It takes me back. It takes me back seven months and reminds me of what we went through. The first thing anyone else seems to notice is my smile. I hate my smile.
I see the bus.
That was the bus that was supposed to collect us at the end of the trek and take us out of the desert after trekking 100km together. That was the bus that broke down.
When we got to it, we thought we were done. We thought we had finished. We still had a couple of kilometres to go but we waited for the laggers to catch up and everyone went through together. We cheered as we crossed that invisible finish line. Then we somehow had beers and we sat on the dunes and took photos and messed around. There were two buses. There had to be for the one hundred of us. I remember the smug face of the guy in the doorway of the first bus who wouldn’t let me on because he said it was full. I was forced to wait with my friend Adam and the rest of his stupid team.
We realised the bus was still stuck two kilometres back and it made sense for us to go to it. Once the sun had set there wasn’t an awful lot left for us to do. Once the beers were finished, there was nothing left for us to do. The temperature started to drop. It got below freezing at night, well below.
We got onto the bus and tried to stay warm. We were taken off so they could try and tow it out. It didn’t work. We sat on the sand and lost more of our body heat. We were ordered back onto the bus. We tried singing and playing games. Nobody had any food. Nobody had any water. We waited for four hours before the original bus returned for us. We were lucky. We laughed it off anyway.
Then I notice my top. My merino wool base layer. Essential, we were told, to insulate us and to self-clean. I wore it for five days straight. It became a second skin. The smell would probably make your eyes water. I only had one because the combo of top and trousers was £100.00 and I figured I wouldn’t be going back to Mongolia anytime soon. I was right.
Next it’s my Action Challenger neckerchief. A Schiernecker-chief if you will. I was given that scarf when I trekked my way up the Inca trail to Machu Picchu exactly two years before. I was so sick on that trip but I learnt a lot about my inner strength, what I was capable of. I refused to give up. I refused to drop it. I’m far too stubborn and it’s not often enough that it’s a good thing.
Then I see my Ray Bans. Actual Ray Bans. I had a pair before that I picked up in Argentina. Those were Roy Bons. I bought the actual Ray Bans in the great spending spree of April 2016, shortly before Adam and I went to Thailand and found exactly the same thing for 200 baht (£4.00). I don’t really go in for the whole brand thing but Ray Bans are cool. They’re cool like Jack Daniels is cool.
It’s only after that I am able to see my face. The beard that had grown out through our days in the desert. The weird way my hair sat when it was full of smoke, sand, grit and grease. The strange dent between my eyes, either through concentration or Resting Bitch Face. The crow’s feet that appear now when I smile. The hook of heritage in the shape of my nose. The tiny shadow of a puncture mark in the lobe of my left ear from when I let my brother go at it with a sterilised safety pin and a champagne cork. The dimples and for a rare change, what looks like a jawline. The teeth. The smile. The memories.
Seven months after we flew out to Mongolia, I look at this picture and I forget about all the stuff that bothered me. The things I left behind that I worried about. The trials and tribulations that we all faced along the way. What it reminds me of is that I am the sum of my experiences. I have no recollection of this photo being taken but it looks far too staged to be candid. I would love to go back there, to that moment, to be with the friends I knew and the friends I had made. To taste some more questionable meat in noodles and brine. To listen to the sound of the wind whipping up the tarp as I tried to get to sleep each night, clenching the opening of my sleeping bag together to keep whatever heat I could inside. To drink more straight vodka in a week than I probably had in the rest of my life. To walk every day with a pack on my back. To not want for anything else. To just go. This picture speaks exactly 860 words.
In February 2016 I spent a week in a gypsy caravan where I recorded twenty songs in the hopes it could become my first album. It was bitterly cold and I had to turn off the storage heater in between takes. I brought home those songs and let them sit for a little while. Then I started tinkering.
This week I finally finished tinkering and am happy to announce that my first fully-functioning album, Workbook, is available now.
You can download it for free. All I want is to share my music and enjoy the fact I’ve managed to get this project together. I’m immensely proud and enjoyed the process so much that I’m already planning a follow up.
