Vagabond Tales: Shady Back-Room Deals With Questionable Thai Gangsters

by Kyle Ellison on

There is a Nikon camera lens on the ocean floor between the Thai islands of Phuket and Koh Phi Phi.

No, I didn’t see it while scuba diving with leopard sharks in the warm waters of the Andaman Sea (I swear they sneak right up on you). I know it’s there because I put it there – with my foot.

Despite my knack for getting off the beaten path, the ferry ride from Phuket to Koh Phi Phi is not one of those moments. In fact, it’s about one of the most heavily trafficked tourist routes in all of Thailand. When boarding the overcrowded ferry between Phuket and Koh Phi Phi, it seems as if every alcohol loving, sex-searching, half-dreadlocked backpacker from Melbourne to Montreal is crammed on board right next to you.

For those not familiar with the Thai islands, if you’re looking for isolation and relaxation, go to an island like Koh Mak. If you find yourself heading for Koh Phi Phi, there’s a good chance you’re looking to get weird.

Crammed onto the small ferry with about 150 other backpackers, my wife and I were squeezed over to the port side of the vessel where we were forced to sit on the outside of the boat with our legs dangling over the side – questionable seating at best, yet strangely romantic.

Leaving the resort-lined shores of Phuket behind, we marveled as Thai long-tail boats darted through the turquoise waters. A little over halfway into the two-hour crossing, the lush, limestone formations, which provide the backdrop of Koh Phi Phi, began to become visible on the tropical horizon.

“Hand me the wide-angle lens,” chimed my wife, the ever-talented photographer of us two. “I want to get some shots as we come around the corner of the island.”Reaching for the camera bag, which houses our various lenses, I handed my wife the wide-angle and watched as she removed the 18-55mm lens and placed it in her lap. Then, in a moment of horror, I watched as that same lens decided to roll down her legs and fresh off the side of the vessel.

Instead of opting to reach down with my hand to try and catch the lens, I opted instead to try and trap it against the side of the boat with my bare foot. All I accomplished, however, was managing to catch the lens with the top of my foot and punt it 25 feet into the rolling blue water below.

Goodnight, sweet prince. May you rest peacefully in your watery grave.

For the next two weeks we were forced to take photos of the southern Thai islands with either an ultra-wide angle lens or a 200mm zoom, because as you might imagine, there aren’t many places selling Nikon lenses in the Thai islands. If we wanted to take photos, we could still do so, but only from about a half mile away.

“Great photo. Stay right there. I’m just going to go and perch myself in that tree across the ravine. Be back in 45.” That sort of thing. Since we still had two months left on the trip, which would take us across Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, this camera situation simply wasn’t going to do.

This is why we were so enthralled to find a cheap lens advertised online at an obscure camera store up in Bangkok. We would be passing through Bangkok in a few weeks, and the owner, Alak, had actually responded to our email and said that he had the exact lens that we needed. Furthermore, since it was a part of a floor set, he could offer it to us at a steep discount.

Under the table, if you will.

Which is how we ended up in an odd corner of Chinatown in a remote corner of Bangkok searching for a hole-in-the-wall camera shop and a mysterious Thai man named Alak. After about four failed attempts at asking for directions we sauntered sweaty and starving into a camera store that sold everything from tripods to lens cleaners to fancy looking surveillance systems.

From the look of things, if there was anywhere this deal was going to go down, it was here.

Eying the shifty man behind the counter, and not knowing whether to verbally strike with Thai or Mandarin, I opted for the former.

“Sa-wa-tee-kraup,” I offered, completely butchering the language in the process, “Ummm… Alak? Nikon? Email? Kyle?” Apparently, in addition to my poor Thai, I had also managed to butcher my own language.

A tense three seconds of silence passed in which the thinly bearded gentleman appeared to stare into my soul. I immediately felt uncomfortable, which is strange, because I was only in a camera shop.

Finally, he spoke.

“You come with me,” he hastily barked in English as we walked towards the back of the store. “You see Alak.”

Peeling back a blanket, which covered a clandestine exit from the shop, we followed the clerk into a backroom with chicken wire over the windows and shelves filled with various curios.

