At Home in the World

by Tsh Oxenreider

  In the morning, we play bus roulette, see where the wind takes us. Our phone apps tell us where to go, and we hop on a city bus and get off at Fort Canning Park. The highest elevation in central Singapore, it rises not quite two hundred feet above sea level. It is a green respite in a neat and tidy concrete city full of old trees and nineteenth-century cannons, fortified walls, and Gothic gates, a reminder that Singapore was once a European occupation. Though we’ve already walked miles and miles throughout Asia, we spend the morning walking even more, pretending this park is a forest. The kids play games through the sally ports, hidden doors in the forts that once allowed spies to come and go undetected. We watch older couples speed walk down the paths in matching jogging suits.

  For lunch, we find a nearby café called Eat Play Love, where families dine on Western food and then afterward, children make crafts at the community art table while parents sip cocktails and coffee. Our kids glue cardboard, use scissors, and wind yarn around their fingers for the first time in three months.

  Lunch takes hours, and afterward, I sense the need for a serious break. I’m trembling, weak, overstimulated. We take a bus and head back to our hostel for mandatory quiet time, where everyone in the family is required to stay on their beds with curtains drawn and do whatever they want so long as they don’t talk. It’s mildly successful. At the end of the hour, my head still spins, my muscles ache, and the kids are all talking at the same time in an echoey concrete room with no rugs or art to cut the reverberation. I feel my insides spiraling downward, wonder if my outsides will soon follow suit. I am swimming in cacophony.

  Kyle is cut from different fabric than I. For twelve years, we’ve traveled together, worked side by side on business projects, and run a household together. But we are very different people. I like to think of myself as flexible, that I’m good at going where the wind blows, but when I need to adapt to unsavory conditions that test my senses, my body and brain overload.

  Kyle, however, is the epitome of adaptability. He makes small talk with taxi drivers as they take convoluted routes and tell about their family exploits. He lets people wrangle for priority in front of him as he queues in line, because why fight it—this is simply how it is done in their culture. He deals with a sensory overload of flashing sights, pungent smells, and dissonant sounds because, well, it’s Asia. That’s what one does when traveling in Asia. Kyle is the masterful cross-cultural explorer. He also knows me better than anyone, and knows when I am about to shatter.

  “Kids, let’s go out. Tsh, you stay here,” Kyle says. Right now, there aren’t eight more beautiful words in the English language.

  Kyle is the parent who pushes our kids to try hard, new, risky things. He’s confident in his conviction that the heavy backpack is good for our six-year-old son’s muscle tone, no matter how much Reed flails in theatrical fatigue every time we walk through an airport. He doesn’t flinch from the symphony of childish whining during hours of wandering foreign metro systems. Kyle is the parent to meander through Singapore sans agenda with the three kids.

  I insert earbuds, start my sleep playlist, turn down the lights, and read a book. Twenty minutes later, I strap on my eye mask and take a long nap, hugging the white linens and spreading out starfish-style on the queen-size mattress.

  Several hours later, Kyle returns with coffee. It’s instant, and it’s from the hostel’s break room, but it is caffeinated, and that’s what matters right now. He is the yang to my yin. He anticipates my needs, my moods. I thank God that we met on a dirt road in a Kosovar village fifteen years ago.

  Outside, the sun sets, and we pack our bags for the ninth time in three months. Finn asks if we can keep his construction paper and cardboard creations from lunch yesterday. They’re cumbersome and oversized, too big for any of our packs. I hesitate.

  “Yes, we can keep them,” Kyle says.

  The next day, we board a plane to Australia. We shoulder our packs, each carrying our weight. Kyle carries an extra paper bag, one containing masterpieces of crayon and cotton ball.

  A Market Street in Asia

  Lambent lights peddle in lines and squares

  Hawking janky batteries and meat-on-sticks,

  Some still writhing in final gulps of life.

  I tread in a sea of dark-headed waves

  With noodle dough jump rope swung between men,

  Thwapping in cadence to calls and crows.

