CANCER ODYSSEY ORIGINS - PART TWO
2000 words / 9 minute read
As I wrote in Origins Part One, when I started out on the Escape leg of the Cancer Odyssey, I had no firm plans in place and nothing more than a vague picture in my mind of how things might look going forward.
Despite that, I wasn’t making a total leap into the dark - I’ve done quite a bit of travelling around Asia and my best mate Dick had lived here in Sinville for much of the previous decade, during which time I came through once or twice for weeks or months at a time.
I must say though, that neither of us expected to end up back in Sinville itself - that took us both by surprise - we were on a mission to find “Sinville 2”, but that could end up being a very long journey with no guarantee of such a place even existing at the end of it.
So I’m glad we came back when we did - like lots of the quirks of this trip, the timing was fortunate and there is no question of me moving on again, I feel we’ve made the right choice staying here.
All the more so because this place can be quite transient as you can imagine - so although we’ve both very much got our own mates and are leading our own lives, it’s nice to have such an old friend living in town.
If you met us, it wouldn’t be unfair to describe me and Dick using words like “chalk and cheese” or “The Odd Couple”. This has been no barrier to the closeness of our friendship, something we've retained for a decade, despite no huge efforts at maintenance by either side (we are men after all), and spending most of that time living on different sides of the world.
Physically the chalk and cheese analogy continues too - he’s unfeasibly tall, still has a full head of dark hair with an enviable hairline and the ability to effortlessly grow impressive lumberjack style beards. In comparison, I am built more like a normal person, but alas, am somewhat “follicularly challenged” - though this is something of a blessing as the hair I do have comes with a "tinge of ginge" (but only a tinge mind you, "carrot-top" I am not).
Add to this that we approach life from wildly opposing directions, (not to mention seeing the world in radically different ways) and this has meant that he has done more than almost anyone else to challenge my pre-held beliefs and perceptions.
This has worked vice versa too it seems: when we met in London (way back in 2007), he was "surprised that he could actually respect a guy who wore a suit to work". Happy that I could challenge that preconceived notion.
We even spent a year or so living in a party house in London back then before Dick, not yet ready to return to Australia, decided to follow a friend of his here to Sinville, where he has basically stayed from then on, embracing his own (thankfully cancer-free) version of the Freedom Philosophy.
Good timing was on our side in the years between his first arriving and our eventual return, as that was during the “financial crisis” period, when I took the chance to escape the recession doom and gloom to go travelling: first to India, moving onto spending some time here, before following my then-girlfriend to her native Oz, where the government had deigned to grant me the ability to live and work for a year without the immigration hoop jumping of applying to stay through my partner.
Good thing too, because, they do give the impression that their doors are closed to immigrants and, as a seasoned loather of bureaucracy, to have to be permanently living under the mercy of the government’s whim (when they’re so hostile) would not have been fun at all.
At least in Cambodia (for now), money talks - “dotting eyes and crossing tees” are not big considerations.
So when the Aussie visa couldn’t be extended, I returned here to Sinville to wait out the northern hemisphere winter. It would have been far too bleak to return to the UK in January from the perpetual-weekend-constant-summer lifestyle and (after flirting briefly with the idea of going to New Zealand), returned to London in the spring of 2011.
Come the summer of 2014, my new English girlfriend and I were going to a large psytrance music festival in Portugal. Knowing that this would be a great opportunity to lure Dick back for a holiday, I bought him a ticket so he couldn't back out and he factored in some time in London either side of the Portugal trip, by chance being there the week I popped into the hospital for my quarterly scan results.
This was supposed to be a good news consultation and I was fully expecting to hear I was on the way to “remission”, having had the tumours removed by surgery and six months of chemo either side of the ops for good measure. Above all I was feeling so great now that Olga no longer impacted on everything I ate or did.
I'd even drafted a text message to send to my friends and family in anticipation of what was (almost certainly) to be positive news. Instead I was met by grim faces and tiny black marks on a CT scan that showed there was a lesion on my lung, which was somewhere those buggers hadn’t been seen before.
As I've detailed elsewhere, this was something of a penalty kick to the Watsons as you can imagine.
It was also the first conversation in which they warned that I should start preparing that a cure was now unlikely - cue the world, crashing, down, ears, all that stuff.
Thankfully, Dick’s presence meant I wouldn't have to be by myself back at the flat, so my boss was happy to let me go home to deal with this traumatic news the only way I saw fit. And being a good and altruistic friend, Dick was also more than happy for me to put a beer in his hand at 10am and go on to spend all day getting ruinously drunk.
All I could think about at that point was how much greener the grass is when you're living by a beach.
Way prior to my diagnosis, Dick had suggested we buy a boat to take us around the archipelago that make up the Philippines and "have an adventure", so when the time came for me to escape London, that was naturally the direction I thought things should go.
When I'd first brought up escape notions with my mum, I had openly wondered whether I would be substituting a lonely existence in London (where I could at least see my family) for a more lonely existence but in a far flung place with a hot climate and a beach.
