End of a new friendship
Inevitably things don’t always work out on the road as you pictured them during the dreaming and planning stages of the trip. In this instance it was one of things I most looking forward to witnessing. And one of the most essential.
When I left England I remember having such romantic notions of Katie playing happily with local children in every village, town and city we visited. The owners of the first hotel we stayed in, which was the SonetApart Hotel in Ovacik, Turkey, had a son a little older than Katie and she would have fun playing with him in the afternoons and evening when he got home from school and had done his homework. The owners of the next guesthouse we stayed in had a son a lot younger than Katie who she played tentatively with. After that though it was another two weeks before we she socialized with another child. We were following a traditional backpackers route along the southern Mediterranean coast of Turkey with an obviously younger crowd, families mainly favoring the bigger resort areas.
We traveled the coast for two weeks before getting a night bus to Goreme in Cappadocia. Another single mother arrived the following day with her two children of similar ages to Katie and it was wonderful, we were both relieved that our children had external focuses and we took it in turns to watch each other’s children to give the other a break. Both our traveling plans had been thrown, we had intended to go east to Mount Nemrut, they had been planning on traveling with a friend but had been let down. Our children didn’t want to part from each other so we decided to join together as a group and retrace Katie’s and my steps back to the coast. This arrangement worked well for two weeks before the novelty wore off and the bickering set in.
For most of the years journey it was just a snatched hour or two here and there or the odd evening playing with the children of the owners of whatever establishment we were staying in. Saying that though one of my most enduring memories is of Don Det in Laos where we had a little wooden cabin on the banks of the Mekong and Katie would play every day with the seven year old whose family ran the small ramshackle collection of huts. They would play soccer with a scrappy makeshift ball, build mud castles on the banks of the Mekong and in the evening Katie would eat her dinner sitting crossed legged on a rattan rug on the floor with the rest of the family, glued as they all were to a popular Lao soap opera.
It wasn’t the fact that this small piece of Asian tranquility was costing us only $2 a night, or that we were discovering the joys of living basically, having to use a squat toilet and cold water shower across a mud road from our cabin, or that I have never seen a purer starry night sky in my life as when I looked up from my hammock, or being woken every morning at dawn by the sound of the gentle bells from the fishermen’s boats that jingled jangled as they went to work the river for the day, that has caused those priceless ten days to stick in my memory so.
It was watching Katie patiently make herself understood using only facial expressions and hand movements, in a place where no one spoke English and the hours she spent building and rebuilding little castles and moats and animal sculptures out of the gloopy mud of the Mekong, and the look of sadness on each little girls faces when it was time for us to leave.
No one needed a common language to understand.
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Tags: katie, Laos, making friends, Socialisation, Turkey