I love the idea of now making videos for the tracks. The first of which, for the opening song, Sometime Later, is here.
“Clearly you’ve never been to Singapore”, famously uttered Captain Jack Sparrow upon freeing Elizabeth Swan from her corset using a knife. This wasn’t the only reason I wanted to visit the city but it was up there, along with the fact it would coincide with Eurovision. I figured flying to South East Asia was a cheap price to pay in order to escape the hideous showboating and rip away skirts.
When my friend Adam, who I first met two years ago on a trek to Machu Picchu, mentioned the pair of us going to stay with his friend Roshni in Singapore, I think he was expecting a little more resistance. I agreed almost immediately. It was only afterwards the gravitas of the decision really hit me.
It seemed bizarre to travel all that way to only visit one place so we set upon Malaysia and Thailand in the process. This post, however, is about Singapore, what we saw and did there, and the lessons we learnt along the way.
Changi airport is one of the best air-conditioned spaces in the world. How do I know this? I tried going outside at eleven o’clock at night to hail a cab. Two steps out into that muggy wall of heat and I returned to the Wi-Fi and eateries of the arrival hall. While waiting for Roshni to meet us, unsure of exactly how we had ended up in such a predicament, we counted our money and tried to work out how many Singapore dollars there were to the pound and if everything before us was a bargain or a rip off. It’s fair to say that Singapore has equal opportunities for both.
Roshni collected us and we got a taxi across the city, taking in views of the marina and the incredible number of skyscrapers before blasting out the other side and up to her apartment. Roshni moved to Singapore last year to teach. She’s possibly the most upbeat and spirited person I have ever met. She’s purposeful and attentive and her smile can sort of break your heart a bit. On top of this, she insisted we take her bed while she slept on the sofa. It was the first of many nights Adam and I were in bed together.
The following morning Roshni made us smoothies and introduced us to her flatmate Amanda who also worked at the school. They took us for breakfast at a restaurant called Jimmy Monkeys to sweeten the deal before we attended a dance show at their school. It did the trick. As I sat with a thick vanilla milkshake, eggs and avocado smeared across soda bread, I couldn’t care what we did, as long as we kept cool in the process.
Like most drama schools, there were a lot of pushy stage parents. My first encounter with them was when we were ushered into the darkened auditorium and told we could sit anywhere by the other teachers, before being moved along by parents who had booked specific seats. They obviously needed to best capture the offbeat stammerings of their kids. After being moved on yet again by another set of Croydon facelifted mothers we hit the back row and watched two hours of theatre which was probably cute if you had an invested interest/offspring putting in a wonderful performance as a daisy or rabbit.
Afterwards Roshni took us on the Singapore underground service, the MRT. I just did some research and that stands for Mass Rapid Transport. How delightful.
We went to every coffee shop, bookshop and bakery we could find before heading to the top of the Pinnacle Tower for an incredible view over the city. Singapore has been built up very quickly. The skyline looks like a competition nobody is winning.
We headed back down and strolled around the city before Roshni took us to one of her favourite vegan restaurants for wraps, soup and salads. Adam and I discovered paying by card in Asia is not commonplace. Like the Queen, I don’t carry money. Unlike the Queen, I serve a purpose beyond just looking nice. Each time we wanted to pay for a meal we had to locate a cash machine on the busy streets and then worry about how to get back and whether our bags and passports would still be there. Considering it lacked my favourite foodstuffs, the vegan restaurants we visited in Singapore were incredible. I was almost converted.
Roshni took us through Chinatown and back onto the MRT to go and see the Supertree Grove in the Gardens by the Bay. This is a must when in Singapore. Not only is it beautiful but it’s also free. My favourite things are beautiful and free. We spread out on the paved floor, in the way of everyone else, and stared up. The supertrees are a collection of eighteen man-made trees, at around eighty-feet high. One of them has a restaurant inside to give an impression of scale. Each evening a light show plays out across the trees in sync with classical music blasted from hidden speakers. We were treated to a waltz. It was a mix of Fantasia, Debusssy and the music from X Factor. I was quiet and still for ten minutes. If there’s one thing it is enchanting to be, it is quiet and still. The lights and music pumped through me and I was so moved by the display that I realised my mouth had dropped open. The experience was something I was so pleased to enjoy with friends.