There was something weird about this, but I didn’t know why. All I knew was I was in the back room of a shady store in Bangkok in a neighborhood where I had the funny feeling that laws were merely guidelines.

Finally, Alak entered. He was tall, dark haired and had an intimidating presence about him. Another smaller man accompanied him in the backroom. There were now three of them to the two of us. Why did this feel so strange?

“Hi, Alak,” I nervously stammered. “I’m Kyle, we had emailed about a Nikon lens that you could get us for a good price. A special price.”

Without saying anything Alak turned around and rifled through the shelves. In the distance I could hear a siren. Looking to my left, a child had silently materialized in the blanket-covered entryway. He looked at us but made no noise. I smiled. He stared.

Eventually Alak placed a brown cardboard box on the table and mimicked for me to remove the lens. I did, and it was the exact one we wanted. I checked the size, I checked the glass for scratches, and I wondered why he was selling it for so cheap.

“You like?” Alak finally sneered, the lone hair on his chin quivering from the breeze coming through the far window.

“I want to make sure it works,” I replied. Then, to my wife, “hand me the bag.”

Reaching for our camera bag – which is specially designed to look just like a backpack – I unzipped the casing and removed our Nikon camera body. Breathing deeply, one of Alak’s cronies loudly cracked his knuckles.

Stroking the lens and attaching it to the camera body, I listened as it clicked into place without a hitch.

I suddenly knew why I felt so weird. This had all the makings of a backroom arms deal going down in a misty, backroom den in the Orient. I played the part of the undercover CIA operative and Alak the unsuspecting dealer who used his camera store in Chinatown as a front.

The stock lens was now my silencer, the camera body my automatic weapon. I suddenly felt the urge to have a briefcase full of money and a drinking problem. It was all too surreal.

“3,000 baht,” Alak suddenly declared. It was a price higher than what we’d discussed.

“That’s not the price we agreed upon, Alak. You said you could get this to us for 2,000. Remember, special price.”

Squinting his eyes and conversing with his cronies, Alak returned with his counter offer of 2,400. What he didn’t know was that he had us in his hands. This was the cheapest – and only – lens that we could find in all of Thailand at this price.

“2,250 or we leave right now.” This operative was playing hardball.

Exchanging cash in the backroom we pocketed our lens and got out of there as quickly as possible.

“Did that feel weird to you?” I asked my wife.

“No, why?”

“You didn’t feel like we were undercover operatives during the Cold War purchasing a black market silencer that was recently smuggled out of Iran?”

I was met only with a blank and curious stare. “It was a camera store with a sweet little old man,” she finally reasoned. “You’re weird.”

Hailing a pedicab in a narrow alleyway beneath a sky of swinging red lanterns, I couldn’t shake the feeling we’d just mingled with shady Thai gangsters. Sliding into a two-seated tuk-tuk, we honked our way out of Chinatown and into the pulsing Thai night.

Want more travel stories? Read the rest of the “Vagabond Tales” over here.

Vagabond Tales: Kayaking With Orcas And Dodging Icebergs In Alaska’s Kenai Fjords

by Kyle Ellison on

Of all the wildlife in the animal kingdom, killer whales really get a bad rap. First of all, only about 20 percent of them even eat other mammals such as harbor seals or sea otters, with the remaining 80 percent simply dining on fish like so many other marine species do.

You know who else eats fish? Dolphins. And nobody is scared of a dolphin.

Speaking of dolphins, killer whales are actually just that – dolphins. Belonging to the Delphinidae family of oceanic dolphins, killer whales are hardly even killers, and they aren’t even whales. Their entire nomenclature is virtually a farce.

Nevertheless, when a pod of them is passing somewhere beneath your sea kayak, all technicalities are thrown out the non-existent window. Such was the case outside of Aialik Bay in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park.

Occupying the southern reaches of the Kenai Peninsula, Kenai Fjords National Park is a haven for outdoorsy kayakers and those looking to escape into the confines of nature. While the protected waters of Resurrection Bay offer breathtaking paddling set beneath hanging glaciers, outfitters such as Miller’s Landing in the town of Seward offer overnight trips into the fjords of the park where the adventures really get wild.

How wild?

