The Insulin Express

by Oren Liebermann

  “One dinar each water,” our hosts tells us. For us, this is a not insignificant problem. We normally carry around at least a bit of the local currency. In Israel, we always had shekels; in Prague, korunas; in Poland, zlotys. But we were told we wouldn’t need any money on this tour unless we wanted to buy some souvenirs, so we never exchanged dollars for dinars. The one time we did buy something—a blue and white scarf at a gift shop—we paid with a credit card, which wasn’t a problem at all since we were willing to pay an extra dinar for the cost of using plastic. Never in my wildest dreams did I think our hosts would charge us for water, especially when they offered us nothing else to drink with dinner. When we explain this dilemma to our host, he offers his own version of a solution.

  “One of you pay me now. Everyone else pay him later,” he says, shrugging. I knew the desert was a harsh environment. I just didn’t know how harsh. Our host doesn’t care who knows who or how we’re all connected or if we’ll ever see each other again. He just wants to get paid. Thankfully, the Norweigan in our group has the dinars to cover the waters, and we pay him back in shekels once we return to Eilat.

  The rest of our time in Israel winds down quickly. We have only a few days before we move east once again. We have completed the Europe, Africa, and Middle East portions of our trip. Now we head for the Far East and Nepal. Western civilization is in our rearview mirror. According to our plans, we will not see a familiar face again for five months.

  Chapter 8

  January 9, 2014

  13°44’07.6”N 100°30’42.8”E

  Bangkok, Thailand

  In some parts of the world, getting lost is an acceptable, perhaps even a desirable, thing to do. We thoroughly enjoyed wandering around Venice’s myriad alleys and canals without any clue as to where we were or where we were going. We spent a wonderful afternoon meandering through the labyrinthine streets of Paris, breathing in the cafe culture of one of Europe’s best cities. But never in a million years would I recommend getting lost in Bangkok. And not just a bit lost. I mean, I have no f’ing idea where we are. We are somewhere in the middle of one of the largest cities in Southeast Asia, a metropolis of fifteen million people.

  In Western imaginations, Bangkok is known primarily for two things: incredible street food and a booming sex industry. For the equivalent of ten American dollars, you can buy a plate of panang curry and see a young lady … well, never mind.

  I have decided not to finish the previous sentence. Well, that’s not totally true. I did finish it. Then I read it once or twice and promptly deleted every word that came after it. If this book is ever made into a movie, the second half of that sentence alone will make the movie inappropriate for most audiences. More importantly, if that’s the sort of literature you’re looking for, then you almost certainly aren’t going to want to read this book.

  On our first night in Bangkok, we venture out in search of pad thai and spicy noodle soup. Every one of our friends who has been to Bangkok—a list far shorter than I just made it sound—had raved about how delicious and cheap the street food was, and we were determined to find out for ourselves if they were exaggerating.

  We ask the girl at the front desk of our hostel where to find good street food, and she points us toward Chinatown. We figure she has to know what she’s talking about, because there are all sorts of street food stalls lined up outside of our hostel, but she doesn’t direct us to any of those.

  During the twenty-minute walk to Chinatown, Bangkok blows away every single one of our assumptions about Southeast Asia. We expected a small city, maybe some one-story buildings, and neighborhoods that resembled shantytowns more than urban dwellings. We basically expected Bangkok to resemble Nairobi, but with better food.

  We couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Bangkok is an ultra-modern city with its own collection of skyscrapers, congested streets, and angry cab drivers. No urban environ can claim to be a real city unless it has its own assortment of angry cab drivers, which is why Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a very real city while Rhodes, Greece—which was named the city with the friendliest cab drivers according to a British survey—is not.

  We wander down streets with names that make absolutely no sense to us—names like Thanon Charoen Krung and Phra Phiphit—hoping that we find something that identifies these streets as Chinatown, then hoping that we find something on these streets that resembles a street food cart. Unfortunately, neither of those things seems particularly likely to happen at this moment for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is that we don’t speak Thai.

