sites have been brilliant and the people lovely and that feeling every time my passport is stamped is something like a heroine high (not that I would know).  But at the bottom of it has been something very mundane: I was constantly hanging out with my husband, a man I happen to like quite a lot.  And of course I took that for granted.  Even when I thought I wasn’t, I was.

Now, alone in the world, I’m suddenly aware of how enormous it really is.
David and I traveled like two book-ends on either side of a very short shelf, creating a safe space that was as much ‘home’ as anywhere else.  But without him the world is a place of dizzying proportions.  Everywhere I look there are gnashing teeth: planes feel more likely to crash, and when, one morning I wake with the slightest of flu-like symptoms there is no one to curb my imagination.

It’s definitely malaria.  I need to get tested.  No wait, there’s no time for that, I just need to get to Bangkok.  I heard the best hospital in the world is in Bangkok, I just need to go there.  But which IS the best hospital?  I don’t know.  How would I know? Would the cab driver know?  Could I just say ‘take me to The Best Hospital In The World’ and he would do it?  But what if I don’t even make it that far?  What if there is extreme weather and no planes can land in Bangkok!?  Or what if I do make it but the hospital is full?  It being the best in the world, probably a lot of people go – there’s a line out the door, I’m sure…

A few minutes into this I’ve determined, with near certainty, that I am going to die of malaria on a filthy Bangkok sidewalk beside a woman roasting corn on the cob.  I will be a cautionary tale told to travelers averse to insect repellent.  Yes, it’s toxic and will probably cause cancer but did you hear about that poor girl from San Francisco?

I finally get a hold of myself, deciding that I don’t feel bad enough for it to be malaria. Surely near-death feels far worse.  In an effort to further bolster myself I think of the solo-travelers – women – I’ve met on this trip.  Laura from North Carolina who traveled Southeast Asia for three months, and Noor, the young Dutch woman who trekked to Annapurna Base Camp alone – sans porter, no less.  Surely I can last a few days more.

So instead of a flight home, I purchase a bus ticket to Pai, a place recommended to me by a girl I met the first time we were in Chiang Mai – a college girl, I should add and man I feel old pointing this out but it’s a detail worth mentioning.

Because Pai is exactly the sort of place an American college girl would recommend.

If Thailand is the plushly carpeted living room of Southeast Asia, well then Pai is that sofa with the goose-down cushions.  Travel does not get easier than this.  Located very near the border of Myanmar this town could be my college campus.  It could probably be yours.  As I write from a cafe with floor-to-ceiling shelves of scraggly used books, to my left sits a man with dreadlocks as thick as my finger, sipping beet juice and doodling in a leather-bound journal.  The pedestrian-friendly street is lined with thatched-roof cafe’s advertising homemade yoghurt, Kampuchea and ‘slow breakfast’ (as opposed to…?).  There are an inordinate number of tattoo parlors, all of them thriving.  And in case there was any question, wooden signs inform you that “Happiness is Here.”

The whole thing is almost too much; if I was on my year’s only two-week vacation I’d feel gypped, quite frankly, to have bussed three hours through the mountains for this.  But I didn’t come here for a cultural experience; I came here for what it is I’ve found: cool breezes and endless country roads to run and good coffee and a quiet riverside guesthouse.  I could almost stay here for weeks, drinking up the warm, pink evenings and the mornings that dawn milky and crisp – but I’m making plans.  Having survived that malaria scare, I’m booking flights, not home but farther from it.

I have no ambitions of Eat, Pray Love proportions.  You won’t find me in India, and this certainly won’t take a year.  But I’m finding there is something to be gained from even a very short time alone in the world.  Already I have a new respect for its breadth and an understanding of my own capabilities within it.  I’ve been forced to self-manage a state of complete and utter presence (thinking of tomorrow only has me itching to book that flight home).  I’ve grown comfortable with the silence and I’m reminded what it was I used to like about time to myself.  I’m working on reigning in my over-active imagination.  Calming my paranoia…

But above all of that, I’ve realized that as exotic and fabulous as world-travel has been…I’d just as happily stroll the familiar streets of San Francisco if it means I can do so with my husband.  David, do you see how easy I am to please?  I know, right?  I’m just as surprised as you.

People tend to talk to you more when you’re by yourself, and that’s been nice.  At dinner the other evening I chatted with a young German woman who explained she’d been traveling alone for ten months.  I asked what possessed her to do such a thing and she looked at me for a moment like she wasn’t sure how to answer such a stupid question.  “I just didn’t have anyone to come with me,” she finally said.  I felt impressed.  Inspired.  And incredibly lucky.