How about strapping a bear canister to the front of your kayak, packing some food and something warm, and paddling into the wilderness hoping for the best. In a world all too filled with congested freeways and bustling slums it truly feels like the end of the Earth.Stroking the paddle through frigid waters, our small group of kayakers paddled in an awed and collective silence. Bald eagles soared overhead as we all scanned the shorelines in hope of a foraging black bear. Paddling amongst emerald green waters, which teem with plankton and all forms of life, hungry cormorants repeatedly executed high-speed dives in an effort to snipe an unsuspecting fish.

Life, it seemed, was happening all around us.

Not to be outdone by the copious amounts of wildlife, even Aialik Glacier itself was rumbling with life in the distance. A massive glacier, which is steadily retreating, the crevasses and pockets of mighty Aialik frequently come calving down into the sea in a thunderous display of ice meeting water. In case you’ve never seen the video of surfer Kealii Mamala surfing a calving glacier, do yourself a favor and go watch it now.

To give a better idea of what Aialik Glacier looks like as it completely falls apart, however, it’s easier to simply show you:

Aside from the surprisingly loud noise, the calving ice continues to float amongst the waters of Aialik Bay as it undergoes the slow and laborious process of melting back into water. Many of these icebergs can extend up to a mile away from the glacier, thereby creating a frozen obstacle course for the handful of kayakers plying the waters.

The experience, to say the least, is entirely surreal.

For obvious reasons it is ill advised to paddle directly up to the face of the glacier and all paddlers opt to stay at least half a mile away from the collapsing wall of ice. Death by calving glacier, after all, would really be a unique albeit unfortunate way to go.

Weaving our red, yellow and orange colored sea kayaks around the Jurassic-sized ice cubes now floating out in Aialik Bay, our small nucleus of adventure paddlers turned away from the glacier and stroked back towards where the protected Bay of Aialik merges into the tempestuous Gulf of Alaska.

As serene as gliding amongst the open fjords can be, it can also be somewhat disconcerting since, as you might expect, thar be animals down in them waters.

Sure enough, in what is admittedly a rare sighting, a pod of resident orca suddenly surfaced from beneath the placid waters, the towering dorsal fin of a male bull confirming the reality of their presence.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I breathlessly stammered in a whisper meant only for myself.

Obviously on the same page, my fellow paddlers had likewise stopped paddling and opted instead to simply sit and stare. Granted, the orca were not directly beneath our kayaks, but they were close enough to hear the spouts of air as they surfaced to breathe, which already was a distance near enough to become wary.

With the initial surprise having come and gone, the awe turned to a fear-based reality check where it suddenly became apparent the only thing protecting me from a pod of killer whales was a thin layer of plastic and a pathetically blunt paddle.

Another eagle soared overhead. A large spout preceded the eruption of a dorsal fin from the pea soup colored water. A gentle gust of frigid wind caused the hairs on my neck to stand up straighter than they already were, and just as quickly, it seemed, that the pod had announced their arrival they similarly had turned away to depart into the open sea.

A fleeting moment in a frozen fjord, we all knew that this had been our lucky day.

Throw on a thick flannel, build a campfire, drink some whiskey, grow a beard, look at the stars and chalk it up to another day in the magical backcountry of Alaska.

Want more travel stories? Read the rest of the “Vagabond Tales” over here.

Vagabond Tales: The Drunken Art Of Nicaraguan Bull Riding

by Kyle Ellison on

Nicaragua’s Isla de Ometepe is an island of many things.

It’s the highest lake island in the entire world, and it has the most perfectly conical shaped mountain in all of Central America. Seeing as it’s set in the middle of Lake Nicaragua, it’s home to the world’s only freshwater sharks.

Isla de Ometepe is volcanic, home to two volcanoes – Volcán Concepción and Volcán Maderas – the former of which experienced a violent eruption in 2010. Isla de Ometepe is also historic, with Nahua and Niquirano Indian artifacts dating back to 300 B.C. During colonial times, Caribbean pirates plied its waters, and lawless outposts were established on its shores.

