samueladamsblog

The idea was brilliant in its simplicity.

I would start an online proofreading company geared towards Chinese and other Asian business people whose written English was not at a native level. Their poorly written documents were always a source of confusion to their Western clients. It made them look unprofessional- it even cost them business. That would be the sales pitch anyway.

I would develop a subscription-based website to proofread their documents and email them back by the end of the business day. My company would be based in Manila, the Philippines- a one hour flight from Hong Kong, the same time zone as Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul, Beijing, Taipei- all the big business cities of Asia.

Did you know that Filipinos speak English as well as Americans do? The educated ones know their prepositional phrases and dangling participles. I don’t even know what those are. Most importantly, the Philippines is cheap. US$400 a month is a good salary for recent college grads. I couldn’t afford to pay Americans.

A previous Google search showed me that no such online service yet existed. I was going to be rich! I was going to be the next eBay, the next Facebook! I would have an employee jacuzzi lounge in the office, a company nightclub where I would fly famous DJs in from Europe for our Friday after-work parties, I would show up to press conferences wearing flip-flops and a bathrobe – brilliant entrepreneurial eccentric that I was. I would grace the cover of Fortune under the heading “Maverick Mogul”, eyebrow subtly arched and bottom lip pouting out just so. But first I had to write the specs for the website, design the logo, hire a Filipino Web designer and find an apartment in Manila where I could oversee the whole process.

I flew to Manila and took a cab to the suburb of Quezon City. I had been to Manila, briefly, years before on a short visa run when I lived in Taiwan. My impression of Manila then was that it was a shit-hole like I had never before seen. It had a reputation for danger- kidnappings, terrorist bombings, out of control crime. It was then on the US State Department’s Travel Warning list along with Pakistan, Colombia and other cool places. And now I would be living here.

The taxi ride took an hour in the worst traffic I had ever witnessed, and as an Atlanta native, that’s saying something. The scene from my backseat window sprawled out before me：shantytowns. A motorcycle zoomed past us at 50 MPH, weaving in and out of the cars; a dog on all fours, tongue flapping in the wind, was riding on the back of the seat. It’s going to be fun living here, I thought. And on the horizon beyond the shanties were clusters of modern glass and steel high-rises – Makati, Ortegas, Fort Bonifacio and, where I would be living, Eastwood City.

Eastwood City is, according to its brochure, “a self-contained, high-rise, live-work-play community surrounded by a shimmering sea of slums”. It is like Atlanta’s Atlantic Station, but bigger and nicer, yet equally sterile. There is a seafood restaurant right in the middle of Eastwood that is a wooden replica pirate ship. The waiters and waitresses wear pirate costumes.

“Arrrrgh, would you like to hear about our daily special, matey?”

The Filipinos, I would learn, took to American kitch like none other. They took it to ridiculous extremes. It was an endearing national trait.

Once settled into my new high-rise apartment, I set out to celebrate the limitless possibilities before me. I started off in the theme pubs of Eastwood. They were devoid of both character and customers. I asked my pirate waiter where the action was and he suggested Fort Bonifacio. So I took a cab there.

Twenty minutes later my cab emerged from the crowded slums into a place that reminded me of Beverly Hills. I saw manicured lawns and hedges, flower beds and palm trees and fancy high-rise condo towers. Forbes Park and the Manila Polo Club were nearby- home to the Philippines’ ruling elite.

There are about 500 families who control perhaps 90% of the Philippines wealth and most of them lived here. No self-made millionaires these families. Many are descended from the Spaniards who colonized these islands 400 years ago and they inherited their wealth down through the generations. Some are of Chinese background too. The Ayala, Sy, Lopez and Tan families grace the Forbes’ richest list.

The cab dropped me off at a multi-story outdoor mall consisting entirely of bars, restaurants and nightclubs. It was called the Fort. I picked a restaurant that looked lively, sat down at an outdoor table and ordered a San Miguel from – oh my God! She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life. She was light-skinned with a mixture of Spanish and Malay features, tall- by Filipina standards, poised and elegant. She had an hour-glass figure, black almond eyes and a radiant smile. I had never before been so smitten by a complete stranger. She could have been a super-model. What was she doing waiting tables here?

