‘Miss Yona’s camera must be one of these,’ the guide said.
Before she could even take a look at them, a fourth camera appeared. The fourth was Yona’s. The teacher’s daughter brought it over.
‘This morning, she said I could carry it around with me …’ the child said, as if she was tattling on Yona.
Yona’s face turned red, and then she remembered she had done exactly that. As soon as Yona’s camera was discovered, the Unda child who’d been in possession of one of the three others burst into tears. It was the same kid who’d made a ‘V’ sign with his hands while floating by on a plastic washbasin. Yona lowered her burning face.
‘I’m sorry,’ she told the child. ‘I’m embarrassed to have made such a disturbance because of my carelessness.’
Because she was speaking Korean, the crying child couldn’t understand, but the important thing for Yona was that her fellow travellers heard. Yona took a small bag of candy out of her bag and held it out to the tearful boy. Then she got in the car like she was running away. The teacher broke the silence flowing throughout the inside of the vehicle. She seemed to be mumbling to herself: ‘How could so many kids have cameras in a place like that?’ This statement upset the college student. He’d looked uncomfortable ever since the camera hunt began.
‘Did we really have to search the homes like that? It was so awkward,’ he exclaimed, clearly angry. ‘This goes against the whole point of the trip. I’m just saying, we have to keep track of our own things.’
Yona closed her eyes and sat in silence. She did feel apologetic. If she’d lost something smaller than a camera, she wouldn’t have bothered to say anything. The college student began to argue with the guide, and Yona watched. The student gave a monologue about the aim of an ethical trip, and finally the guide rebutted that this trip didn’t fall under the category of ‘ethical tourism’. To stop the two, Yona said, ‘It’s all my fault. I’m sorry.’ The fight quieted, but curses kept coming off the college student’s tongue. He was still upset by what the guide had said.
‘Mum, what does “fuck” mean?’ the teacher’s daughter asked, briefly taking a break from drawing.
‘You don’t need to know,’ the teacher replied.
‘Mum, Mum, what does “fuck” mean? What does it mean?’
‘You know, don’t you? Are you really asking because you’ve never heard that word?’
As she got to the end of the question, the teacher’s voice grew quieter, but the child seemed to enjoy listening to her mother’s timid explanations, so she answered even more sonorously to taunt her.
‘Yeah, I do know what it is!’ she shouted. ‘It’s a bad word, a bad word.’
The writer tried to change the subject by bringing up the Unda skull-shaped decorations he’d bought from a vendor, but no one was interested. The guide just stared at the itinerary. Everyone kept their mouths shut.
‘Mum, I want to eat a rice omelette!’ the teacher’s daughter yelled tactlessly, instantly wrapping up the ‘fuck’ situation.
The car stopped in front of a restaurant, and soon a lunch that specifically included a rice omelette had been prepared. The college student pounded his chest like he had indigestion. A rash that hadn’t been there a few hours ago welled up on Yona’s forearm. The unfamiliar water here probably wasn’t the only reason for the rash’s appearance.
The resort was the sole place in Mui that didn’t have a shortage of drinking water. Judging by their experience last night, the travellers had realised that a guest in the resort used more water per day than all the houses on stilts together. After the group ate lunch, they plunged into four hours of volunteer work, drilling a well. The team on the trip right before them had done some work on the well already, and progress continued with the new visitors as if they were competitors in a relay race. The now-silent party dug into the earth as diligently as they could. After four hours, they enjoyed a moment of contentment when, like compensation for their labour, water leaked out of the ground. It wasn’t just a reward for the work they’d undertaken; it also seemed like compensation for the emotional toil that had been plaguing everyone since the morning.
Before returning to the resort, they bathed in nearby hot springs to dissolve their fatigue. It was hard to judge the water quality, but because the springs were near a volcano, someone kept loudly claiming, the water had special properties. After two hours, they emerged with skin that was definitely a bit softer, and commemorative stamps on their foreheads: mosquito bites.
After a brief burst of rain, the earth quickly dried out again. Under a sign that said ‘Mui Market’, the travellers encountered a line of tents and street stalls. They purchased their desired souvenirs, then entered a nearby pub and sat down. The walls were shabby, but it was crowded with locals and had a pleasant atmosphere. There were no menus, so you couldn’t know exactly what they sold. The guide ordered food and drink for the group. At the end of the alley outside the bar, locals knelt as they braided clients’ hair, and others gave people tattoos. A huge bundle of balloons came into view. The bundle looked like a bouquet of flowers, ready to shoot up into the night sky. The guide bought two balloons and gave one to Yona and the other to the teacher’s daughter. The writer came back to the group holding a dragon fruit, which he began to cut in two. After spooning out the flesh and eating it, he filled the remaining pink skin with nep moi, a local spirit.
‘These are dragon fruit shots,’ he said, pouring the alcoholic creation into cups for the others. ‘Let’s drink it all in one go! Days like today make us all feel on edge, don’t they? Let’s drink and unwind a little.’
The teacher’s daughter touched her tongue to the dragon fruit alcohol and then pretended to be drunk, which took some members of the group aback and made others smile. Soon, even the college student’s expression had softened. They didn’t want to accept that they’d gone on a trip to a disaster zone only to create a disaster of sorts on their own, by disrupting the lives of the locals. Yona felt exactly like her fellow Jungle travellers did. She wanted to forget the discomfort of thinking about that Unda child, so with the help of alcohol she erased the day’s events from her mind. At the bar, Yona and her fellow travellers reflected on the simplicity of their identities here: they were just tourists.
‘Hey, at first glance, doesn’t this place look like Khaosan or De Tham Street?’ the writer asked his travel mates. ‘The famous tourist streets in Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City. You know, Bangkok isn’t a city to be lonely in. It’s the sort of destination for tourists without any innocence, for people who are really explicit about what they want to do. And then Ho Chi Minh City is a bit more unsophisticated, and haggard, really. And Mui, it’s, it’s something like …’
The writer went on to a different tourist destination without bothering to describe Mui. Yona felt queasy. She kept thinking about what would complete the writer’s sentence: ‘Mui, it’s, it’s something like …’
The group got more drunk. Yona looked over at the entrance to the bar. The building opened on to a view of sea, or maybe the sea opened on to the building. There was nothing about the opening that you could call a door (or maybe the door was open so wide that Yona couldn’t see it). All Yona saw was a plaque hanging above the opening, bearing a sentence that apparently indicated the theme of this place. According to the guide, the sentence meant, ‘Drinking is happiness’.