  I have absolutely no idea where we are. We should be in the general vicinity of Chinatown, but “general vicinity” means one thing in Duluth, Minnesota, and entirely another in Bangkok, Thailand. I wouldn’t worry about the former. I currently find myself quite concerned about the latter.

  As a general rule, one of the most important things to do when you’re completely lost in a foreign city is to make sure you don’t look like you’re completely lost in a foreign city. But it becomes appallingly obvious that we’re doing exactly that at this moment. We wander in circles around the same few streets, trying to find anything that says Chinatown or anyone who looks like they may consider selling us a plate full of noodles they whipped up on the curb. We strike out on both of those objectives repeatedly. We find ourselves hungry and lost in a foreign city, 8,653 miles from home.

  A nice old lady walks up to us out of nowhere and asks us in very good English if we’re lost. We kindly reply that we are, and that we’re looking for street food.

  She tells us to follow her. She will take us to a good street food place. We ask her, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’ll take you. I’m on my way to church.”

  Alarm bells go off in my head. It’s fairly late on a random weeknight, and this equally random lady is going to lead us to a street food place out of the generosity of her heart? This sounds too good to be true. As she takes us down dark streets and back alleys, I become convinced that I will end up in a bathtub full of ice with one or both of my kidneys missing. That’s how all these stories end. For once, I don’t think I’m being overly skeptical about human nature because I spent eight years reporting. I may not be skeptical enough right now. She may not even anesthetize me before surgically removing my kidney(s).

  In four months on the road, we have only encountered one scam. A guy in Paris “found” a gold ring on the ground in front of us and tried to convince us to buy it. We didn’t bite. Before traveling, we trained ourselves to always be on guard against scams. But here we are, on our first night in Bangkok, and it’s starting to look an awful lot like another scam. And we have no idea how this one will end.

  Our spontaneous tour of Bangkok’s seediest streets continues with no sign of ending, at least not in the friendly, congenial way in which many tours are supposed to end: a woman in a weathered smile and company T-shirt tells us to enjoy our day and kindly points us to the receptacle into which we should place our tips. That’s not happening anytime soon. I’m not sure if it’s just my imagination or if the streets are really getting darker and narrower. We make a bewildering array of rights and lefts as we hurtle after this woman. If our guide’s intention is to get us even more lost than we already are, she has succeeded beyond her wildest expectations. It’s at times like this that I understand the genius behind Hansel and Gretel leaving behind a path of breadcrumbs to follow home, even if their shortsightedness in failing to anticipate the birds eating their bread crumbs was, to put it mildly, regrettable. Or Theseus using a ball of string to track his way through the minotaur’s maze. They were geniuses of foresight. We are about to pay for our stupidity with our lives.

  After about ten minutes of walking down random streets, our host stops and smiles at us. This is it. My final moments of consciousness before I am drugged and parted from my kidneys. I’m not sure if Cassie understands everything that’s about to happen. She seems very nonchalant about this whole thing, as if she’s
not nearly as suspicious as I am.

  “We’re here.” Before us is a small establishment, not quite a street food vendor, but not a full restaurant either. The cook prepares the food in a large cart positioned on the sidewalk, then serves it to the patrons seated at a few indoor tables. I am beyond relieved that we have arrived at a legitimate restaurant, especially when I notice the conspicuous absence of surgical equipment. This kind, random lady really did lead us to street food after all.

  No one at this restaurant speaks English, so the lady takes us inside, grabs us a seat, and starts making food recommendations. At this point, I become convinced she’s going to ask us to buy her food. I wouldn’t mind, because I know from months of travel that no foreign help is free. Everyone wants to be paid, especially when the currency is American dollars.