With each beer she brought I would talk to her some more, asking her name, about her life. As I got drunker I grew bolder in my flirtation. I told her she was beautiful- she giggled, covering her mouth and averting her eyes in embarrassment. She liked me. I was getting the signals. I would never attempt to flirt with a girl of this calibre in Hong Kong, much less the U.S., but here I had no such inhibitions.

As I got drunker – was I on beer 10 now? This San Miguel is like water – I grew bolder and perhaps cruder in my flirtations. What time do you get off work tonight? Come with me! What’s your phone number? And she just covered her mouth and giggled. Her name was Jill and I would get to know her better later on in the story.

I was in need of company other than the wait-staff. Drinking alone was no fun. At a table next to me sat two stylishly dressed Filipinos about my age. I introduced myself.

“Hey, I just moved to Manila today. Can you recommend any good clubs to go to tonight?”

“Of course! Come with us. We’re leaving as soon as we pay the bill”.

They both had an air of money about them. Maybe it was the nice clothes they were wearing. I was dressed like a slob- t-shirt and shorts. How could you dress otherwise in this climate?

After settling our tabs the three of us walked to Joseph’s car. It was a new Japanese sedan, worth more than most Filipinos make in ten lifetimes. Dexter rode shotgun and I sat in the back.

“So what brings you to Manila?” Dexter asked. I told him about my business.

“That’s an excellent idea!” he said. “There’s definitely a need for that. I’m an editor myself.”

Dexter’s firm edited and wrote content for American magazines and newspapers. They outsourced this work to him. And Joseph was an architect. Both were members of the Manila Polo Club. Good people to know, I thought.

We drove for twenty minutes though a sprawling part of Manila that, apart from the palm trees, reminded me of any upscale American suburb, though set in the tropics.

As we neared central Makati, Manila’s modern business district, the gated neighborhoods of stately homes gave way to deluxe high-rise condos, glass office towers and finally, Greenbelt- the city’s most fashionable shopping and entertainment district.

Greenbelt consists of five mostly outdoor malls connected by pedestrian bridges and landscaped walkways. There was Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada and Fendi. Are there really enough rich people in Manila to keep these overpriced stores in business? Apparently so. And at nighttime, the couture shops close and the bars and nightclubs open.

After parking in the underground lot, the elevator deposited us at a long, outdoor plaza that snaked around fountains, fish ponds and palm trees lit up in Christmas lights. Greenbelt’s plaza was ringed by all manner of bars, restaurants and nightclubs, all teeming with revelers. I forgot to mention that this story takes place on a Tuesday night, though it could have been a Saturday night anywhere else in the world.

Dexter pointed out the bars of interest for my benefit as we walked towards our ultimate destination.

“This is Cafe Havana” he said. “Mostly of hookers and old white guys. A scummy crowd, but they have good Latin bands.” I scanned Havana’s outdoor seating and the tables were indeed almost exclusively occupied by older white men and their young Filipina ‘dates’.

We continued along the outdoor walkway, each side flanked with nightclubs and palm trees, different styles of music fading in and out with each passing club – rock, hip-hop, R&B- until at last we reached the end of the mall where we were enveloped in a cocoon of chill-out electronic music. It was called M Cafe.

Did you ever see that Seinfeld episode where George, while out walking, stumbles upon this ultra-hip nightclub full of super models? Not only is the pudgy, bald George Costanza allowed in but once inside, the models can’t get enough of him. Everyone wants a piece of George!

The next day, George excitedly tells Kramer and Jerry about this mythical nightclub full of super models. They, of course, think George is full of shit.

Exasperated, that night George drags his friends to this nightclub to prove he isn’t lying. The three of them arrive at the nightclub only to find an empty, boarded-up warehouse.

I’m reminded of that Seinfeld episode when I think back on M Cafe, there at the tail-end of Greenbelt.

