If disaster were to break apart the Earth during Yona’s trip, her camera was the tool that would make the shattered pieces around her feel real. The moment the camera shutter clicked, the image in front of it was no longer a subject or landscape to photograph. It was a blank space in time. Sometimes short intervals of nothingness affected people more than long periods of actual life. Yona considered how trips began. Didn’t travellers begin their journeys before they’d even left? Travel was nothing more than the recognition of the path they were already on.
Time passed slowly, and Yona dealt with things she had to do before her trip started. One of her tasks was the cancellation for the man she’d spoken with twice. She’d changed her mind again and wasn’t going to charge him for it. In order to withdraw his trip, she had to send in five whole pages of documents. She could only cancel in the first place thanks to a loophole in Jungle’s system, and the stress of the ordeal was burning a hole in Yona’s throat.
Departure was at the beginning of July. Even though more than a week remained before she left, Yona began to place things in her bag with a sudden urgency, as if she’d forgotten about them until now. She packed mosquito repellent, emergency medicine, and pencils and candy to give to local children. Constipation and diarrhoea pills were necessities, too. As she packed, it felt like so many things were vital. Barely a day would pass after she had closed the bag before she found a new reason to open it, as she thought of something else to pack. Soon after, she would open her suitcase yet again to remove other items, like her toothbrush, that she still needed before leaving for her trip. Yona spent several days stuck between two worlds before closing the suitcase for good the morning of departure.
Now Yona was inside the aeroplane as she had long envisioned. She pulled a blanket up to her neck and looked through the cornerless window. Lights below her dotted the Earth like a mosaic. Looking from above, she could see that the city was at full capacity. Only inside this obese metropolis could one take the congestion for granted. As the red-eye flight cruised overhead, the urban swarm shrank into nothingness.
2
THE DESERT SINKHOLE
SIX TRAVELLERS SPENT THREE HOURS rushing over Vietnam’s national highway number one. The bus they were riding had been swept up in a deluge of motorcycles. Motorcycles zipped along the road, and more waited by the kerb. The kerbside bikers were waiting for scheduled pickups, or hanging around hoping for customers. Bikes carrying up to four people at a time could be seen from the bus windows. Yona also watched the passing Vietnamese flags, stuck in the ground at equal distances, and street vendors hawking bags of bread and noodles. Two-storey houses, simple except for their beautifully decorated eaves and elaborate front gates, glided by, alongside tangles of electrical lines that resembled thick hair. The travellers recorded each moment, clicking their camera shutters as they glanced out of the windows at an outdoor wedding, and later when they drove past a cemetery busy with funeral-goers.
Among all the views on the road, what caught Yona’s eye most was the Korean writing. She saw Korean words written on small items, like vests labelled with the phrase ‘quick delivery’ and T-shirts with unexpected slogans like ‘hazardous materials vehicle’, but she also noted Korean on buses, like those adorned with misspellings such as ‘automatic rood’ instead of ‘automatic door’.
‘Right now in Vietnam, we have a lot of buses covered with maps of the old Seoul transportation system,’ the guide explained. ‘People import old Korean buses to Vietnam, and buses with even a few Korean words on them sell for more. This means that a lot of people just go ahead and put Korean stickers on the vehicles they’re selling. If you look carefully, you’ll see Korean letters all over the place, even though what’s written doesn’t always make sense. Recently I rode a bus that, according to the map on the outside of the vehicle, went by Jungang Market, Gyeongbok-gung Palace and Mapo-gucheong. Of course, that wasn’t the actual route. Isn’t that funny?’
The guide had energy suitable for a person used to long journeys. Her name, she said, was ‘Lou’, and she was Korean—even if her name wasn’t. She spent ten months each year in places like Vietnam, Mui and Cambodia, but Mui was her favourite. Accommodation there was of especially high quality, she said.
Highway one first hit the coast at the seaside town of Phan Thiet. The town was a checkpoint you had to pass through to reach Mui. The bus stopped in front of the entrance to Phan Thiet’s largest grocery store. Lou rose from the passenger seat.
‘We’re going to take a break here for the next hour,’ she told the travellers. ‘There are no large supermarkets in Mui, so buy any necessary items or snacks you’ll want to bring with you.’
An hour later, the passengers boarded carrying remarkably similar purchases: products like G7 coffee, Oral B toothbrushes and nep moi, a Vietnamese rice liquor. Everyone carried bundles of toothbrushes as well. Lou had informed the group that toothbrushes were especially cheap in Vietnam, so they’d all been sure to buy a few, even though some of the travellers had initially laughed at the idea. ‘We’re on a disaster trip,’ they’d exclaimed. ‘Aren’t toothbrushes a bit too ordinary to bring on an adventure like this?’
‘Maybe Mui is more ordinary than we’re expecting,’ the man facing Yona said. There were two men on the trip. One was a college student who’d just been released from his compulsory military service; he’d been preparing for the trip since the beginning of his conscription. The other man looked to be around forty, but he turned out to be much younger. He was only one year older than Yona, and he told her he was a screenwriter. This was the man sitting across from Yona.
None of his works had been turned into movies yet, but he had sold more than ten screenplays to production companies, and he supported himself with a variety of side jobs. The other two female travellers, besides Lou, were a mother and child. The woman was an elementary school teacher who’d brought along her five-year-old daughter. Yona’s fellow adventurers began to ask her questions.
‘Are you married yet?’ one person asked.
‘How old are you?’ demanded another.
‘What kind of work do you do?’
She couldn’t say that she was on a business trip, or that the person who’d created this package was a co-worker. She wondered if their guide, sitting in front of them, was aware of the personal details of her clients. Thankfully, all Lou seemed to know was the contents of everyone’s passports. Yona tried to come up with an appropriate fake job for herself. She decided she’d be a thirty-three-year-old independent café owner: a life Yona had daydreamed about. If she ever quit her job at Jungle, Yona really did want to open a store that sold coffee and pie.
‘The truth is, I paid for this trip with my student loans,’ the college student told the others. ‘Trips like this aren’t usually expensive, so I figured it wouldn’t be too hard on my finances. And the insurance that comes with the package is pretty generous, too: if anything happens to me on this trip, the massive payout Jungle will send my parents is going to pay back the debt I owe them for raising me!’
It seemed like the college student had said this as a joke, but the guide wore a serious look on her face. ‘As long as you pay attention to your surroundings, you’ll be fine. Accidents that occur because of broken rules aren’t covered.’