vietnam

annie and i are in vietnam for a relaxing holiday before i move my life to africa in three weeks. what better way is there to relax than to jump on some bicycles and ride through the mekong delta. a tour was booked. this was going to be FUN.

day one. we met our tour guide trieu and headed off in a bus to pick up the four other ‘casual cyclists’ we’d be touring with. first we picked up an american couple (let’s call them GI jane and GI joe) on their honeymoon. we rolled on to our next pick-up point only to have to wait almost half an hour for our remaining tour buddies. GI’s jane and joe speculated with us over where our missing members were from. there was a consensus that they were probably european. i voted for french... certain they were late because they were too busy eating bread, smoking, and being better looking than the rest of us.

they were all smiles as they eventually boarded the bus. one i forgave immediately... prematurely greying, definitely the best looking member of our tribe, i’m going to call him george clooney. the second i forgave only because he was friends with mr clooney. i’m going to call him puffa because he chain smoked for the entire tour. they were a pair of hungarian mates... our group was complete.

we drove for some hours then transferred to a boat, then a smaller boat for seemingly no reason. hours passed then someone force fed me more fruit than i’ve eaten in a decade. this was the best cycling tour i’d ever been on! GI joe told us about a time he ate a guinea pig and about how he wanted to eat snakes and rats. GI jane looked on lovingly. puffa smoked a pack or two. mr clooney told a witty anecdote about a game of hangman he once played, and in trying to translate ‘hangman’ accidentally called it ‘the execution game’. we eventually got on our bikes to roll for a few hours in the afternoon. annie didn’t fall off, which was good for the esteem as we quickly discovered we were riding with four elite athletes.

preparing to eat my own body weight in fruit by riding in a tiny tiny boat

cruising in a bigger boat... wearing my helmet cause, you know, i'm on a bike tour

our day ended in rustic bungalows atop the mekong river. puffa puffed and drank. the GIs swapped travel stories with annie and i. mr clooney persisted in wearing a shirt in public at all times.

the mekong

day two. if day one was anything to go by we’d probably spend the majority of our day eating pineapple then get on our bikes for fifteen or twenty minutes in the afternoon. this was not to be. we found out there would be several hours of cycling... how dare they make us do that on a cycling tour. it was stinking hot and we were all struggling. puffa was only able to smoke a handful of ciggies on the bike, and had been forced to replace his vodka with water. about an hour in, i looked over at annie and she started crying. i’d like to believe it wasn’t purely the sight of my face that caused the meltdown, but i can’t be sure.  the GIs battled on in true american style. mr clooney single handedly brought fluro orange lycra back in fashion.

cycling by rice paddies...smiling cause trieu just told us we were fifteen minutes from lunch

trieu cut the cycling hours back a bit due to the extreme weather – or as he called it – “a perfectly normal summer day.” annie and GI jane had a break from the cycling after lunch. i desperately wanted to not cycle, but mr clooney was cycling, so...

a well earned dinner at the end of day two was a trip highlight for me. it started with puffa and george clooney approaching annie and i saying, “before we go to dinner we have a surprise for you in our room.” i vaguely recalled someone once warning me about men who used this line, but mr clooney...

it turned out the whole group was invited, so we were safe with the crazy hungarians. we gathered in their room and they poured an unknown liquid into glasses for us to drink together. again... something about accepting drinks from strangers... blah blah. it smelled like rocket fuel that had been diluted with nail polish remover. GI joe was sure he’d smelled something similar before. i pondered whether it had been his beverage of choice to wash the taste of squirrel out of his mouth after an afternoon snack at some point. i chugged it down as quickly as i could. not surprisingly, it tasted like rocket fuel that had been diluted with nail polish remover. thank you hungary.

more mystery drinks were served at dinner when trieu poured another unknown liquid into our glasses at the restaurant. i shot something down that had hints of rotting rice at its core. trieu proceeded to pull out his phone and show us photos of the brewing process for the beverage we’d just ingested. there was a glass receptacle of some sort with green things floating in it which we were informed was ginseng. in the corner of the picture was what appeared to be a floating baby tiger. trieu went on to tell us that a baby tiger was, in fact, one of the key ingredients... along with six additional tiger penises and the penises of five himalayan goats. at this point, puffa chose to speak english for the first time on the tour to utter the phrase we were all thinking but were too afraid to ask... “is he f#@king kidding us?” the answer is still unknown. either way, i find it hard to believe that a baby tiger would taste like rotting rice.

day three. trieu finally realised none of us were particularly interested in cycling on our cycling tour, so he cut back the bike hours some more. this gave us time for some more boat cruising on the mekong (more in line with what we were all expecting of a cycling tour) and i was finally able to realise my lifelong dream of eating an entire pineapple in one sitting. mr clooney touched my arm even though i was wearing oversized men’s running shorts and the same singlet i’d had on for three days. i think he might be god.