It is a tourist destination, a site of archeological importance and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

Isla de Ometepe is also poor. Nicaragua is the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere behind Haiti, and in few places is this more apparent than on the rural village roads far removed from the main city centers of Moyogalpa and Altagracia. Despite being part of the same country, the poverty of Ometepe is a different type than in the national capital of Managua. The tent cities of the urban center are instead replaced by one-room thatched houses where three generations of family members all exist beneath the same roof. Bananas are gathered, fish are attained, piles of moist grass smolder to deter the mosquitos, the heat swelters and time lurches on.

Lastly, as is often the case with rural and agricultural outposts, Isla de Ometepe is also home to cowboys, although the rodeos in this part of the world are a loosely organized and drunken affair. I know this because I once stumbled into one.Having hired rickety, one-speed bikes from a Playa Santa Domingo guesthouse, my wife and I pedaled off down a dirt road at the base of Volcán Maderas. Bouncing down the dusty dirt track we waved at hordes of scampering schoolchildren as howler monkeys growled and danced in the treetops. One of the best ways to interact with local cultures, I have found, and a way to truly put a finger on the pulse of a destination, is simply to hire a bicycle, pedal without a plan and sit back and observe.

Having passed donkeys laden with banana leaves and elderly grandmothers harvesting large piles of sticks, a curious collection of people was beginning to become visible a half-mile down the dirt road. Approaching closer, the rhythmic thump of a bass emanating from an old speaker indicated what appeared to be some sort of festival.

Curiosity piqued – I decided to inquire as to why exactly a couple hundred local villagers had all gathered at this seemingly nondescript venue down a dirt road in the forest.

“Permiso,” I gently asked of a passing woman – her mestizo stature amounting to no taller than 4 feet 10 inches – ¿Por qué toda la gente? What’s with all the people?

“Está un rodeo“.

A rodeo. Of course it was. We had stumbled upon a rural Nicaraguan rodeo, and common courtesy dictates that when you happen upon a rodeo on a Saturday afternoon bike ride on Isla de Ometepe, you are ultimately obliged to stop in. Entry was $1, and the price of beers the same. There was no way this wasn’t going to happen.

Leaving our bikes with a 12-year-old boy we found manning the concession stand, I grabbed a lukewarm beer and ambled my way through the shoddily constructed grandstand. Bleacher style seating constructed of wood of dubious strength and safety, all the seats faced into a dirt clearing presumably meant to be the rodeo arena. Collections of men in faded blue jeans mingled inside of the ring, and a few isolated cows cohabited the arena along with them, their visible ribs a testament to the general level of poverty.

As thirty minutes faded into three beers, I began to wonder as to when the action was going to take place. The roping, the barrel racing, the bucking broncos and the clowns diving into oversized barrels. Thus far, the only action we had been privy to was a number of wildly intoxicated gentlemen periodically attempting to sit on top of a motionless cow and subsequently be carried over the side by their own inebriated momentum. Whenever this happened, it drew a slight yet noticeable reaction from the crowd.

Wondering if perhaps we had missed the main event, I inquired of the barefoot, elderly woman standing next to me when the rodeo was slated to start.

“This is the rodeo,” she replied with a deadpan stare. “This man, right there, it’s now his turn”.

Shifting my attention towards her outwardly stretched index finger, I watched as a thickly mustachioed caballero in a long-sleeve, olive colored work shirt approached a group of stationary bovines. Slapping his friend on the back, he proceeded to take a swig out of a bottle that didn’t quite look like rum, but sure didn’t look like water, and then drag his feet lazily over towards the cow. Much like the other before him, he nearly tripped and fell into the cow, eventually threw a leg over its visible spine, and then immediately slipped and fell off the other side, his face landing teeth down in the dirt.

The crowd cheered.

Well, some of the crowd – a greater number was paying attention to a fracas back by the entry way, which involved a group of children chasing a chicken that had gone rogue. This, it appeared, was just another Isla de Ometepe Saturday afternoon, the melody from the speakers and the howler monkeys in the trees providing the soundtrack to a rural Nicaraguan rodeo with bull riding like you’ve never seen before.

Want more travel stories? Read the rest of the “Vagabond Tales“ over here.

