How was your night?

I smile and hand the taxi driver the small piece of scratch paper with Thai words scribbled on to it that the hotel lady wrote out for me. I imagine it saying, "Hi, my name is Carrie. I am a mute, please take me to the bus." And it makes me laugh. He nods and I jump in, hoping it affirmates his understanding.

Success! The taxi driver pulls up to a bus, not a bus station, but one single bus. The employees do not speak any English, so we call our new boss, whom we have yet to meet, and hand over the phone so he can tell them where to let us out 10 hours later. I scrunch down into the uncomfortable seat and wait for the lights to turn off. Finally they do and I slip off to sleep hoping I am woken up and pushed off this awful bus at the right stop. 

The lights come on and it stirs me from my sleep. My neck hurts and my eyes still can't open all the way. I blink the world into clarity. I look at my watch. It is two a.m. We are all shuffled off of the bus like zombies in a prison. Our feet slap down on the steps as we step out into the night. In a daze I head for the bathroom.

Long rows of stalls line the wall, so many in fact I wonder if there is a mirror somewhere down there. I walk into the little stall and find another hole in the ground where the toilet should be, hmm, I thought I left you guys behind in Cambodia. Thailand you sly fox, you caught me with my pants down, and in this case the metaphor means I literally had my pants down and for the first time since I arrived I wasn't prepared. I had no toilet paper. 

I turn on the faucet and little cockroaches scream and scurry up the wash basin, I have just flooded their home and stirred them from their slumber as unpleasantly as I was.

I walk to a cafeteria and am handed a food ticket. 

"We are not eating," my stomach states in blunt refusal. 

"Oh yes we are," I respond, "we paid for this!" I walk down the rows of food and look at my options. Gray balls of mystery meat on a stick, mystery soup, or eggs and dried...something. 

"I think we are going to sit this one out."

"But you paid for this," my stomach mocks. 

"Shut up stomach it's 2 in the morning."

I walk back to the bus and curl up beneath the freezing cold air, and fall back asleep. 

At 5:30 a.m. we hear yelling. The bus employee points at us and points at the door. It's not 6:30, we must be at the wrong stop, we think in confusion, but our bags are already off the bus so like good little materialists we follow. Instantly taxi drivers swarm us, like bees to fresh honey. Half alseep, we turn round and round, "Mai aow." We say dazed and confused. We sit down and wait, for what you ask, I don't know, the sun to rise I guess. At 6:00 am our boss calls, "let me talk to the bus driver," he asks. See we would sir, but we are already off of the bus. "Where are you," he says, to which we shrug, which he can't see but he takes our silence to mean we don't know. "Hand your phone over," he demands, so we awkwardly hand the phone off to the nearest stranger. There is yelling, Thai always sounds like yelling, but this was definitely yelling. Apparently the guy on the bus didn't speak English or Thai because we were at the wrong stop and an hour away from where we were supposed to be. We lug all of our crap and jump into a taxi. Kevin hands the driver, once again, the phone. The driver stares at it cautiously, as if he doesn't recognize this foreign technology or the aliens that handed it to him. The same way I imagine a cave man might look at modern technology. The thing is this isn't an iPhone 12, it's simply a burner phone, a brick with numbers, oh and it has snake, I love that game. The driver finally holds the phone up to his ear silently. "Sawadee krab", Kevin prompts. The driver nods his head and we are off again.

Our phone rings again 20 minutes later, we pick up, "one more minute," the driver yells. Yet with another coversation we don't understand, this driver too has brought us to the wrong place. We get out anyway, because I don't know why, because this guy on the phone we've never met tells us to. One more taxi, whew, are you tired yet? This is all after a few miserable hours of sleeping on a bumpy chair! We load all our shit into that taxi and drive another 15 minutes, finally he pulls us up to Dreamland, yay, our dreams have finally come true! Wait no, we aren't going to dreamland, just getting into another car. This one belongs to our new boss. He looks at our stuff and back at his packed car, "I didn't know you'd have bags." He says. Really? He takes us back to his house to load a van with boxes and bags of random stuff; playballs, silly string, straws, toilet paper, candy, black lights, we are eager to see what these next few days have in store for us. He drops us off at a cement bunker hotel room that would be better suited for district 13 from the Hunger Games. He tells us to shower and he'll be back in an hour to pick us up for a four hour bus rise to Kanchanaburi. 

1 baht bus, 1 VIP bus, 2 taxis, 2 vans and 1 car ride later we arrive. After a miserable day of traveling, 150 young cheering faces greet us like we are celebrities. 

Buying a one way ticket to a foreign land has been an amazing way to learn to trust, and walk in faith. We take a step before we even know if there will be ground beneath our feet to catch us. There always is.