Read the opening pages. If it doesn't hook you in the first three paragraphs, nothing will.
That morning in London had the wrong sort of sunshine — the kind that makes everything look normal when you're not. We were wandering about with Sarah's parents, smiling at things we'd walked past a hundred times before: tourists taking the same photo twice because the first one "didn't feel like London enough," commuters moving at that grim, purposeful speed like they were late for a meeting with destiny.
I laughed in the right places. I nodded at whatever Sarah's mum was saying. I even stopped and looked interested when someone pointed out a building. But my head wasn't there. It was already somewhere between Heathrow and whatever came after.
You can be stood in the middle of a crowd and still feel like you're watching yourself from above.
We ended up by London Bridge, and there he was — David Blaine — hanging in that glass box over the Thames. Suspended like a grim little exhibit. Day after day, visible to everyone, unreachable to anyone. People gathered on the pavement beneath him, craning their necks, squinting up at the glare, talking as if he might suddenly wave.
"How long's he been up there now?" someone said, like it was a football score.
"Forty-something days," someone else replied with confidence, the way people do when they've read one headline and made it their personality.
It was strange, looking at him. Not just because the whole thing was bizarre — a man choosing to starve in public — but because the crowd had turned it into entertainment. Some people looked impressed. Some looked disgusted. Most just looked curious. A few were taking photos like they'd stumbled across a new monument.
I stared at the box and felt something click in a place I didn't know was waiting.
Because the weird thing wasn't him. It was us.
He was trapped in glass, obviously. But we all do it in our own ways, don't we — build a little box around ourselves out of routine and safety and "I'll do it later," then get comfortable enough that you stop noticing the walls. You still go out. You still do the motions. You still stand in crowds and laugh at jokes. But you're sealed off in a way you can't quite explain, even to yourself.
I'd been doing that for years.
Not dramatically. Not in a "my life is tragic" way. Just... safe. Same jobs. Same weeks. Same pubs. Same talk. Always some reason to wait for the "right time" — the better pay packet, the better plan, the better version of myself.
And suddenly I was watching a man in a box, and all I could think was: I know that feeling.
Only mine didn't have glass you could see. Mine was invisible, which makes it worse, because you can pretend it isn't there.
· · ·
Later that afternoon we arrived at Heathrow, and the whole thing became real in a different way. Sarah and I finally grabbed the backpacks we'd bought months before — the big, serious ones that made us feel like proper travellers in the shop and slightly ridiculous now. Everything we owned for the next year was going to live in those bags. Not "everything we owned" in the literal sense — but everything we were choosing to carry. The rest of our life was being left behind on purpose.
There's something sobering about zipping your world shut.
In my pocket I had the round-the-world ticket, my passport, and a bank balance that looked comforting until you did the maths properly. Just over ten grand. Between two of us. Across a year. That worked out at about eight hundred quid a month for two people — if nothing went wrong, if we never splurged, if the world stayed polite.
At the time it felt like plenty.
Looking back, it was wildly optimistic.
We stood under those bright airport lights with Sarah's parents a few steps away, and it hit me that this was the last moment of normal. The last time someone else could step in and say, Are you sure? The last chance to back out without having to explain yourself to the entire planet.
Then we were sat at the gate, watching the plane through glass — another box — and I had this stupid thought: Maybe I'm the one up there...
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Order Out of the Glass Box →Bangkok didn't introduce itself gently. It hit us like a wave: motorbikes threading impossible gaps, cars boxed in on every side, horns layered over one another without pause. The air smelled of petrol, frying oil, incense, damp heat. People cooked on the pavement wherever there was space — plastic stools, makeshift grills, steam rising from woks in tight bursts. Fluorescent strip lights washed faces pale. Neon signs climbed vertically above us in competing colours. Music spilled from doorways in overlapping rhythms, bass lines clashing rather than harmonising.
Plastic chairs scraped against concrete. Glass bottles knocked against metal trays. It wasn't just busy. It was relentless.
We walked in widening circles, trying not to look lost. The pavement felt slightly greasy in places, as though it had absorbed years of cooking oil and humidity. Motorbikes brushed past close enough that you felt the heat from their engines on your legs. Bought beers. A packet of biscuits. Retreat rations. Then we headed back to the hotel.
Sarah cried. Not loudly. Not theatrically. Just overwhelmed. The kind of crying that comes when your brain can't process that everything — every sign, every sound, every smell — is new at once. I didn't blame her. I felt it too, just quieter.
That night I wrote a quick postcard home. Told Mum and Steph that things were "doing good." Said the beer was cheap and McDonald's was half the price of back home. It was easier to write it that way. Simpler. Safer. If I kept it practical — prices, trains, cheap beer — then it all sounded manageable.
· · ·
The next morning we noticed the Skytrain running near the hotel, slicing through the air above the traffic like something from a different city altogether. It looked efficient. Orderly. Predictable. Exactly what we needed.
We bought a day pass, unfolded the slightly confusing map, rode it to the final stop, then took a boat up the Chao Phraya. The river was brown and opaque, moving with slow authority beneath us. The boat was packed with locals and moved like a water taxi: quick, practical, unromantic. Red life jackets lined the ceiling above our heads. The engine vibrated through the metal floor and up into our feet.