Afterwards we met up with Roshni’s friends and went to a bar in an alley where musicians played covers on guitar, trumpet and keyboard and we sipped at expensive cocktails named after renaissance painters or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Soon we were dancing away in the hot night. Adam and I took breaks to stand in front of a huge fan that pumped out recycled air into the alley. We watched a woman getting arrested and Roshni fell in love with yet another musician, taking up residence in the chair directly opposite the performance area to pine. After clearing away all of the money we had withdrawn earlier in the day on drinks, Adam and I were forced to call it a night and get a cab back to Roshni’s apartment, falling into a drunken sleep underneath the buzz of the ceiling fan. The best way to get over jetlag is to get drunk.
The following day we woke up late to discover we had been left alone. It was a Monday and Roshni and Amanda had both got up and gone to work/school. A friend of mine had recently returned to the UK after spending a year in Singapore and had given us a number of spots to check out, including a barber’s shop in Geylang where he had worked.
When we got outside it started raining, a thick viscous downpour that quickly soaked us through. I was growing tired of the mop of fringe dangling wet in my face. I wanted it gone and considered shaving my head.
We took the MRT without Roshni’s assistance for the first time and when we arrived in Aljunied (memorised by thinking of All You Need Is Love by The Beatles) we found the barbers closed. I had told Adam we couldn’t rest or eat until we had found it. After rattling the door for confirmation our thoughts turned to our stomachs. We didn’t have a clue where we were or where was good. There were no picturesque bakeries or quaint vegan eateries so we stumbled into an open air buffet next door where we were promptly handed two plates of what we quickly realised were the “westerner’s special” – rice, noodles, chicken, sweet and sour pork. It was delicious but Adam was feeling adventurous. He went back up and returned with a plate of pig skin. He assumed it would be fried off, similar to crackling. He was disappointed. What he had collected was boiled skin. I watched him struggle with a mouthful before deciding I needed a similar kind of punishment. I have put some terrible things in my mouth but the lump of pig made me heave. I quickly chewed and swallowed it down but I could feel it writhing. I was once told that pork is the closest meat to human and I had the horrible feeling I had gone all Hannibal on the buffet. Our two plates of food plus pig skin, two bottles of coke and four bottle of water came to £9.00. You can’t beat that with a stick.
Being suckers for punishment we decided to head to Orchard Road, an intense complex of shopping centres designed for the ex-pat community especially. The place was so swanky that I felt like I was going to be shooed out with a broom the whole time. Adam found a gold-plated, jewel-encrusted pen that was marked up at £3,500.00. He said he would buy it if he had the money. I called him a capitalist pig. It was the first of a series of conversations we had about materialism and politics. I told him a Bic was good enough for me. He pitied me.
We had arranged to meet Roshni and to visit another of her favourite spots, East Coast Park, but were slightly concerned we would have to forgo meat from another meal. Despite the tale/tail of the pig skin we were eager to get some food in us before our next adventure and hid in a KFC near our arranged meeting point while trying to connect to the Wi-Fi so we could book a restaurant for dinner. As Roshni had been so kind to us we wanted to treat her. When we told her she seemed genuinely impressed but had already set her heart on visiting Brownice, a vegan Italian bistro nearby.
We first went to East Coast Park, took off our shoes and paddled in the water before walking up and down the beach and talking about how connected we felt with the earth. At the time it felt really intense and honest but I now feel silly and clichéd for considering a concept so enlightened. Not me at all.
Brownice had the best food I ate in Singapore. The pizzas were big, covered in tofu and vegetables and their Root Beer float changed my perspective on the universe. Again, when it came time to pay, we couldn’t use our cards and Roshni had to pick up the tab for the bill we had kindly taken her out for. We got vegan ice cream and sat out in the hot street, watching traffic and street cats wander past until it was time to go home.
The next morning we awoke at six for our flight to Malaysia. Roshni made us smoothies so thick they would have been placed in a remedial class and we booked a taxi back to the airport. Our next adventure was waiting.