more boating on our cycling tour... GI jane in the background

me with the first quarter of my pineapple
(wearing my lifejacket because it's important to be safe while eating a whole pineapple on a river)

we eventually got on our bikes for our last bit of cycling. puffa prepared with half a pack and a shot of nail polish remover. george clooney looked on like some kind of perfect greek statue. the GIs remained upbeat and positive and i wondered if they’d secretly had a few shots of polish remover themselves. annie and i assessed our chafing and decided we had more left to give. we ended up by cycling in to can tho (one of the five biggest cities in vietnam) where i was passing mopeds and cycling into oncoming traffic like a vietnamese maniac... it was perfect.

george clooney on the left and puffa doing what he does best on the right

we did cycle probably a bit more than this post would have you believe, but again i experienced that it’s not really what we’re doing in life that we remember, so much as the people we are doing it with. i met some wonderful people this week who i may never see again, but who gave me the gift of themselves for a few short days. trieu, mrs and mr GI, puffa and george clooney... thank you!!

lovely

last week someone told me i was lovely.

about a year ago i wrote a blog about my body... about appreciating and respecting this body of mine that had just cycled over 2000km down the west coast of america. the moment i hit ‘publish’ on that blog post i began a familiar descent into doing exactly the opposite of what i had promised myself i would do. it was like the time i said i wasn’t going to eat fast food for the rest of the tour my band was on in america... only to lead the entire band into a chinese buffet some fifteen minutes later... my promises cannot be trusted it seems. as soon as i published my blog proclaiming to the world that i loved my body, i began to loathe my disproportionately large thighs, and figured that the best way to silence the screaming voices in my head was to engage in several sessions of lamington abuse... that will make it all better. i told the world i had figured this weight/body image thing out, only to find myself straight back in the dreaded cycle of yo-yoing weight and self-loathing.

then someone told me i was lovely.

in the wise words of one of my feminist icons – rizzo from Grease – ‘there are worse things i could do’. admittedly, she was talking about having sex with lots of boys and i’m talking about being intimately involved with more than my fair share of caramello koalas... but you get the picture (i hope). it could be worse. i could be really mean... or void of compassion... or a collingwood supporter. but my thing... my drug... my problem... is that every day i have to try and convince myself to like (dare i say love) my body. and it’s silly and i hate that i waste energy on it when there seems to be so many legitimately terrible things happening in the world around me. people are dying of starvation, living in abusive relationships, suffering under oppressive regimes, getting bombs dropped on their houses, and continuing to support collingwood. i know i’m silly and i dislike myself for it...

and yet, last week, someone still told me i was lovely.

i’m almost certain they weren’t referring to my body when they called me lovely, but i guess that’s the point isn’t it. the two aren’t connected... and yet in my brain i have allowed them to become so inextricably linked that i find it impossible to believe i could BE lovely when i feel as though i don’t LOOK lovely. i can believe it for other people, but most definitely not for myself. that’s messed up.

the fact remains: someone told me i was lovely.

i have thought about it, and felt uncomfortable about it, and told myself it couldn’t be true... but to settle there would mean that ‘the someone’ was a liar... and the thing is, they can’t possibly be a liar because they are quite lovely themselves.

mutafela: a lovely kid i'm going to be hanging out with in zambia next year

lollies

when i was growing up my family would go and visit my wallis grandparents every friday after school and stay for a roast dinner. the whole extended family would show up... cousins, aunties, uncles, random strays someone found on the street. i was one of the youngest cousins and was pretty captivated by how cool my older cousins were. my cousin kay came to friday night dinner one week with a brand new batman t-shirt on and i just about exploded with jealousy.

BATMAN T-SHIRT.

i wanted to be her so bad that it was beginning to hurt a little when i breathed.

five minutes later her younger brother (my cousin david) threw a gravy-covered roast potato at her. the new, crisp, white, batmanny goodness was destroyed. i was distraught for both kay and myself – couldn’t davo see he was hurting us all? i considered offering her my knock-off hypercolour... but we all knew there was no replacing the batman. there’s a streak of mild (or legitimate) insanity that runs through the veins of the wallis clan, which meant that friday nights were full of laughter and drama. and then there was the food. my grandma’s roast potatoes remain the best i have ever eaten. i think the trick was the 5:1 oil to veggie ratio.

my grandma wallis: a strong, remarkable woman who stretched every resource she had at her disposal to breaking point in order to care for her family. upon initial inspection you would assume she was a garden variety grandma. i don’t remember an occasion of walking into her living room and not seeing her on her recliner with a crochet hook in hand.  but if you hung around for a few minutes until the footy replay began you’d have seen this crochet-bandit grandma burst out of her skin and approach near hysteria. in her later years she couldn’t watch live sport on tv anymore... the excitement was literally too much for her ginormous heart. she could only watch replays where the result was known... and even then she had to take half a sedative to cope with the excitement. she loved sport like i love donuts... and she loved her family.