When the boat pulled away from each dock, the engine note deepened and spray lifted briefly along the hull. Ropes creaked under tension. Conversations around us flowed in soft, clipped syllables I couldn't separate into meaning. Diesel hung faintly in the air. From water level, the city felt taller, closer, more layered than it had from the minibus window.
We got off where we thought we should, grabbed a tuk-tuk to Khao San Road, and finally found what we'd been craving since landing — other travellers. English voices. Backpacks. Laughing groups spilling out of cafés. It was noisy, but it was a noise we understood. Sarah lifted instantly. So did I.
· · ·
Our room off Khao San was basic — fan, shower, loo, thin mattress — but it suited me. The corridor outside carried the constant hum of other lives. A shower ran somewhere behind thin walls. Water hissed against tiles. Muffled bass travelled up from the bar below, never loud enough to follow, just enough to remind you it was there. A fan turned unevenly overhead. Doors opened and closed along the hallway at irregular intervals. Nothing was silent. Everything was shared.
Everything seemed impossibly cheap, the numbers almost suspicious. We kept converting prices in our heads. Street food for coins. Water for loose change. Rooms for notes. It made you feel rich and exposed at the same time: like you could live for nothing, but you'd better not make a stupid mistake.
We met two lads from Edinburgh — George and Douggie — proper Scotch drinkers who introduced us to the whisky bucket, which sounds harmless until you're staring at it. A whole bottle of whisky mixed with Red Bull, Coke, lemonade, and a handful of straws in a plastic bucket. We had a few, which is a sentence that should never be written.
We arrived in Chumphon at around four in the morning. A shack of a bus station. A few dim lights. And one phrase, repeated with hopeful persistence in the dark...
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Order Out of the Glass Box →Leaving Perth felt less like pulling away from a city and more like releasing a handbrake we hadn't realised was still on. The skyline shrank in the mirrors, glass towers flattening into something ordinary, and within half an hour the road widened and the traffic thinned until it felt as if the continent had opened its shoulders for us.
Excitement doesn't quite cover it. It was the kind of energy that makes you sit taller in the driver's seat and grin for no reason. Huey hummed along happily, automatic gears slipping in without drama, and the CD player we'd wired in only days earlier gave the whole thing a soundtrack. This wasn't a bus timetable dictating direction. It was us. Key turned. Foot down. Go.
The further north we went, the more the city dissolved into bush. Red shoulders of road stretched out on either side, low scrub and scorched tree trunks punctuating the landscape. Blackened trunks from previous fires stood like charcoal drawings against the sky, bright green shoots already pushing through at their bases. The bush didn't just survive fire; it expected it. New growth followed quickly, as if the land refused to waste time feeling sorry for itself.
That felt quietly reassuring.
· · ·
Cervantes was our first stop. We parked, opened the rear doors, and stared at the pile of poles, canvas and pegs that supposedly formed our annex.
Four hours later we were still there.
The professionals around us seemed able to erect entire mobile homes in the time it took us to untangle a guy rope. Pegs scattered. Poles refused to align. Canvas flapped in the wind with mild contempt. At one point an older bloke from the neighbouring pitch leaned over and shouted, "Got a bloody hotel there, ain't ya?" He wasn't wrong. When it was finally standing, Huey looked less like a van and more like a small suburban extension with wheels.
We stepped back and looked at it properly. It wasn't elegant. It wasn't quick. But it was ours.
As dusk slid in, the temperature dropped. The only real light came from inside Huey — strip lights we'd installed and the small television glowing blue from its VCR unit. The awning zip made a long, deliberate rasp each time we stepped in or out, a sound that felt oddly ceremonial. Outside, sausages hissed in the pan, fat spitting in the still air.
"Proper camping," I said, half-laughing.
Sarah, sleeves pushed up at the outside tap, water running over plates in the dark, replied: "Who thought we'd be living like this, eh?" There was pride in it. And a warning a few seconds later: "The sausages are burning."
She wasn't wrong.
There was no wind. No generators. Just us, a handful of quiet vans, and the smell of sausages and toast drifting out into the campsite.
When we finally pulled the awning zip closed for the night, it didn't feel exposed. It felt sealed. Safe. The van was tidy. Deliberate. Ours. Nothing dramatic happened that night. Just the hum of a place settling and the awareness that this small rectangle of light and canvas was home — chosen, not assigned.
· · ·
As the days stacked up, a rhythm formed: two nights on a site with power and showers, one night free to save twenty dollars. Twenty dollars bought fuel. Fuel bought distance.
I returned from the ablution block one morning to find Sarah standing with her arms slightly outstretched, fifteen or so green parrots clustered around her shoulders and forearms, yellow neck rings catching the sunlight. They squawked and jostled for crumbs, claws light but insistent. She looked half-anxious, half-thrilled — the kind of smile that isn't entirely sure whether to pull away or lean in. It was slightly chaotic, feathers beating the air, wings brushing her hair. And yet she was laughing. For a while budgets and distances dissolved into feathers and sunlight.
When we finally returned to the Dolphin Discovery Centre, hopeful and slightly damp after two days of rain, the dolphins didn't show. We waited anyway, standing with a handful of other optimists scanning the grey water. Nothing.
The road, we were learning, doesn't owe you moments just because you've planned for them.
That night, back in the van, we watched the Rugby World Cup final live on the tiny television. England versus Australia, on Australian soil. When Jonny Wilkinson's drop goal sailed through in extra time...
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