  Playthings rat-a-tat on wilted boxes, mine for eight quai.

  The melon, the meat, the additive music

  Pulses me onward, sagacity my sails.

  As for me, coruscate shops and sales pale

  To earthy mettle, sullied soles, and raw, sticky-still bark.

  Light wanes behind me.

  Onward.

  PART III

  The greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time.

  —Bill Bryson

  6

  AUSTRALIA

  It’s a strange phenomenon, listening to Bing Crosby croon about a white Christmas while driving in the summer on Highway 1 along the Queensland coastline. It’s Christmastime, but it’s not winter, and it’s anything but white. You’re stopping for ice cream on the way to the pool, or you’re letting your shorts dry on the clothesline while your kids jump on the backyard trampoline. But there’s also a Christmas tree inside, Santa-shaped cookies are baking in the oven, and Bing’s there, singing about his white Christmas.

  We arrive in Australia from Singapore in early December on a cheap, region-specific airline with stellar ticket prices because they don’t serve water on the flight. Or rather, they do—for five dollars per bottle. Had I known we’d be unable to slake our thirst for an eight-hour flight, I would have snuck contraband water in our backpacks. Thankfully, this is an overnight trek, so the kids mostly sleep while I try to ignore my thirst. Five hours in, I cave and crack open a bottle of water.

  Our first layover is Sydney, then Gold Coast (with the delightful airport name Coolangatta, named after a schooner that wrecked there in 1846); then we catch a northbound train to Brisbane, where we spend the night in a dingy, fluorescent-lit motel near the airport so we can catch an early-morning flight north to Cairns. This means that we fly almost four thousand miles south, then hop a train, and another plane, and trudge another fifteen hundred miles back north. It is the equivalent of flying from Los Angeles to New York in order to get to Dallas. Convoluted itineraries often save enough money to make voyages possible.

  It is a jolt, landing in Cairns. The previous twenty-nine hours were spent moving our bodies through airport terminals and train stations, restlessly sleeping and refueling with foreign fast food with jet lag as a familiar friend. We traveled at night, so when we walk up to the car rental desk in Cairns on a bright Friday morning, the woman behind the desk is an alarm clock of cheer. I need coffee.

  “Good morning! May I have your confirmation number?” she asks with a smile. Kyle reads her the combination of numbers and letters.

  “Ooh, I see that you’re American. Whereabouts you coming from?”

  “Well, we’re from Oregon, but we’ve been in Asia for several months now,” Kyle answers.

  “You don’t say!” she says as her fingernails clack the keyboard. “I spent some time in Portland a few years back. Beautiful part of the world, that is.”

  My ears perk, both at the name of a familiar place and at the opportunity for a breezy conversation in my native tongue. “What were you doing in Oregon?” I ask.

  “Oh, some family lives there. Let’s see . . . We went to the big science museum, and drove to the coast and then the mountains. My goodness, was it spectacular.” She prints papers, shows us where to sign, hands us keys.

  “Where are you staying in Cairns?” she asks. We tell her the name of our place, and she draws our route on a map. A yellow highlighter squeaks our itinerary to the other side of town. “All right, mates, seems you have all you need, but give me a ring if you need
anything. Have a fab time in Queensland!”

  The five of us walk through the parking lot to our sedan, arms heavy with backpacks dragging behind us like stubborn dogs, eyelids heavy from the glare of a happy sun. We buckle up in a black sedan, inhale the smell of new car, and fidget with the console buttons to connect the Bluetooth signal to my phone. Familiar bands start playing—Portugal. The Man and Lord Huron. Kyle and I look at each other, wide-eyed.

  After three months in Asia, all this feels strangely close to home. Kyle pulls out of the parking lot and heads down the left side of the road, a habit already cultivated from Thailand.