a few years ago my mum reminded me of this story about me and grandma.

grandma and grandpa wallis had a lolly jar in their kitchen that never ran dry. for a young kt marie, this = heaven. for an older kt marie, this = heaven. i love lollies. i will smash an allen’s party mix any time of day. apparently i got into a bit of a habit when i was a child of walking into my grandparents house and immediately asking grandma if i could have a lolly. my mum was obviously a bit embarrassed by her sugar-addicted offspring when she sat me down one friday to give me a stern talking to. “kt, it’s rude to always ask for lollies. today you aren’t allowed to ask grandma for lollies. just sit down and have a normal conversation like a normal kid.” the message was devastating in its clarity.

i don’t remember mum having this conversation with me but i can only imagine that this news shattered me almost as much as the batman-gravy disaster. i would never be as cool as kay and now here was this woman telling me i couldn’t ask for lollies anymore. what was the point in living?

as we walked up the front stairs of my grandparents house that afternoon, my mum reminded me of our deal. no talk of lollies. i was not to mention the word.

we walked through the front door. i kissed my grandpa on his bald head like i had a hundred times before and then approached grandma in her recliner. she looked up at me with her gorgeous sparkling eyes and cheeky grin. she wanted to give me the world... we both knew it. and by ‘the world’ i mean ‘the lollies’. this was clearly going to hurt her as much as it was hurting me so i had to think quick. i hesitated a little, eventually kissed my grandma’s curly head, and simply said, “hello grandma, do you have something yummy to put in my mouth?”

there was no talk of lollies. i didn’t even mention the word.

max

*late at night on the 26^th of june 2013 – two days before the one year anniversary of my mum’s death – one of my dear friends unexpectedly lost her five-year-old son. these are some thoughts/dreams i had at the time, but have only just now been able to write down...

she had been there for almost a year. if the grapevine was to be believed, someone was throwing a big party for her in the coming days to celebrate her first birthday. she had had a productive year teaching singing and hugging... quickly progressing through the ranks until she was appointed as the head teacher of both ‘bedtime-squeezy-hugs 101’ and ‘singing-at-all-times: advanced’. she had put on some weight and found herself relieved that her bones weren’t so lonely in her skin anymore. there was flesh where flesh should be and a curly mop of hair atop her beautiful freckly head. she loved her new life but she missed so many people... especially her children. she knew the first birthday party was going to be huge and that her girls would have loved to have attended. she cherished kids and made it her daily goal to let at least one or two million of them know that they were loved. there needed to be kids at the party, so she had spent the previous weeks inviting all the kids from her classes... and any others that she stumbled upon as she wandered in her down-time.

she saw him as soon as he arrived. he was much younger than most of the new arrivals which made her mother-heart grow big in her chest.  he seemed to walk taller than everyone around him... as though his little body had been carrying a weight that was too heavy and he now didn’t quite know what to do with all the strength he felt. he looked a little bit lost... as though he knew he had arrived at the wrong time. it was a bit like turning up at a dinner party too early. the people who should have been there to greet him had not yet arrived. he knew that they loved him and was sure they would want to be there with him if they could. something must have happened, things weren’t quite right. he was alone and wondered if he had the courage to make some new friends to tide him over until someone he knew arrived. he didn’t have to worry for long. it seemed as though everyone loved him there already. how strange. his mum would have loved to hear all about this day. he felt warm and protected and not even a little bit scared.

max

she knew exactly what it felt like to get there too early (unfortunately it had happened that way for her too), so she couldn’t wait to meet the new arrival. they always needed a hug... and she was the resident expert... and it was night-time, so a bedtime-squeezy-hug was well within the realms of possibility! she skipped and floated and danced and sang her way over to him, introducing herself quickly, keen to get the formalities out of the way so the hugging could begin. she loved the hug. it reminded her of the thousands of times she had practiced the bedtime-squeezy-hug on her daughters. all that practice so the hug could be perfect for times just like this. he loved the hug. it made him miss his mum, but it also kind of felt just like the hugs he remembered her giving to him. that made sense, he had been told that this lady was the queen of the hugging after all. it was the perfect end to a difficult day and so he drifted off to sleep. people kept talking about big parties so he figured he would need some rest.

they woke up bright and early the next morning and, as expected, the party was bigger than either of them could have imagined. maybe the party was for her. or maybe it was for him. come to think of it, every day after that felt like the best party either of them had ever been to.

and so here we are today, a whole year later. there was a huge party last night to celebrate max's first year and lynnie can hardly believe that tomorrow she will get another party for her second birthday. every day they know that they are missed... so they try to send rainbows and butterflies and sunshine and ocean waves and stars and bright balloons to let us know that they’re doing just fine. they feel pretty lucky to have found each other.

a match made in heaven.