A thousand miles from home

Six thousand miles from home and there I was, wading through the murky waters of the Taman Negara National Park, in a futile attempt to catch a fish by hand in the darkness. Spread out in a shaky line, we were far more likely to fall over a submerged log than to feel the flicker of a slippery tail slide through our fingers, evading our grasp.

The jungle was eerily quiet, the sky full of stars we wouldn't see back home. And there beside me was a girl I had never met before, from the very same town that I was from. We had been invited by the jungle guides to accompany them on an expedition in a rickety old canoe to an isolated river-side beach, and it was here that we were fishing for our supper.

Thirty minutes later, with a couple of our fellow fishermen threatening to give up or drown, we made our way slowly back along the snaking river to find a roaring fire, prepared in anticipation of a triumphant return. Miraculously our host, the local fishing hero, had had far more success than us, and three fish now sat roasting in the open flames, sticks piercing their bodies.

A miracle? Or a sly unseen jaunt upstream, aided by vital nets, whilst we scrambled our way hopelessly through the muddy water with about as much skill and grace as a hippopotamus attempting ballet. Regardless, there we were, and we laughed at how one day we'd bump into each other at home and remember this night, so far away, so far from anything we would experience there.

Then it appeared, a device I had never seen: a cylinder, with a thin line of smoke rising slowly inside, and a pipe from which our hosts were taking turns to inhale. And it made sense; the shockingly thin frames of the tour guides around us, the sunken, hollow eyes that fixed on nothing and drifted so far away, those moments before each tour when the guide would disappear to 'sort something out' and reappear looking so startlingly full of energy.

Meth to wake up and 'jungle cigarettes' to fall asleep, the lives of these men were ruled by a cruel cycle that they couldn't escape. Sitting there, surrounded by the dense jungle and beautiful night sky, the realisation hit that behind the scenes, behind the tours and the adventures, and the stories we backpackers seek to create, are the hidden stories of those who live in the places that we visit. The struggles that they try to hide, struggles that can be found all over the world. And with that, sitting over six thousand miles from home, the world suddenly felt very small.