[Image credit: permanently scatterbrained on Flickr]

Vagabond Tales: Racing In The Baja 500 … In A Volvo Station Wagon

by Kyle Ellison on

One of the world’s most well-known and revered off-road racing events, the Baja 500 runs for approximately 440 miles through the deserts of Mexico’s Baja peninsula. Why it isn’t called the Baja 440 I don’t know, but then again, I just write on these sorts of things, not organize them.

A loop-course beginning and ending in the city of Ensenada, thousands of race participants and accompanying pit crews descend on the peninsula each June for a chance at calling themselves the fastest and dirtiest desert dogs on the entire peninsula. Over the course of the 42-year-old event some really big names with some really big money have gotten involved. Red Bull, Ford, Ducati – those sorts of guys.

The cash prizes can number over $300,000. There have been races with over 100,000 spectators. In case my point isn’t being made – this race is a big freaking deal.

With divisions ranging from motorcycles to trucks to ATV’s, professional teams backed with professional money descend on northern Baja towing trailers full of spare tires and some insanely rugged rides.

Surfers, on the other hand, do not usually drive tricked out off-road vehicles backed by thousands of dollars of corporate sponsorships. They drive whatever they can find. True, a lot of Baja surfers will invest in a sturdy 4×4 desert vehicle that has some high clearance and can power through the infamous Mexican moon dust, but nothing that can plow through 440 miles of dirt road washboard in 12 hours or less.

This is why it was so strange to find myself amongst a thunderous cloud of rally cars racing in the Baja 500 in a Volvo station wagon better suited for suburbia.Fresh off of a surf pilgrimage to southern Baja’s Scorpion Bay, our haggard troupe of Tecate-swilling, wave-hunting twenty-somethings opted to camp out for the night on a stretch of Baja coastline popular with American surfers. Not far from the fabled breaks of Punta Cabra and Punta San Jose, unbeknownst to us this stretch of coastline was also situated on the racecourse of the Baja 500.

And, of course, as it would just so happen, we found ourselves there on race day.

Strapped down with surfboards and sporting a clearance best suited for navigating suburban speedbumps, the silver Volvo station wagon was a far cry from your usual Baja vehicle. Laden with empty beer cans and with windows obscured by clouds of Mexican dirt, I haphazardly navigated the Volvo towards that night’s intended camp spot along the Pacific coast.

Driving due west late in the afternoon into a fiery and exceptionally bright sunset, the fourth-inch cloud of dust which had accumulated on the windshield reduced visibility to virtually zero.

In a move pulled directly out of the pages of “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” I strained to keep my right foot on the gas pedal while arching my head and neck out of driver’s side window in an effort to navigate the Volvo sans the use of the windshield. With a top speed of no more than 20 mph, this wasn’t exactly a NASCAR level performance.

Head now arched out the window with the grace of a slightly inebriated ostrich, it was during this time that we first became aware of the crowds of people beginning to populate the rural dirt road.

“Sure are a lot of people randomly standing on the road,” we deftly noticed. “Maybe there is some sort of festival going on.”

Although the Baja 500 draws tens of thousands of spectators and is staffed by hordes of support and pit crews, the rural stretch of road we happened to find ourselves upon wasn’t exactly close to either. Most of the spectators were gathering at the finish line towards Ensenada, and all of the pit crews were waiting at the nearest highway intersection.

Here on this stretch of rural coastline, however, there was only the race course, some local spectators and some unfathomably naive and unlucky surfers who were unknowingly driving down the main thoroughfare of the Baja 500 in an unbelievably pedestrian station wagon.

The scene was officially set for disaster.

As I navigated the Volvo with my head out the window there were an increased number of shouts coming in our direction.

“Cuidado!” shouted a Mexican woman in a flowing floral skirt. “Muevate!” demanded another, who simultaneously was operating a tamale stand for hungry residents and spectators.

Still monumentally aloof as to what was happening (having been in Mexico for two weeks and not having seen any pit crews, we were still utterly unaware that the Baja 500 was even happening), it came as a curious surprise as to why the local people were so hellbent on telling us to be careful driving and demanding that we pull off to the side of the road.

Intrigued but undeterred, I continued to navigate the Volvo around the dirt potholes and patches of dry sand with my head craned out the window in the hopes of reaching the campsite before nightfall.