  For the first time in our lives, we will celebrate Advent, St. Nicholas Day, and Christmas at summer’s apex. It’s the heat of the yuletide, and we’re sweating to the carols. When we planned this portion of our trip in Oregon, we looked at the map and calculated our general whereabouts for December, realizing we’d be near a culture that recognized the Christian holiday. We have spent a fair number of Christmases in Muslim-majority cultures, and while it’s nice to escape the Western commercialism that’s taken over the season, it’s hard on the kids and conjures aching nostalgia in me. During those holidays abroad I missed “Jingle Bells” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” piping through the grocery store speakers and wishing a merry Christmas to the cashiers.

  This is not essential, and grateful for the chance to travel, we were more than willing to forgo a familiar culture during Christmas. But when we first announced to the kids we really, truly would be traveling for a year, the idea was made more palatable to them knowing we could celebrate Christmas in a culture that felt like home, even if it was midsummer.

  There’s something about this holiday that evokes a longing for home and belonging more than any other time of year. I am curious, however, if it’s our long-held familial traditions that make us wax nostalgic, or if it’s our customary calendar rhythms. Do we tend to ache for customs of hot cocoa by the fireplace because we’ve gone through the swelter of summer and the decline of fall? Or does Christmas itself imbue us with sentimentality? We will better understand our human longing to be home for the holidays in six weeks’ time, when we leave Down Under and trek back up the latitudinal ladder. Africa is looming.

  Of course, a summertime Christmas is only strange to us because we hail from the Northern Hemisphere. In the past, Aussie friends have asked me if singing carols through the snow and curling up by the fireplace to watch Jimmy Stewart is a commercialized cliché, or if it’s a literal thing Americans do. In reply, I asked them why Australians don’t use local palm trees instead of fake evergreens for their holiday tree, or why they haven’t written summertime carols. Their answer: There are, indeed, Australian carols, and a few people do decorate alternative Christmas trees, but for the majority, Christmas is more about the magic, the dreaming, the pretending of a faraway winter wonderland. Santa’s from the cold, after all.

  This is Christmas four days after a summer solstice: it’s home with cognitive dissonance. We wear swimsuits on St. Nicholas Day.

  I had been to the northeastern state of Queensland, Australia, before, both times on work assignments. I knew the first time I stepped into Oz that my clan would soak up the flora and fauna; the Australians’ love of water; their casual, sunglasses approach to life. From their beer (lager) to their dress (casual), to how they embrace a laissez-faire take on time, most Queenslanders I had met before seemed—well, an awful lot like my people.

  They prefer the great outdoors and wearing flip-flops (which here are called thongs), they’re proud of their beer and ice cream, and they employ an inordinately sizable amount of local vernacular in their verbal cadence. My swimsuit is a cozzie, a bather, or togs. Kyle wouldn’t be caught dead in a budgie smuggler, but I’m still not sure if he wears boardies. It takes me several weeks here to learn that my backpack wardrobe also contains a singlet, strides, a cardie, a flannie, a windcheater, sunnies, grunders, a frock, sandshoes, and of course, thongs for wearing in the arvo. A dag I wasn’t, nor was I a bogan.

  Reed says a few days after our arrival here: “I like Australians. They almost speak English.”

  We’re here for six weeks, and it’s Christmas, so we’re giving ourselves carte blanche to enjoy good things. Good things sometimes show up in life cloaked as guilty pleasures—dark chocolate, well-crafted mattresses, a forgotten show now on Netflix—and like this entire trip, being in Australia feels like luxury. Luxuries, even relished frugally, feel like an homage to an overabundant lifestyle after my decade-long inclination toward thrift.

  Ten years after our start of global, nonprofit employment doing important work in hard places, we struggled with letting ourselves enjoy things. Several years ago, when we lived in Turkey, we spent one Thanksgiving in Paris because it was the cheapest international flight out of Izmir. We spent weeks agonizing before buying the tickets. What will people think? Should we overcompensate for going to a fancy place by staying in the sketchy part of town? Perhaps eat Thanksgiving dinner at a cheap café as penance? (Spoiler: there are no cheap cafés in Paris.)