As people started to move from their seats despite the fact we had been specifically told not to undo our seatbelts until the sign had been turned off I grabbed the US Customs form we were supposed to have filled in during the flight. I had been too engrossed in my mammoth film session to even consider the red tape and bureaucracy of it all. I managed to get the first couple right, I knew my name and date of birth, but beyond that I started to struggle. They wanted to know the specific address we were heading to and when we would leave. I thought to myself calm down mate, we just got here. Harvey gave me his form to copy so as long as I didn’t accidentally copy his passport details down I was sorted. We were due to spend our first night at a lodge in Grand Canyon National Park and that was what Harvey had put down on his form. I copied his details word-for-word before realising we didn’t have the same date of birth, he was five years younger than me and also infinitely cooler. I managed to remember that America, for reasons unknown, put all their dates in the format month, day, year and checked everything I had put down. I wanted to make sure it was right. Despite the fact we had taken off at eleven in the morning and flown for over ten hours it was only two pm local time. I struggled with the maths of it all in my head as Harvey handed me my bag from the overhead shelf and I carefully piled everything back into it.
We arched our way out into the aisle and I slowly managed to shake off the dead feeling in the bottom half of my body. I’d only got up once in the course of the flight and felt twinges like it had gone to sleep. I felt rested but confused and disorientated, like waking with a hangover. Maybe this was the jetlag.
Nobody had anything to say to each other as we followed the row of heads through white corridors and out into a hall covered in a snake of rope to help us non-American citizens queue more effectively. Overhead were a lot of warnings about having your passport ready for inspection and not taking photographs in the hall. Every two minutes a video would flash up featuring Carrot Topp detailing how it wasn’t a good idea to decide to “have a laugh” when it came to entering these United States. I took heed of the ad, I was going to be a good boy.
As if the videos weren’t enough, a stern looking guard in uniform patrolled the front of the queue and yelled at anyone who had taken their phone out prematurely.
‘Sir, no pictures in here.’
‘You, in the sunglasses, cell phones away until you’re through security.’
‘Have your passports ready for inspection.’
This meant taking them out of protective cases. Security hate protective cases which is funny because they literally sit in one, behind glass, judging. I watched as Melanie and Harvey were asked to step forward into a queue for a particular desk. There were outlines of footprints painted on the floor to indicate exactly where they were allowed to stand while waiting to be invited up to the desk. Customs didn’t want them to stand too close together apparently in cas e that was the moment they chose to launch an attack on US soil. Behind me, Dr James and Teni were worrying about where Dr Amy had got to. They were sure she had been right behind them as they were coming off the plane but now she was nowhere to be seen. Teni was trying to count everyone through to make sure there were no stragglers.
‘Sir, you can join queue 17.’
As they had said sir, I assumed they were addressing someone else. Someone who must have somehow been ahead of me in the queue. Maybe an adult. It turned out they were talking to me.
‘Sir, number seventeen, hablo English?!’
I stepped into a queue and started to sweat. I tried to look like I hadn’t done anything wrong because I hadn’t. The bloated couples in front of me, clearly on their way to Vegas in their clichéd trilby and sunglasses, their too high heels and palm tree shirts were having their fingerprints scanned. It seemed a bit unnecessary. From what I had seen on the news, Americans had been committing crimes against fellow Americans with no mention of us non-US citizens being involved. Regardless of all the gun crime and the rape they may have committed against each other I was certainly not going to make a joke or try to be funny or give them any reason to take me to a tiny room and test the capabilities of my frame with a cavity search.
I looked up and the solemn man with the wonky moustache but straight glasses signalled to me with two fingers. I hoped he was at least going to buy me a drink first.
‘Ello’ I said, attempting to be more English than ever before and coming out somewhere along the way to Van Dyke cockney.
‘Passport please… sir.’
