Europe: A Journey (Prologue)

Prologue

The journey began rather unusually. I was sitting in front of a computer, with nothing to do. I had volunteered as an intern to a political party’s office, which had just recently swept to power in the state. It was the honeymoon days, when idealism was something still realistic to believe in. 

I was alone in the office and browsing through the Internet, looking for interesting things to while the time away. Then I stumbled upon a picture. It was, for lack of a better word, beautiful. A green valley, carved by a glacier and covered by alpine green with waterfalls at its sides. It was Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland. 

Almost immediately then, Europe came back to me. For it had been away from my mind for quite some time.

I had just about reached the end of my teenage years, which were spent not really in school (I was homeschooled), but in college. At the tender age of 15 I began my diploma (not that starting early mattered much - I only finally got my degree when I was 21). It was a combination of the suggestion of parents and lack of purpose on my part that I chose to enter college to study for a business degree (a bittersweet decision). 

The Grand Tour began to form in my mind, after I first saw that image. It is named of course after a famous tradition, a rite of passage, that began hundreds of years ago and continues to this day (as I will find, largely among Caucasian Americans and Australians). To travel to a distant, exotic, yet civilized land.

I live in Malaysia, a peninsula that marks the tip of South East Asia (Singapore would be the full stop). Yet I had not really traveled my own lands, so to speak. In a classic case of green grass on the other side, while Europeans arrive by the plane loads to our beaches and cities, my eyes were elsewhere. 

Europe was a no brainer as a destination of choice for a teenager looking for a definitive rite of passage. The monuments, the history, the culture. Huge and subtle variations all within easy reach of one another. But there was one little problem.

A teenager usually does not have a lot of money. And my own pride dictated that there would be no parental funds involved. This was going to be my trip. From my own bootstraps. You could have hardly found a better motivator for someone to get off his behind and start looking for work.

And find work I did. I settled into a decent job in IT. It payed well. It was something I moderately enjoyed. It was slow but it was sure and I began to accumulate the money I needed to make it a reality. Oh, but what a ride it was.

Our budget carrier, AirAsia had the cheapest route to Europe - from Kuala Lumpur to Paris. I woke up early in the morning to purchase a ticket while it was on sale, and snagged it for a rather cheap RM1,500 (around $500) return. I was in the clear, or so I thought until an email arrived in my inbox less than three months before I was to take off, saying that unfortunately, the route was discontinued.

It gets better, of course. I get a call saying that I had been rebooked to a flight on Malaysia Airlines (getting pulled over by the police in the process!). So that was settled. Then began to long and ardous task of meticulously planning my route.

I am not the free and easy type. While I do believe in leaving some room for spontaneity, I had decided based on cost-effectiveness that the traditional Rail Pass wasn’t for me and decided to book point to point tickets which worked out to be cheaper but meant that by routes were fixed.

Then came the hostels. I had at least one of them cancel on me, but again, another smooth process.

And in the early days of May 2012, I left (along with my brother, a last minute addition to my journey) to another land for an adventure of sorts.