That’s when the first Honda dirt bike came ripping from behind and passed within about three feet from my head.

Before the shock of the near-accident could even be analyzed, a tricked-out dunebuggy swerved around us to the left and enveloped the Volvo in a cloud of dust.

Between the flashing headlights in the rearview mirror and the chaotic screams of the spectators being chanted in our direction, the reality that something was entirely amiss was quickly becoming apparent.

Finally, the absurdity of the situation caught up with us.

“Oh my God,” offered my friend Jason. “We’re on the race course for the Baja 500. We’re in the middle of the race!”

The realization, however, was too little too late.

With local Mexicans screaming and the sound of mufflers resonating through the air the lead pack of trucks, motorcycles, dune buggies and ATV’s all started to swarm around our vehicle. There is big money in this race, and these racers would be damned if a poorly situated surfer’s station wagon would get in the way of their race progress.

With hearts racing and clouds of dust swirling amidst the vehicle, the option of pulling off on the side of the road had long since disappeared. Stopping entirely would likewise be a poor decision as it would make us a sitting duck for a rear-end, high-speed crash.

“Go!” the drunken passengers in the backseat would scream. “Drive! Drive! Holy…”

The off-road vehicles enveloped us with a vengeance as my foot depressed the Volvo to as fast as it could handle. Forward was seemingly our only option and there was literally no turning back.

The next seven to ten minutes were spent with me driving with my head out the side of a Volvo unable to see if there were little children crossing the road in front of us and getting honked at and flashed at by professional off-road drivers while hoping that we didn’t simply slam into the side of a hugely lifted truck.

With the red and orange sun slowly dipping below the Pacific horizon, the only thing left to do was simply hold on and pray.

Ten months later we would crash the Volvo into a stationary rock in southern Baja and be stranded in the middle of the desert with no cash, too many beers, and be forced to pay off both mechanics and the local military with old copies of nudist magazines.

That, however, is a different Vagabond Tale for a decidedly different time…

Want more travel stories? Read the rest of the “Vagabond Tales“ over here.

Vagabond Tales: Kidnapped in Borneo

by Kyle Ellison on

As a disclaimer, I have never officially been kidnapped in Borneo. For a very uncertain period of about 15 minutes, however, things were starting to look that way and the mental unrest was all the same.

The idea of being kidnapped in Borneo is not without precedent. In April of 2000 there was a much publicized incident in which 20 international tourists were kidnapped from the island of Sipadan by the Muslim separatist group Abu Sayyaf. Abducted in the night by armed men brandishing assault rifles, the remarkably unlucky group of tourists were shuttled 90 minutes by speedboat to Jolo, a small neighboring island belonging to the Philippines. Although all the Sipadan hostages would eventually be released, there would be future hostages taken by Abu Sayyaf who would be found decapitated in the jungle.

Nevertheless, I somehow found myself on a cramped minibus navigating the dense jungle roads of Northern Borneo en route to the island of Sipadan. Famous in the scuba world for having some of the best wall diving in all of Asia, the island presented visions of sea turtles and reef sharks that obscured the harsh realities, which may or may not have been lurking all around me.

To be fair, nine years had transpired since the Sipadan kidnappings and tens of thousands of tourists since that time had successfully made voyages to Sipadan without becoming a ransom piece. PADI even held one of their international conferences there.

When the minibus made an unplanned exit down a sketchy dirt road, however, the wheels of media-induced paranoia began to slowly churn into motion.In an effort to transport ourselves from the town of Sandakan – a festering hole of a city, which shockingly used to be home to the highest concentration of millionaires on the planet – to the coastal town of Semporna, I had opted to share a small minibus with my wife and eight other foreign tourists. Two Americans, two Germans, two Finnish speaking gentlemen, one Israeli and a curious Englishman who had somehow managed to teach himself the Malay language in a period of about three weeks.

It was a neatly packed little metal box of Westerners just rife for the taking.

Statistically, kidnapping should be the least of my worries in this situation. In Robert Young Pelton’s legendary travel series “World’s Most Dangerous Places,” he lays out the facts, which show that statistically the most dangerous form of transport on the planet is a shared minibus in Southeast Asia. The chances of my dying in a head-on collision with the various other minibuses all adhering to the non-existent traffic laws are far greater than the likelihood of being targeted for an international ransom showdown.