I put my passport down on the desk between the pair of us. Everything around him was square to the desk itself. It had a place. The pens were in a row at the side of the keyboard. The monitor was facing the back wall. His hands were poised on the edge, perfectly manicured fingers ready to judge me. In the midst of all the depraved and purposeful contours of his universe was my misaligned and grubby passport, eight years into its ten year life, stamped in Africa, South America and soon, the United States of America. He swung it around and looked hard at the picture. A young, shaggy-headed version of me looked up at him with stoned, puffy eyes.
‘Hmmmm’ he said. The sweat on my brow stopped rolling like his vision was based on movement. ‘You’ve had a haircut.’
‘That was 2008 mate, I’ve had a few.’
The hallway was windowless. I could have been anywhere. All I knew is I was alone and if I didn’t do something about it I was going to be stuck there for a long time. People walking in the opposite direction glared at me. I felt scrutinised and studied the floor. At the end of the long hallway there was a glint of light like a door had briefly been opened into another world before being shut again.
I wasn’t about to feel the long arm of the law. I had simply lost the rest of the group.
What happened after I made the terrible blunder of attempting to be funny on my way into America is the man with the wonky moustache and straight sunglasses looked me dead in the eyes before glaring hard at my passport picture.
‘Place your thumb on the panel.’ Shocked, I did so. ‘Spread the fingers of your right hand on the grid’ he added. I did as I was told, placing my four fingers across a Logan’s Run looking pad attached to the front of his desk. ‘Repeat the same with your other hand.’ I repeated the same with the other hand. ‘Look into the camera. I tried to look distant and aloof with a wry grin, like I knew I was going to be trouble. When they flashed that mug shot up in the Fox News update showing in my mind I wanted Americans sat around their television sets to declare me a nasty piece of work with adorable dimples just based on that know-it-all smugness.
‘Welcome to the United States’ he said and banged his stamp in and around my passport a bit to make it look official. I fought the law and I won. I hurried through to baggage claim and waited while everyone else in the group managed to find their bags. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and freshen up. My mouth felt dry and gummy, again like waking with a hangover. I checked my reflection over and pulled at the sleepy black circles underneath my eyes. I tried not to think about the time back home but knew it had to be bedtime. I wanted a Horlicks. I needed to keep on trucking and assimilate the new time zone as quickly as possible to get full enjoyment from the trip. When I came back out, everyone except Dr James had gone through. He had his bag but was still waiting for Dr Amy who hadn’t come through security. She seemed to have disappeared. He was understandably concerned for her for two obvious reasons. The first is that anyone who is whisked away upon landing from a flight is either a celebrity or in trouble. The second is that he didn’t want to deal with our whining and first world problems on his own for a week, which was understandable. My bag finally came through. I was able to recognise it from the rainbow tag that remained tied to the top from the group flight to Peru a year before. Aside from that it was a non-descript black backpack. I took it down from the conveyer belt and slowly tried to wheel it through. The problem is, and always has been, that the bag is shorter than my legs. It doesn’t have an extendable handle so I’m constantly having to slouch to pull it and it is constantly having to flip over and embarrass me. We’re like C3PO and R2D2 but not in a galaxy far, far away.
‘Sir, can I see your passport?’ asked a guard at the side of the walkway. He had a gun and a walkie-talkie so I respected his request. He looked it over and I managed to hold my tongue.
‘You got anything on you?’ he asked.
‘I’m sorry.’ Oh shit, here we go again. ‘You got any on you?’
He raised his head indicating towards me. I couldn’t work out what I was supposed to do.
‘You got any coffee, like on your shirt.’
I looked down at the stupid upside-down logo on my t-shirt. I JUST WANT TO DRINK COFFEE, CREATE STUFF AND SLEEP.
‘Oh, haha, no. I don’t, sorry.’
‘There’s a lot of you coming through here for that Grand Canyon Lodge. Where are y’all going?’ Y’all, y’all, he actually said y’all. I was in America after all. ‘We, good sir, are off to trek the Canyon for charity.’ Again, the sentence was jumbled together with chimneysweep cockney thrown in for good measure.
‘Well, have a great day. Have a great day, have a great day. He actually said have a great day. That confirmed it. I gave a bit of a curtsy and broke on through to the other side.
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Paul Schiernecker 