Its patrons were painfully mod; they looked as if they had just stepped from the pages of Vogue.

The DJ was a black guy with a giant 70′s-style afro who, at 11 PM, was wearing fashionably over-sized sunglasses. He was from Brazil. The women there were an international potpourri of beauty- black girls, white girls and Asians from all corners of the world- and many of them really were models! This is Manila not Milan- what the hell were they doing here?

If you recall, I was in shorts and a sweat-soaked t-shirt-and sweat you do in this steam-shower climate. I was too drunk at this point to care.

My rank clothes were not an issue here as they would have been back in stuffy, buttoned-up Hong Kong. Everyone was really fucking chill here. Wanting to fit in, I ordered a lychee martini – Grey Goose please – and set out to mingle.

“Oh, you’re an entrepreneur! There are lots of those here now!”

“I’m here on a six-month modeling contract.”

“I’m an artist. I started an NGO to help the people living on Smokey Mountain.”

“Reuters correspondent. I’m off to Mindanao tomorrow to cover the guerrilla insurgency.”

“I have my own events coordination company. We organize fashion shows…”

“It’s so sad, these children. They spend their days digging through the garbage looking for things to recycle”

“I’m holding a fashion show tomorrow night sponsored by Maxim magazine. I’ll get you a VIP pass if you want. But make sure to dress fashion-forward.”

“I understand why they are rebelling. It’s not so much third-world as it is fourth-world. The poverty is shocking and they are completely neglected by the corrupt government here in Manila.”

“I used to live in Hong Kong, too. What a drag that place is!”

“We teach them how to use the garbage to make really cute handbags. They use newspaper, juice boxes…”

“Outsourcing is where it’s at right now. People are making a fortune!”

“Are you going to the party tonight?”

M Cafe cleared out en masse as we all boarded taxis for the party. It was the first of what would be many more parties just like it.

By the rooftop pool in a high-rise condo, a shirtless DJ with washboard abs was spinning “progressive house”- or whatever the fuck. There was an open bar with free drinks. The bartenders wore bow-ties! The 100 or so guests were a mix of upper-class Filipinos and international bright young things- all of them in various states of intoxication and undress.

Girls in bikinis laughed and splashed water at each other in the pool while, from the 30th floor rooftop, the lights of Manila flickered in a dizzying panorama; its teeming masses of 20 million restive in the tropical night heat. Few of them would ever know such decadence.

“Oh, we have these sorts of parties all the time” the events-coordinator told me with a studied air of nonchalance, waving her hand as if shooing a fly. “Every Friday or Saturday night you’ll find one. Sometimes on weekdays, too.”

It’s going to be fun living here, I thought.

And so ends the first chapter of my story. What happens in the coming chapters is so brutal, so outrageous and so unbelievable that I am once again reminded of that Seinfeld episode. Will anyone believe me? Well… unlike George, I have evidence.

For three years now, I’ve wrestled with how to best tell this story- or even if I should tell it.

As mentioned at the beginning of this blog, the situations I got myself into reflect poorly on my judgment. Once these details are public, there’s no putting this genie back into the bottle.

But then again, this story is just too amazing not to be told. And enough time has now passed that I can reflect on these experiences with some detachment.

As you can see in the picture, I spent time in a Philippine jail. An American friend, who worked tirelessly to get me out, took this photo on his Blackberry. It was taken on my fifth or sixth day inside. I had not slept but for a few hours in all that time.

What looks like a toga is actually my t-shirt draped around my shoulder. There was neither fan nor air conditioning- and with all the people packed into that tiny space, it was very, very hot.

The little guy behind me? He doesn’t look very threatening but he was the leader of this particular jail’s chapter of the Sputnik gang- one of the biggest prison gangs in the Philippines. Though he doesn’t look threatening, in jail he was king. One word from him and his underlings would, for whatever reason, beat the shit out of another prisoner. I saw it happen daily. If you were not a member of the gang, beatings were an ever present threat. Luckily I had enough money to stay on his good side.