  She points at food others have ordered and describes what’s in it and how spicy it is. She doesn’t think much of our Western ability to handle Thai spices, so she orders our meals for us, making sure we sample a variety of tastes and plates. She tells us that the table next to us is a group of her fellow church members. After we order, she makes sure our waiter doesn’t try to rip us off on the check. The food is absolutely fantastic, and she chats amiably with us while we masticate our way through the different dishes.

  A series of somewhat related but completely random thoughts run through my mind. Primarily, what the heck is happening? Secondarily, who is this lady and why haven’t we cloned her yet? Tertiarily, is everyone in Thailand this nice? We have trained ourselves to believe that stuff like this simply doesn’t happen to Western backpackers. You are always the target of a scam and everyone is always out to get you, maybe not in a violent way, but because they love your currency, whether it’s dollars or euros or pounds. Those assumptions seemed to work well up until this very evening, when they all fall apart in a blaze of Thai friendliness—and not the kind that involves ladyboys and Ping-Pong balls.

  A few minutes later, the woman excuses herself and is about to leave when we ask her for a quick picture. Not once does she ask for food, money, or our kidneys. She is being good to us because she wants to. She is a genuinely kind person.

  As we talk about the evening back in our hostel, we realize we don’t know the woman’s name. She will always be a stranger to us, and yet we will always consider her our friend. How is that possible? I have no idea. It doesn’t make sense—and it makes perfect sense. It shouldn’t have happened. But it happened.

  It’s not all that uncommon to find a stranger willing to help in a foreign country—though not as common as finding a stranger ready to rip you off—but this woman didn’t just help us for a few moments. She completely devoted herself to our cause for an hour or more, even if that cause was simply finding a decent bite to eat for two famished travelers. In my book—the figurative book in my mind, not this actual book—that is perhaps the most noble of causes.

  I’m still not aware of what’s happening inside my body, and I dismiss the constant thirst as a consequence of the relentless heat of Bangkok. I’ve never experienced heat like this before, and I am always drinking water or buying a fresh coconut for a dollar or a fruit shake for two dollars to quench my thirst. My body is breaking down, still slowly, but that’s about to change. I will unknowingly accelerate the deterioration of my entire system with one of the most exciting parts of our entire year. As we race around the globe, I am racing toward my own personal judgment day faster than I can imagine.

  We spend three more days wandering around Bangkok, exploring the Golden Palace and the world’s largest reclining Buddha while eating as much street food as possible. We never visit Patpong, which is Bangkok’s internationally famous red light district. It’s not that we have no interest in seeing that area—as a journalist, I am obligated to be interested, or at least that’s the excuse I was ready to use in case someone snapped any compromising pictures of me—but we simply run out of time in a city that offers so much to see and do and eat. It’s a shame that we don’t have more time to explore Bangkok, but we will be back in a few weeks to explore the rest of Thailand when we begin our Southeast Asia tour. For now, our next stop is Nepal.

  Chapter 9

  January 17, 2014

  28°31’43.5”N 83°53’44.3”E

  En Route to Annapurna Base Camp, Western Region, Nepal

  I never expected that hiking in the Himalayas would be easy. Even the phrase “hiking in the Himalayas” presents an alliterative difficulty that you can’t say five times fast without stumbling. Performing any sort of activity in a location where the altitude requires five digits to the left of the decimal place is incredibly challenging, and I knew that when we signed up for our excursion into the world’s most imposing mountain range.

  I just never thought it would be this hard.

  Each step is impossible. Every inch feels like a marathon. And I have a long way to go until we reach our destination: Annapurna Base Camp. A small cluster of guest houses tucked into the Himalayas, high in the Annapurna range. No power, no heat, and, when the temperature drops below freezing and turns the water in the pipes to ice, no running water. Yet there is something about it that sounds delightfully charming.

  Annapurna Base Camp is our stated goal, the reason we’ve been hiking for four days. Our motivation for waking up early this morning and skipping breakfast is so we can make it to ABC, as it’s commonly called, relax for a few minutes, enjoy what we have accomplished, have a quick breakfast, and start our descent.

