Bed bugs, an almost-broken leg & a British boy
After more than a decade of non-stop travel, I had an epiphany: my life is a Wes Anderson movie filled with awkwardly hilarious moments in beautiful and perfectly symmetrical settings. These kinds of stories are so insanely random that there’s no way you could make them up. (Seriously who gets food poisoning FOUR times in a month?) Despite the humiliation and pain, one positive side is that I ultimately survive these mishaps albeit with scars, some witty Facebook status updates and a good story.
My trip to Bali earlier this year was another prime example of my Wes Anderson philosophy.
My alarm went off at 5:45 a.m. Despite my grogginess, I was excited to go for a sunrise photo walk around Bali. I was even more excited for the hot British boy who was joining me.
I cut on the light in my bunk in the hostel. That’s when I saw it – a dead bed bug on the sheets. There were hundreds of bites covering my thighs in a pattern that looked as if a 3-year-old had haphazardly drawn lines with a crayon. I panicked, looked around and killed the only two other bugs I saw.
This—sadly—wasn’t my first bed bug rodeo (damn, Cancun in 2014) so I knew the protocol – washing all my laundry (Ironically, I’d just washed it allthe day before!) and switching to new accommodation. (In my defense, this place was really nice and had great reviews.) There was no point in freaking out now because I couldn’t do either until later in the day when people were awake.
Plus, I had a hot British boy waiting on me. We’d met a few days before in the hostel and shared similar interests.
As we headed toward the rice fields at the edge of town, the sun started to peak over the tree line. We shot a few frames of a red motorbike parked by a row of palm trees and chatted about photography and life. The place was postcard perfect—we were literally walking through a movie scene. The only thing missing was Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman.
One of the craziest things about traveling is how quickly you connect with people and how it leads to insightful conversations. I’ve met strangers on trains and after a 10 minute conversation felt like they understood me more than people I’ve known my entire life.
We took a path that cut through the rice fields. And, that’s when it happened— I broke one of the cardinal rules of the third-world: ALWAYS look at the ground when you walk. I was distracted by my phone and, suddenly, my right foot plugged downward into a large knee-deep hole in the walkway. (In Asia, large holes like this are pretty common even on city sidewalks.)
The boy was a few steps ahead of me and heard my scream and turned around.
It took me a minute to realized that I—thankfully—hadn’t broken anything. Both of my knees were scrapped up and it was clear I’d have a hefty bruise on the back of my right leg. I could still walk. My iPhone screen was scratched but not cracked. Thankfully, my camera escaped unscathed.
The boy asked if I wanted to go back. I laughed and said “No, let’s keep going.” It was too pretty to go back. I started shaking my soggy right shoe with the same disgust that a cat shakes his leg after a surprise encounter with water. The water looked significantly more sanitary that the black goo I stepped in in India the time my foot slipped through the bars of a knee-deep sewer drain. (Yes, this has happened to me twice in life.)
For the next 1.5 hours, I would just start giggling uncontrollably at my misfortune as we walked around the town. As the heat started to set it, we headed back to our hostel to grab breakfast.
We turned onto one of the main streets in the town and walked down a narrow sidewalk. Despite our conversation, I kept my eyes peeled on the ground to avoid any surprise holes. I had finallylearned my lesson or so I thought until something smacked me hard on the bridge of my nose.
I had literally walked into a thin, horizontal foot-long metal rod outside of a shop that looked like it normally held a small decorative flag. Again, I can’t make these things up.
There I was walking down the street in Bali with a spiderweb of bed bug bites across my thighs, dried blood on both of my injured knees and a fresh scrape on the bridge of my nose. What are the odds that these things could happen in a two-hour period to the same person? What force of nature have I offended?
[Later that day, I noticed someone put an empty water bottle over the tiny flag pole. This realization offered a bit of relief because I clearly wasn’t the only person to have an unfortunate run-in with the ill-placed pole.]
I splurged on a nice hotel for my last three nights in Bali to resolved the bed bug issue. The woman at the laundry place was confused why I was back so soon but gladly took my money again.
Despite my clumsiness, the British boy still hung out me with after that morning, which was slightly shocking. We hung out multiple times a day for the next few days. We talked for hours and hours about traveling, photography and our similar lives.
He got up at sunrise with me to shoot the local morning market on my last day in town. As a photographer, I find it very difficult to be friends with other photographers especially if you are both making a living by your camera. The profession is cutthroat so there’s usually a streak of jealousy or arrogance that’s prevalent, which is why I tend to avoid befriending many photographers unless they are humble, live in other places or shoot vastly different subjects.
While this boy was an unpretentious hobbyist, he was clearly a stronger photographer I was. He loved film and had two Leica’s, the Ferrari of the camera world. He edited his photos instantly, which to me seemed a bit insane. (I only edit immediately if money is involved and drag around for months to edit photos I shot for fun. No matter how you much love something, there’s usually some part you despise about it. For me, it’s culling down my overload of images to the perfect ones. It’s one of my flaws for sure.)
He loved photography because he appreciated the beauty of the light and the moment. The same things that 20-year-old Anna loved when she first picked up a camera. This love had diminished over the years and turned into to resentfulness at times. This is the byproduct of all the years I spent working three jobs and endless 14-hour days in the aftermath of the 2008 recession and wondering if it was even possible to make a living with my camera again or
The five months I was in Asia, like any long-term adventure, brought forth some surprising insights and rekindled my passion for photography. This trip made me realize how far I’d come since my first trip to Asia over 10 years before. All of those years of working multiple jobs had paid off because it allowed me to save enough money to plunge 100% into freelancing full-time with a safety net. It was the only way to control my money fears and keep it from corrupting my love for my art. Nothing hinders creativity more than worrying about money. I’d also invested a lot time and effort into building a strong set of contacts and quality clients.
I got on the plane to leave Bali with the same messy thoughts as I had 10-years prior. While I was wiser, the emotions were the same and sadly, there was a British boy on my brain, which was a reoccurring theme of my 20s. This time I was sad because he didn’t kiss me.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not trying to marry this boy or anyone. I just wanted him to kiss me and make plans to possibly meet up again in another part of the world in a few months. The chemistry was there. We talked for hours and hours. He was a bit shy and maybe socially awkward, which made him hard to read.
Of course, said boy is terrible at keeping in touch with people, which he professed the day I met him. Perhaps, he was really just scared away by my awkward yet hilarious bad luck. Either way, I tried to keep in touch and invited him to meet me in Portugal in September but never got a response. It’s like he dropped off the face of the earth. Either way, I wish him the best and wonder if he’ll ever read this.
Even though I don’t get the boy, I always survive to go on another adventure that will hopefully one-day land me a Wes Anderson movie deal.
Most of all, I walked away with one of the most valuable lessons in all my travels—a story doesn’t have to end well to be a good story. The best stories are awkward, hilarious and slightly painful.
