How I traveled 20 years ago

My old pal PRiley recently forwarded me this email I’d sent out to friends and family back on February 17, 2005, when I was bopping around Asia on a trip that would launch my career as a travel writer. I wanted to share it as a throwback reminder to how it felt to explore, to wander, and to wonder.

Subject: Q: Where is Matt Gross?

Hey,

I don’t know if you’ve asked yourself that question in the past few months, but it’s something that I’ve been grappling with on a day-to-day basis. I guess I’ve kind of come unstuck: no fixed address except at Verizon and Yahoo, backpacks and suitcases and plastic bags and old magazines left with friends all over Southeast Asia, and a full deck of prepaid SIM cards for my trusty Nokia 3200b.

Occasionally, though, there is an easy answer to the question. Right now, for instance, I’m somewhere over the South China Sea. They’ve just dimmed the lights, and the chatty French tourists behind me are quieting down after a meal of barbecued pork and too much red wine. Me, I’m still recovering from an epic lunch of foie gras, veal, and scallops at a Bordeaux hideaway out in the wilds of Ho Chi Minh City. My stomach is still full, five hours later, and I’ll soon be landing in Hong Kong. This much I know, and not much more.

Will I go to Taiwan after the weekend, and will I get to see Jean there before she heads back to Ohio? Where will I stay in Shanghai, if and when I actually board the plane that’ll take me there? Do I return to Vietnam on the 3rd or 4th or 5th of March, and will I be there long, and will I make it back to Mui Ne, before I take the bus (the plane?) back to Phnom Penh, where I’m supposed to be taking Khmer lessons and combing the National Archives for historical tidbits?

I suppose I should be nervous about my lack of schedule, about the fact that United refuses to let me reschedule my return flight to JFK, about my fast-dwindling bank account, but I can’t quite work up that level of anxiety. And I know that this freedom, such as it is, is something to, well, cherish, for it’ll be gone soon enough. But for now, it all just feels... normal. Weirdly normal. I float in and out of these monstrous cities, the immigration officers barely giving me a second look, and I buy a new SIM card, call up the people whose phone numbers you sent me long ago, and meet them for noodles and, inevitably, a Tiger beer (thank you, Singapore).

Once in a while—or maybe a hell of a lot more frequently than that—certain things nag at me, things I should be getting back to: the apartment that that German couple is (I hope) still subletting from me, the novel I’m supposed to be researching but which has (temporarily, I hope) taken a backseat to my journalistic/financial ambitions, the beautiful Taiwanese girl waiting with infinite patience (I hope!) for me to get this wanderlust out of my system (temporarily) and reunite with her in Ohio or New York or wherever. Oh, and the typo-ridden copy at DailyCandy. Can’t forget that.

But then I wind up touring a pepper plantation run by ex-Khmer Rouge guerrillas, or boating past islands that look like grains of rice or ripe mangoes, or explaining to a motorbike taxi driver for the nth time that I don’t yet have, want, or really even like children, or sampling every rooftop swimming pool in Saigon, or stumbling over a quartet of pint-size gangsters with fake .45s—and that’s when the real world seems so unreal, and I can no longer remember the shape of my old cubicle, and my memories of the morning screech of the F train are displaced by the more immediate cacophony of honking Honda Dreams...

Captain Georges says we’re landing soon, so it’s time to shut down and cease interfering with the operations of this Airbus 321, but I’m going to leave you with another batch of inexplicable photos to illustrate my semi-fantastical journey through time and space.

Cheers,

—Matt

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Read a Previous Attempt: I Wish I Could Trust You

Though I despise the current administration, I did not participate in this weekend’s political protests. This story kinda gets at why: