a blog by Julia Escano
Please don’t let my long-winded rants and run-on sentences fool you; I’m quite a decent writer (when I need to be).
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Thick fog nestled lazily on Salt Spring Island’s fields the morning we left for Calgary, as if they slept on a cradle of land. The sky was as blue as ever and the air sharp and nippy. Everything had a whisper of freshness and light, a hint of quiet awakening.
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“It should be here somewhere.” Sandy slowed to a crawl on Highway 4, looking for an abandoned logging road that should take us to our campsite by Lake Kennedy. According to the internet, it was a few kilometers before the Tofino-Ucluelet Junction, yet we had already reached the junction and turned around. We never saw…
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I’ve been gone a whole year and before I go on to the main point of this post, I first owe you guys an update. It’s not because my year had been painfully boring that I haven’t shown up here. It’s quite the opposite. 2015 has been pretty amazing.
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Four AM. The world was sound asleep. It was pitch black beyond the lone bulb on my room’s terrace. I sat beneath the light, my bags packed, waiting for the driver to take me back to the Bali International Airport, about two hours away. The epic journey, Indochina 2014, was about to end.
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There were tiny knots in my stomach as I watched Bali’s landscape morph from the concrete blocks of the urban jungle into green pastures and rice fields of the countryside. With every corner we turned I felt the ropes of comfort thin out and stretch, getting ready to snap at any moment.
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In keeping with our trip’s theme of painful country transfers, our way from Myanmar to Indonesia was a long and dragging affair. It wasn’t without its highlights though. It started with the best bus ride of my life.
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There was something cinematic about the clunking of hooves against pavement as the horse drew our cart across Old Bagan. Dawn was coming, and across the indigo sky the sun slowly stretched its rays in streaks of pink and orange. We were still laughing hysterically at the turn of events right after we got off…
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Fantastical and exotic images filled my mind as our plane descended onto the runway at Yangon International Airport. Myanmar was my most anticipated destination in our trip because it seemed so far removed and untouched. Having just “reopened” to the rest of the world several years back,
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My chest tightened as the bus pulled up into the 4am frenzy of Bangkok’s Southern Terminal. Three quarters of the journey was finally done, but ahead lay the most precarious leg yet.
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My friends Nica, Bernice, and I left Dien Bien Phu in a whirlwind 24 hours after our fateful arrival. We were properly scrubbed, rested, fed, and properly ready to get the hell out of there. We boarded the bus to Luang Prabang, Laos at 7am, and excitedly waited for the next leg of our journey…
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Life as a Tumbleweed 