  Maybe it’s because I haven’t eaten breakfast. My body has become accustomed to tea and porridge with fruit every morning. It’s not a massively nutritious serving of edibles, but it’s a hiker’s meal. Enough food for fuel, but not so much it weighs you down. Now, without the benefit of calories to burn, I’m absolutely gassed. My speed registers one step above crawling, plodding along like a crippled three-toed sloth. Every movement is deliberate. Right foot forward. Left trekking pole forward. Left foot forward. Right trekking pole forward. Repeat.

  Maybe it’s the altitude. We’re up at thirteen thousand feet, higher than I’ve ever been before. I grew up at the luxury of sea level, and my house was only a fifteen-minute bike ride to the New Jersey beaches, so my lungs are used to a rich, endless supply of oxygen molecules per cubic meter. Four days ago, our hike started at three thousand feet, which wasn’t too bad at all. And it wasn’t bad for the next two days, until we crossed ten thousand feet. At these elevations, everything becomes harder, gradually at first, and now all at once.

  Or maybe it’s that I’m out of shape. The simplest explanation is often the right one. Sure, we walked all around Europe, but this isn’t Europe. Italy and France and Spain have no mountains compared to the Himalayas, and certainly not where we were in those countries. Towering peaks surround us in every direction, reminding us how difficult and how inhospitable this area has been since the very inception of human history. Eight of the ten highest mountains in the world are within a few hours of us. Annapurna I—the mountain toward which we relentlessly climb—was the first eight-thousand-meter peak ever climbed, three years before Everest. The Alps don’t compare. Neither do the Rockies. Nor the Andes. And don’t even mention the Adirondacks.

  Not once do I imagine that something far worse is happening inside my body.

  When I can’t move fast enough to warm up my body, my hands start freezing through my gloves. I pound my hands together, put them in my pocket, and pump my arms up and down, but nothing works. My hands are beyond feeling cold. They hurt like hell. Our guide gives me his gloves to put over my own, and the pain of nearly frostbitten fingers slowly subsides. More than once, I think I won’t make it. Can’t make it. Cassie is well ahead of me, and I am barely lumbering along. When Cassie looks back, she thinks I’m not moving.

  I pray in every language I know, and when I run out of prayers, I make up new languages to pray in. We are hiking in fresh snow, and every few steps I punch through a layer of snow and find myself standing in three
feet of bone-numbing cold. I had laboriously dried everything the night before, but every stitch of clothing is wet again. The snow soaks my pants, my shoes, and then my socks. This wasn’t exactly the hike I had in mind when we signed up to volunteer in Nepal.

  We landed in this country five days ago and were immediately assaulted by a small army of Nepali cab drivers at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport. They wield a mob mentality as their blunt-edged weapon, swarming every foreigner immediately after clearing customs. They insist you put down your backpack, right here, yes please, thank you, only so they can pick it up, carry it five feet, and demand a tip for their service. Whoever picked it up gets the tip. Every other cab driver yells at you, screams at you, and berates you to give him the tip. We are immune to their guilt-tripping shenanigans, but the Chinese college students who share a bus with us succumb to the insanity and hand over a small wad of Nepali rupees.

  Nepal made our list of countries from the very beginning because it was our chance to volunteer. Although we’ve always believed that anyone who wants to travel can make it happen, that really only applies to Westerners and people from developed, relatively wealthy countries. Our minimum wage of $7.25 an hour amounts to a small fortune in most countries. So, in exchange for us being able to see the world, we wanted to give back.

  A few years ago, Cassie considered teaching English to Buddhist monks in Nepal for a summer. She found Alliance Nepal, a volunteer organization, and spoke with the manager, Krishna Timilsina, but wasn’t able to commit to that much time abroad. While planning our trip, Cassie reconnected with Krishna to arrange our volunteering stay. We signed up to teach for five weeks, then hike for one.