Again, once our driver made an unexpected turn off of the highway and down a narrow dirt road, however, the fear of crashing was replaced by the fear of being videotaped in front of an Arabic banner hanging on a wall. Granted, this isn’t Pakistan, but the Malaysian state of Sabah still sports some hardline Islamic fundamentalists. Furthermore, the Abu Sayyaf kidnappers had actually departed that fateful evening from Semporna, the town where we were headed.

**As a highly relevant side note, I recognize the intrinsic and massive differences between peace loving Muslims and Islamic fundamentalists who adhere to misguided interpretations of the Quran. I have no problem traveling in countries where a muezzin announces the calls to prayer, and I feel safer in many of these places than I do in bad neighborhoods of American or European cities. With so much fear being broadcasted over the airwaves nowadays, however, you’ll have to excuse my mind for even going there for a brief moment since our modern-day world is saturated with such images.**

Bouncing further and further down the dirt road it became glaringly apparent this was not the way to Semporna. We hung a left, then a right, and then two more lefts before we were on narrow ribbon of dirt leading through the teeming green jungle. In the ten minutes or so which had transpired since departing from the paved highway our repeated attempts to communicate with the driver had gone unanswered.

“Umm…excuse me. Is this the way to Semporna?”

Silence.

“So…where are we going?”

Silence.

Even the self-taught Englishman attempted to make some inroads in Malay.

The only response was furtive glances in the rear view mirror, a cracked piece of glass where we could momentarily make contact with the pupils of his eyes.

Finally, just as the confusion was beginning to turn to angst, our rickety van pulled up in front of a collection of wooden shacks surrounded by a semi-functional barbed-wire gate. Columns of smoke rose from smoldering piles of leaves and the incessant sounds of the jungle provided the only break in the silence.

If ever there were a rebel jungle compound it would be in a place that looked exactly like this.

Still not having informed us as to where exactly we were, our driver hopped out of the van, slammed the door behind him, and proceeded to walk part way behind the wooden hut closest to the van.

As the driver casually strolled into the compound all of us hostages inside of the van strained our necks so as to be able to watch as he lit a cigarette and proceeded to get in an argument with an unseen person standing behind the hut.

In my mind it went something like this:

“I brought you the van full of foreigners, now I want my money! That’s not the price we agreed upon! What do you mean I’m going to have to tie them up myself! Ugh…fine”.

Tossing his still lit cigarette onto the damp grass our driver then reached out for an object, which at this point I was almost certain was going to be an automatic weapon.

“Unbelievable,” I trembled. “This is actually happening.”

I squeezed my wife’s hand and hoped for the best. I can only assume the others in the car were somewhat on the same wavelength, as the vibe was undoubtedly tense.

Then, in a moment which will forever cause me to doubt the paranoid ramblings of my mind, our driver emerged from behind the shed holding an…

infant.

He was holding a small, peaceful, sleeping child. If ever there were a sign of pacifism and calm then it was in the shallow breaths of that sleeping Malaysian child. Cradling his young daughter in his arms, our driver gently kissed her forehead and told the rest of his family it was time to leave.

This was not some military compound where they beheaded innocent travelers in a political and religious global war. This was his family’s house and he was here to pick up his children.

Cramming his wife and four children into an already packed van our relieved group humbly endured the remaining 45 minutes of the ride to Semporna. I, for one, internally hung my head in shame for allowing my mental demons to get the best of me.

Here before us was not a terrorist operative but a hard-working man just trying to make a living to support his wife and children, a human trait that defies religious affiliation, language-barriers and the image which might grace the cover of your passport.

This, I feel, is one of the greatest gifts of international travel: the ability to witness firsthand that regardless of geopolitical stereotypes, religious affiliation, general ethnicity, or what modern media may lead us to believe, we’re all just humans trying to make it in this world, who work jobs to survive, love our families and strive to sculpt the most comfortable and successful lives possible.

So no, I have never been kidnapped in Borneo. My mind, however, has been a hostage of the largest kind.