How driving a motorbike off a cliff was the best thing that didn't happen to me: Thailand, Part 1.

The last photo of my ill-fated motorbike ride

As I watched my white motorbike fling itself in a suicidal dive out of my hands, across the broken paved road and soar into a tree, all I could feel was exasperation.

The island of Koh Chang from the ferry

"Fine! Fine! You win!!" You. WIN!" Happy?" I was not sure to whom or what I was conceding to.  God? Asia? My common sense? As Thai people ran out of their houses made out of boards and insulated by newspaper across the rotted log that I had just gingerly tiptoed across, that led from their beach to the main road, I crossed the road to inspect the poor bike.  For the first time,  I saw that the only barrier between the road and a several hundred foot freefall was that gnarled tree.  The lone foreigner, a britishman, came up to me.
          "You let go of the bike." he said.  "That's good, most people never do." Picturing myself and my bike soaring off the cliff in a final blaze of glory, I realized just how close of a call I had just had.
         I had a flashback to when I was in 2nd grade:  standing in my kitchen, anxiously recounting the boxes of girl scout cookies I had sold, realizing I was under quota, and my mother's response to my woeful lamenting. "So what are you going to do? Jump off a cliff? Figure it out." 
         Here I was, seventeen years later, anxiously counting and recounting, standing on the side of a cliff.  
         What was I doing? Why was I here? How did I get here? How did I almost drive off a cliff, alone on a remote island in Thailand? 
         It was a reality check.  This was far from the first dangerous situation I'd encountered in the past eighteen months, but it was the first time that it had been my fault.  I had been reckless, I had told the person I was riding with to go on without me, I had wanted to stay behind and take pictures.  Sure, nothing bad had happened, but I was lucky.  What was I thinking?
        The issue was, I hadn't been.
         According to all the expats I've talked to, as well as a graduate students whose actual study is the effect of living abroad on people,  after living in China for about a year, expats experience what is scientifically known as the "China funk." It's symptoms are different for everyone, for me, it manifested itself in homesickness.  
           The difficult part of living abroad isn't the culture shock, the language barrier or traveling.  The emotionally draining part is the unsettling knowledge that everyone who knows and loves them is 3,000 miles away, and that they have to build a life without any of that support, and that everyone else's lives are moving on without them.  
         So in the throes of the "China funk", I decided to escape from the crowds of people and disconcerting street food.  
            I was going to backpack my way through Thailand, hostels and all. I was inspired by a friend known for her chill, laid back demeanor,  love of traveling and penchant for staying in hostels that looked like someone had just been murdered there.  If she could travel cheaply and light, so could I.  Carrying only a small backpack filled mostly with sunscreen and the book Eat Love Pray (more on that later), I boarded the plane to thailand. 
           Baby powder beaches, vivid blues, grey matte skies (it was the rainy season in Thailand) , bizarre yet tasty street food,  hospitable Thai people, it was as if I had stepped into a computer beach screensaver.

This is an actual picture I took myself.  Go to your computer's screen savers...look familiar?

              Perfect, right? The only problem was myself. I snorkeled, accidentally deep fried myself, meandered on beaches, saw insane amounts of temples, tried to find elephants and consumed every type of food I saw; yet I was still plagued by the same thoughts, namely, that I was 24 and still didn't know my exact life plan. 
            Standing over the mangled body of my poor motorbike, I realized that throwing myself off a cliff, metaphorically or physically, wasn't for me.  I had passively brooded over my potential life plans for months.  It was time for me to be proactive.  
           A few hours later, after a kindly Englishman and Thai man took me back to my beach bungalow and I had negotiated and paid the motorbike rental price for the damages (about $90, which I was later told was far too expensive, but I did wreck their bike, so I didn't negotiate too much), I started to read Eat Love Pray. 
            And thus started my attempt to be proactive by being exceptionally passive.  I,  the anti-hippie, anti-vegan republican, decided to go to a meditation retreat on a quest to find myself.