I knew from conversations with Dick while I was still back home that his return to Oz "for good" in 2015 was not going so well and he was going through what was effectively a prolonged culture shock, struggling to adapt to his native environment after such a long period away, so I had a notion that I could entice him to join me on the Odyssey.
I didn't give him a huge amount of warning so he didn't have many months to prepare and save his monies - in fact he wasn't even working at that point so it would have been a struggle for him to be able to match me pound for pound at the start.
This was okay though, because I had a picture in my mind of us finding a Filipino version of Sinville, a bolthole where I would finance us to set up some kind of business in this new improved Sinville that would give Dick an income so we could enjoy ourselves while I was still well enough, but also once I was no longer around, where he will be self-sufficient and would then be able to continue without me.
The Philippines was our initial destination of choice for other reasons too: neither of us had been before but had both heard a lot about the place. Conversations I’d had with fellow travellers in the past had been illuminating - they'd shared that they felt the country was the “Last Asian Frontier”, which you can imagine would be something of a draw for chaps like us (not that we wanted to live in the wild west or anything - and this was before Duterte started killing drug dealers by the thousand).
I was looking to enjoy a peaceful existence in a permissive and relaxed society, “like Cambodia but different”.
And it turned out to be exactly that - since I ended up visiting seven Asian countries (plus Oz) over the course of the two-month period around the end of 2015 and the start of 2016 - Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Cambo and the Ppines, I had much to compare it to and it was certainly my favourite of those I've just listed.
We were confident that we would find what we were looking for in the Philippines - there are enough islands to choose from after all - and we started off on Cebu, settling for several weeks in a little village called Moalboal.
We loved it there - and there is so much about the Philippines that I do prefer - not just to Cambodia but also other similar countries in Southeast Asia. The language barrier is far less of an issue than it is here, the girls are just as pretty, the beer is cheap and the weather equally good.
But, to quote John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, it’s the “little differences” that can make all of the difference in the long run. They've got the same stuff there they have here, there it’s just a little different - add to this the fact that life wasn't as cheap as we were used to here and it led us to separately wonder what the weather was doing in Sinville (if you know what I mean).
These separate wonderings became open discussion one morning and flight booking by lunchtime - at that stage purely for reasons of “memory consolidation” you understand, and with no intention of remaining here for any length of time.
Despite only spending a few weeks there in the end (and only visiting one island!), I'm still very fond of the Ppines and would happily return for a holiday, but it was strange that we were looking for a “new Sinville” without thinking that “Original Sinville” might be the best place for us after all.
All the more so because this place can be quite transient as you can imagine - so although we’ve both very much got our own mates and are leading our own lives, it’s nice to have such an old friend living in town.
UNFEASIBLY CHALK AND CHEESE
Physically the chalk and cheese analogy continues too - he’s unfeasibly tall, still has a full head of dark hair with an enviable hairline and the ability to effortlessly grow impressive lumberjack style beards. In comparison, I am built more like a normal person, but alas, am somewhat “follicularly challenged” - though this is something of a blessing as the hair I do have comes with a "tinge of ginge" (but only a tinge mind you, "carrot-top" I am not).
Add to this that we approach life from wildly opposing directions, (not to mention seeing the world in radically different ways) and this has meant that he has done more than almost anyone else to challenge my pre-held beliefs and perceptions.
This has worked vice versa too it seems: when we met in London (way back in 2007), he was "surprised that he could actually respect a guy who wore a suit to work". Happy that I could challenge that preconceived notion.
We even spent a year or so living in a party house in London back then before Dick, not yet ready to return to Australia, decided to follow a friend of his here to Sinville, where he has basically stayed from then on, embracing his own (thankfully cancer-free) version of the Freedom Philosophy.
Good timing was on our side in the years between his first arriving and our eventual return, as that was during the “financial crisis” period, when I took the chance to escape the recession doom and gloom to go travelling: first to India, moving onto spending some time here, before following my then-girlfriend to her native Oz, where the government had deigned to grant me the ability to live and work for a year without the immigration hoop jumping of applying to stay through my partner.
Good thing too, because, they do give the impression that their doors are closed to immigrants and, as a seasoned loather of bureaucracy, to have to be permanently living under the mercy of the government’s whim (when they’re so hostile) would not have been fun at all.
At least in Cambodia (for now), money talks - “dotting eyes and crossing tees” are not big considerations.
So when the Aussie visa couldn’t be extended, I returned here to Sinville to wait out the northern hemisphere winter. It would have been far too bleak to return to the UK in January from the perpetual-weekend-constant-summer lifestyle and (after flirting briefly with the idea of going to New Zealand), returned to London in the spring of 2011.
BOOM FESTIVAL
Come the summer of 2014, my new English girlfriend and I were going to a large psytrance music festival in Portugal. Knowing that this would be a great opportunity to lure Dick back for a holiday, I bought him a ticket so he couldn't back out and he factored in some time in London either side of the Portugal trip, by chance being there the week I popped into the hospital for my quarterly scan results.
This was supposed to be a good news consultation and I was fully expecting to hear I was on the way to “remission”, having had the tumours removed by surgery and six months of chemo either side of the ops for good measure. Above all I was feeling so great now that Olga no longer impacted on everything I ate or did.