  This is still my default way of thinking about luxuries. After earmarking travel money for years, we no longer feel guilty about this round-the-world trip as a whole, but it is still mostly an exercise in frugality. And here we are now, in Australia, right after affordable Southeast Asia. It’s one of the world’s most expensive countries.

  Part of our ability to enjoy Queensland our first week here is through a work assignment. I’ll be writing several pieces for the North American division of Queensland’s tourism board, which means our job as a family is to learn how to frugally enjoy northeast Oz, home to some of earth’s most stunning land and seascapes. We will experience some touristy sights and excursions, so guilt-free and in the name of work, we dive in.

  Australia is home to Uluru, the world’s largest monolith and named by white settlers as Ayers Rock, planted squarely in the continent’s center, where 35 percent of all the land is effectively desert. Alice Springs, the closest town, is almost three hundred miles away and a five-hour drive through the Outback, where the second most common fatality to drivers, after heat exhaustion, is a collision with a kangaroo or a camel. The continent-cum-country is largely sparse and uninhabited by people, but is home to 5,700 different animal species, 80 percent found nowhere else in the world. Scientists aren’t sure whether there are 100,000 different insect species, or twice that number, but odds are good that many are fatal, because Australia has more things that will kill you than anywhere else on the planet. Ten of the world’s deadliest snakes live here, and five of the most lethal creatures in the world—the inland taipan (the most venomous land snake on the planet), the Belcher’s sea snake (one hundred times more toxic than the taipan), the cone snail, the box jellyfish, and the blue-ringed octopus—reside in the northeast state of Queensland, where we begin our visit.

  There are two significant natural wonders to see in this corner of Australia, and a man named John will show us one of them this morning. He is a local Aboriginal guide in the Daintree Rainforest, the world’s oldest at some 135 million years.

  “My childhood home is just down the street here,” he says after we walk through the entrance to the national park. “I went to school a few kilometers away with all my cousins and siblings, and my grandparents’ grandparents lived in the same village where I still live.”

  John is about fifty years old, stocky, with thick hair; he is wearing khaki shorts, a polo shirt, and hiking boots. I’m mildly disappointed he’s wearing Western clothes instead of native Aboriginal attire, then kick myself for even having that thought.

  Our kids are entranced by him and his cheerful disposition. “Kids, kids, come over here, and we’ll first walk around the campfire three times before entering the forest. This place is sacred territory to my people.” He is as excited as a giddy child on Christmas to introduce us to his homeland. We walk in a bungling line around the smoky fire; I cough and feel an extra trickle of sweat trace down
my back. The smoke smells sweet, like earthy tea, and wafts into the trees, disappears.

  John asks the kids to choose walking sticks from a nearby cluster of trees; then we gather around him for a short homily to the woods. “As we enter the forest, stay silent and listen to the trees. They have stories. They knew the dinosaurs now buried in the dirt by name.” I look to my children, and Reed, the literal one, raises a perplexed eyebrow.

  “That means these trees are really old,” I whisper in his ear.

  “The Daintree tells us the story of the world,” John continues. “Well, the part of the story that doesn’t involve us humans. Nowhere else in the world can you see still-living examples of all eight major stages in evolutionary history, all right next to each other. This forest, my friends, is the ultimate natural history textbook.” He closes his eyes and we watch as his antennae perk, listening to his native soil. The kids are quiet and find John mysterious, like an eccentric uncle. I bow my head, offer a quick prayer of thanks to be here.

  Later, I read UNESCO’s description of the crowning of the Daintree as a World Heritage Site, verifying John’s assertion. Indeed, the age of the pteridophytes, the age of the conifers and cycads, the age of the angiosperms, the conclusion of Gondwana (the ancient supercontinent before it split into today’s continents), the origin of songbirds, the mixing of continental biota between Australian and Asian plates, the extreme effects of the Pleistocene glacial periods on tropical rain forest vegetation, and the most important living record of the history of marsupials and terrestrial vegetation—all are on display here, inhaling and exhaling together, its scent of sweet decay wafting in the air.