It’s all gone south – Theo’s blog

It’s all gone south – Theo’s blog

It felt romantic, as it always does to me, heading out to sea from the Malaysian Port of Batam.  After two and a half months travel, we’d finally stepped off the land mass that had Amsterdam at one end and us now at the other.  I felt elated and slightly scared to be sailing south into a new hemisphere, a foaming trail growing between us and Indochina.

I watched from the back of our fast ferry, surrendering my transcendent spiritual moment to the chattering mad American cyclist – a grey haired, weatherbeaten, intel consultant with a hippy head band – boasting on beside me about his high-powered friends, covert connections, drinking and sexual excesses and improbable contradictory life histories.

He’s not the first older American travelling alone with the implied backstory, probably fantasy, of a would-be deep-state veteran. As he invoked his secret bloodline link to the family of Mrs Wallace Simpson, which he assured me he could summon in real emergencies, I made my excuses and went inside to join the others.

We sat and watched the onboard film John Wick, Chapter 3, which we couldn’t hear above the ferry engine, but mercilessly with English subtitles.  Seemed like John was exactly the kind of implausible action man those American loners aspired to.  I imagined them as retired nine-to-fivers, finally breaking free and squeezing some zest out of their lives, and good luck to them. I also like to see myself as a fearless underworld adventurer with a more intriguing secret life than anyone could ever guess.  A Jason-Bourne-again if you will.

But at that point, the fact that me Shannon and Rosa were skidding across a tropical sea with the island of Singapore along our starboard horizon and the freighters and tankers of a hundred nations navigating the crowded shipping lanes before us, was more than fantasy enough. I just can’t believe we’ve made it to Indonesia.

• Theo, Jakarta