I'd even drafted a text message to send to my friends and family in anticipation of what was (almost certainly) to be positive news. Instead I was met by grim faces and tiny black marks on a CT scan that showed there was a lesion on my lung, which was somewhere those buggers hadn’t been seen before.
As I've detailed elsewhere, this was something of a penalty kick to the Watsons as you can imagine.
It was also the first conversation in which they warned that I should start preparing that a cure was now unlikely - cue the world, crashing, down, ears, all that stuff.
Thankfully, Dick’s presence meant I wouldn't have to be by myself back at the flat, so my boss was happy to let me go home to deal with this traumatic news the only way I saw fit. And being a good and altruistic friend, Dick was also more than happy for me to put a beer in his hand at 10am and go on to spend all day getting ruinously drunk.
All I could think about at that point was how much greener the grass is when you're living by a beach.
THE FINAL FRONTIER
When I'd first brought up escape notions with my mum, I had openly wondered whether I would be substituting a lonely existence in London (where I could at least see my family) for a more lonely existence but in a far flung place with a hot climate and a beach.
I knew from conversations with Dick while I was still back home that his return to Oz "for good" in 2015 was not going so well and he was going through what was effectively a prolonged culture shock, struggling to adapt to his native environment after such a long period away, so I had a notion that I could entice him to join me on the Odyssey.
I didn't give him a huge amount of warning so he didn't have many months to prepare and save his monies - in fact he wasn't even working at that point so it would have been a struggle for him to be able to match me pound for pound at the start.
This was okay though, because I had a picture in my mind of us finding a Filipino version of Sinville, a bolthole where I would finance us to set up some kind of business in this new improved Sinville that would give Dick an income so we could enjoy ourselves while I was still well enough, but also once I was no longer around, where he will be self-sufficient and would then be able to continue without me.
The Philippines was our initial destination of choice for other reasons too: neither of us had been before but had both heard a lot about the place. Conversations I’d had with fellow travellers in the past had been illuminating - they'd shared that they felt the country was the “Last Asian Frontier”, which you can imagine would be something of a draw for chaps like us (not that we wanted to live in the wild west or anything - and this was before Duterte started killing drug dealers by the thousand).
I was looking to enjoy a peaceful existence in a permissive and relaxed society, “like Cambodia but different”.
And it turned out to be exactly that - since I ended up visiting seven Asian countries (plus Oz) over the course of the two-month period around the end of 2015 and the start of 2016 - Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Cambo and the Ppines, I had much to compare it to and it was certainly my favourite of those I've just listed.
We were confident that we would find what we were looking for in the Philippines - there are enough islands to choose from after all - and we started off on Cebu, settling for several weeks in a little village called Moalboal.
We loved it there - and there is so much about the Philippines that I do prefer - not just to Cambodia but also other similar countries in Southeast Asia. The language barrier is far less of an issue than it is here, the girls are just as pretty, the beer is cheap and the weather equally good.
But, to quote John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, it’s the “little differences” that can make all of the difference in the long run. They've got the same stuff there they have here, there it’s just a little different - add to this the fact that life wasn't as cheap as we were used to here and it led us to separately wonder what the weather was doing in Sinville (if you know what I mean).
These separate wonderings became open discussion one morning and flight booking by lunchtime - at that stage purely for reasons of “memory consolidation” you understand, and with no intention of remaining here for any length of time.
Despite only spending a few weeks there in the end (and only visiting one island!), I'm still very fond of the Ppines and would happily return for a holiday, but it was strange that we were looking for a “new Sinville” without thinking that “Original Sinville” might be the best place for us after all.
Reality hit us when we’d been back in town a few days and found Dick’s money was dwindling. I certainly wasn’t going to carry on the Odyssey without him, so we rented a house and fell into the Narnia time-vortex that this place is (very happily I might add).
Those first few months before Olga the Second got her evil claws to me, our lifestyle was idyllic - I was having daily Khmer lessons and gym sessions, fully living the “retired life” I came here for.
Even after I gave the gym and the lessons up as I started to grow sicker, things were still great here and my decline was very gradual, though noticeable as I write about here.
Of course my trip home and unexpectedly coming back with George the Second has made a huge difference to my quality of life, as I shall document in Part 3 of the Odyssey Origins in the not too distant future.
Thanks for keeping up with me this far, much more to come!
Catch up soon
Stage-4-in-Sinville
theccconline.blogspot.com
Those first few months before Olga the Second got her evil claws to me, our lifestyle was idyllic - I was having daily Khmer lessons and gym sessions, fully living the “retired life” I came here for.
Even after I gave the gym and the lessons up as I started to grow sicker, things were still great here and my decline was very gradual, though noticeable as I write about here.
Of course my trip home and unexpectedly coming back with George the Second has made a huge difference to my quality of life, as I shall document in Part 3 of the Odyssey Origins in the not too distant future.
Thanks for keeping up with me this far, much more to come!
Catch up soon
Stage-4-in-Sinville
theccconline.blogspot.com
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