At three in the morning, after six hours to Vancouver and another sixteen to Bangkok, Thailand introduced itself all at once: heat, humidity, and the immediate realization that wearing nearly every piece of motorcycle gear I owned had been a terrible idea.
It wasn't a fashion decision. It was luggage strategy. I had become my own suitcase.
I stood outside BKK waiting for a Grab, alone in Asia for the first time, sweating through everything I owned within seconds. I had a one-way ticket, no return flight, and only a vague idea of where Thailand sat on a map.
That was more or less the point.
The gap I finally left open
I started my bachelor's in 2021. From the summer of 2022 onward, I barely stopped: classes, internships, contracts, personal projects, then more classes. I told myself I liked living that way, and mostly I did. But eventually, even a life you chose catches up with you.
When Shopify let me choose my full-time start date, I suddenly had a gap after graduation and no good excuse to fill it with another project. I wanted distance from my computer, my routines, my home, and everyone who already knew me. I had started university very young and finished it as a man. I just wasn't entirely sure what kind.
So I booked Bangkok.
My first plan was proudly nonexistent: one-way ticket, one backpack, figure it out. Then the departure date became real and I overcorrected. I enlisted every lovely AI tool I could find and quickly discovered that I had chosen Southeast Asia at the height of monsoon season.
Excellent.
I planned around it anyway.
Bangkok before breakfast
Jet lag turned me into a morning person. I would leave early and walk through neighbourhoods before the city had properly woken up, which felt brilliant until the midday heat arrived and reminded me how far I still was from acclimatized.
Somehow, I never took the public transport Bangkok is famous for. I crossed the city either on foot, slowly roasting, or on the back of a Grab bike, holding on while somebody else made sense of the traffic for me.
I hadn't come for the nightlife, so I expected Bangkok's daytime to feel like the part people waited through. Instead, it was charming. I liked watching shutters rise, stalls open, and entire streets switch on around me. The city was loud even when it was quiet.
Thirty-seven days on one island
From Bangkok, I flew to Koh Samui with one clear objective: train some good Muay Thai, get used to the Southeast Asian heat, and become comfortable on the roads. I gave myself 37 days to do it.
Lionheart Muay Thai became the centre of my routine. I trained in the morning and again in the afternoon, then fitted the rest of the island around those sessions. Some days that meant ziplining or jet skiing. Other days it meant fishing, riding through the mountains, or doing absolutely nothing because training twice in tropical heat had already answered the question of how much energy I had left.
Then there was the Rebel 300. In Canada, it is a friendly little motorcycle. On an island where scooters rule the road, it made me feel like a total rockstar. It was more motorcycle than I needed and exactly as much as I wanted.
The lovely cycle of life
The progress showed up first in my cardio. Training in heat that felt close to 40 degrees leaves you with two options: adapt or pass out. Slowly, I adapted.
I trained with professionals who absolutely whooped my ass. Then I trained with beginners and got to return the favour. That is the lovely cycle of life, apparently.
Staying in one place for so long also gave me something a faster trip would not have: a social life. I made friends, saw familiar faces, and began to have routines instead of an itinerary. For a while, that was exactly what I needed.
Going far, staying familiar
By the end, though, I had to admit something felt missing. Samui had become the kind of destination where it is very easy to travel a long way without leaving the familiar. Nearly everyone I became close with was European. I had come to learn something about Thailand and somehow left the island knowing considerably more about Europe.
That wasn't a failure. Those friendships were part of the trip, and the training had changed me in ways I could already feel. But routine is not the same thing as immersion, and staying somewhere longer does not automatically take you deeper into it.
Five weeks was too long for the trip I was beginning to understand I wanted. Koh Samui had made me fitter, steadier on two wheels, and comfortable being very far from home. It had also made me restless.
Ready for the road
I had arrived in Thailand hoping distance might hand me some clarity. It didn't, not all at once anyway. What it gave me first was proof that I could leave, land somewhere unknown, and build a life there quickly enough to miss it when I moved on.
The Rebel 300 would eventually make way for a Honda H'ness 350 in Vietnam. The tiny adventures would grow longer. The road would become less of a side activity and more of the point.
Thailand taught me that I could leave. Vietnam showed me how far I was willing to go.