The Thailand Realization

Sometime in 2022

A few years ago I went to the Azores accidentally.

I didn’t realize Portugal had these small islands in the middle of the north Atlantic Ocean. When I saw the cheap flight deal on the web, $400 round trip from Toronto, Canada to Ponta Delgada, Portugal, I thought it was just a few hours away from Lisbon.

I bought the ticket within minutes, afraid they would sell out. They never sold out, those tickets were available for weeks!

I never looked at a map or Googled where Ponta Delgada was. I assumed it couldn’t be far from Lisbon. I booked it, nine days, my first international solo trip.

When I told my friend Leah about it she chuckled and told me I should have looked it up! My other friend, Colin, said he’s heard that it’s a very beautiful place but its population is primarily comprised of sheep and cows.

When I arrived it was 8 p.m. at night in February, and quite warm. I found a bus that dropped me off somewhat close to my hostel; when it spit me out at my stop, the town square was ominously dark, save for dim streetlights at its edge. I saw a man walking to the front steps of a church, and a woman crawling on the ground beside him. The look of it frightened me.

I walked quickly through the square, down a narrow street to my hostel. When I entered using the code provided, nobody was inside to greet me; two other travellers sat under a fluorescent light in the otherwise dark kitchen eating dinner. I found a room and chose a bed. The place felt deserted. *What the hell am I doing here?* and also, *I’m hungry.*

Someone else, young guy, entered the room; at that moment I realized I was not the only one in this room, and another bed was slightly dishevelled - signs of claim in the hostel world. We said hello, and he invited me to dinner with him, so we drove. In a pitch black cobblestone street en route, he stopped and showed me a water faucet embedded in a decorative, tiled wall. Atop the faucet was a quote:

“Dessa água não beberei.” I will not drink this water. He told me that it was the Portuguese equivalent of never say never.

We enjoyed a Portuguese steak dinner in the smoking section of the restaurant. He puffed a cigarette between sips of espresso afterwards at nearly 11 p.m. We had double-parked the car but didn’t hear any aggressive shouts during our meal. Over the course of our courses we discussed candid truths about our lives; satisfaction with our jobs and pathways, odd things about our childhoods that we still wonder about. When we got back to the hostel and said goodnight, I never saw or heard from him again. Instead I was woken in the morning to the sound of an early newcomer to the room, just past seven!

Her name was Amel, and we spent several days adventuring together on her layover back to Canada. I’d never heard of the name Amel before, but I loved it. I thought it was so beautiful (I still do). We had a lot of fun. On one of the days we went to an iron water hot springs, where the water was orange. We spent enough hours in the warm water chatting and sitting around to forget what day it was and what planet we were on. When we walked around the gardens afterwards, I remember remarking:

“This sort of looks like Thailand.” Amel agreed and said she saw what I meant. Even now I can envision some of the photos of Thailand I have seen that reminded me of it, even though I had never myself been to Thailand. I’m not fully certain but I think that Amel also had not been to Thailand before.

In some ways, social media had stripped the novelty of certain places around the world for me. It can be great to witness the beauty of a place through photographs of course, to see where loved ones and strangers alike have visited and add places to our own bucket lists. Still, since the day I had the Thailand Realization, I try to avoid looking at photos of places I’d like to visit. As someone who has a pretty open bucket list, I prefer to hear about places anecdotally rather than visually, hearing about how a place made someone feel rather than seeing how it looks. In fact, even being told how it looks is fine with me - it’s nice to let the mind conjure up ideas that are replaced by reality later.

For this reason, I do not include browsing photographs of a place in any of my travel plans (although, sometimes I will do a look at Google Maps Satellite to see what the streets look like and whether an area appears safe or not). Similarly, I usually only watch trailers for movies I don’t actually want to see.

Novelty can be one of life’s finer offerings.

By the way, I still enjoy looking at proud photographs that people have taken. I still have some of my own photography kept on this website. For some reason that feels different than giving myself a preview of what places look like before I go to visit them.

Feel free to send in thoughts on the piece, I'd be interested to hear them: