About the hard parts, honestly

By reading these posts it may seem like travel is constant fun and adventure — and most of the time, it’s true, it is amazing. But there are some more difficult days that we usually don’t write about. Now we are sharing a more tiring experience as well.

Our journey to Taiwan was especially wearing. Getting to the Narita airport took two and a half hours on the metro, standing in the crowd. Our plane was leaving at 22.15.

The flight itself was excruciating. We got into heavy turbulence that was like sitting on a hundred year-old rollercoaster, except worse. We experienced limb numbness, nausea and lack of oxygen. We ripped open the papers bags but managed to land without vomiting.

Stepping out of the plane, every movemenet is painful. We lay down on the cold marble floor; it feels good to rest on the cool stone, moitionless. We stayed there for twenty minutes, then we got ourselves together and crawled to the arrivals. We there we had to wait a few hours — it was not even dawn, there were no buses to the city yet.

We tried to buy some Coke in a small convenience store, but they didn’t accept credit cards. We found an ATM but there was a queue. Acquiring a coke was a struggle. Our nausea almost disappeared by the time our bus arrived. Of course it was over-cooled — as in all warm countries, air conditioning is abused here. We were shivering while it was 26 degrees outside.

Arriving to the city, it was 5 am and raining. We didn’t know where we are. We got lost on the metro but found our way to the street of our accommodation. Our host, Ken, was not there at the meeting point. We asked an officer to borrow his phone to call him. Ken arrived 15 minutes later. We were dog-tired and impatient. He told us every detail of no importance about the room. We were dehydrated and irritated. We fell onto the hard bed and slept til noon.