I’m not proud of going to jail and I do not pretend to be a victim. Though I didn’t do anything too terrible, I deserved to get arrested. Though if I had done what I did in the U.S instead of Manila, I would have been out on bail in a couple of hours. I would have then gone to court at a later date and would most likely have had to pay a fine for my transgression. Not so in the Philippines. I was left to languish in jail with no end in sight, in the most dangerous and inhumane of conditions, and completely at the mercy of Sputnik and the corrupt police, both of whom worked as a team to extort all of the money I had. I was only in there for 7 days. In that time I gained a lifetime’s worth of insight into the darker side of the human condition.

I give you this as a teaser of what’s to come. Believe it or not, the jail story- of which I will be elaborating on- is just the tip of the iceberg. It gets even more fucked up after I get out.

The genie’s out. No turning back. On with the story…

Every big Asian city has a different breed of expat.

In Taipei, it is the English teacher. They come from Australia, Britain, the US and Canada. Recent college grads in their 20s, English teachers are middle-class adventurers on year-long sabbaticals. Once their teaching contracts end, most return home to begin their careers, get married, buy a house in the suburbs, have kids, grow old, retire and then die. But those memories of spending a year in an exotic country will sustain them throughout the remainder of their bland existences. They really went out there and did it!

Some of the male teachers, however, come under the spell of Asian women; graceful, pretty and demure they most certainly are. They fall in love. Many marry and have mixed-race children.

And then the years go by. At 40 they sing Old McDonald to school kids by day and then drink themselves silly in the expat bars by night- wondering where it all went wrong.

The pay for English teachers is OK; a middle class salary by local standards. This allows the teacher to live in comfort, to go out on the town a few nights a week and to vacation in Thailand or Bali twice a year. All-in-all, it is an easy life.

The English teacher is found not only in Taiwan, but also Japan, South Korea and anywhere else where English skills are in high demand by the locals. There weren’t many English teachers in Hong Kong, though. As a legacy of British rule, Hong Kongers knew English better than other east Asians. Apart from the Filipinos, of course.

In Hong Kong the expat is of an entirely different breed. In Hong Kong, it is the finance worker.

Middle-aged and married, often with kids in tow, the Hong Kong expat is highly paid, sometimes obscenely paid. They enjoy a full compensation package that includes a housing allowance, private school tuition for their kids, membership to the exclusive American Club, a Filipina nanny and a car. This is above and beyond their significant salaries and year-end bonuses.

Hong Kong expats live in high-rise condos on the slopes of Victoria Peak where they have breath-taking views of Central and the harbor. If not there, they live in Discovery Bay (known as “DB” by the locals)- a sterile, American-style planned community on Lantau Island. DB has golf courses, a fake beach and its residents ride around in golf carts instead of cars.

To get to DB you must take a ferry from Central. Upon arrival you immediately notice something amiss: there are trophy wives everywhere. And each one is pushing a baby stroller. It is the Stepford Wives. Many DB couples are reputed to be swingers – and in a land where the white man is in high demand, and where opportunities to cheat are endless, swinging may be the best way to keep a marriage intact.

By far the strangest group of expats can be found in the Philippines. I will elaborate on this in my next post.

The last two of my ten years in Asia were spent in the gutter- this is true. Before my descent, I was a relatively well-paid professional living in one of the world’s great cities. Hong Kong is an international hub of high finance, media, fashion and movie making. It ranks right up there with London and New York in terms of global importance and sophistication.

Hong Kong is also the most densely populated city on Earth and somewhere in that forest of neon-lit, ultra-modern skyscrapers sat my office in Central. It was on the 32nd floor with panoramic views of the harbor. All the big players were in Central: Lehman Brothers, AIG and Bear Sterns all had their Asian headquarters there. CNN, Bloomberg, BBC- all of them a short walk from my office.

My friends at the time? They also worked in Central; many of them at the above-mentioned companies. Some of these friends even had junk privileges. A junk, you may be wondering, is a fast, engine propelled boat that seats 30 comfortably. It has decks and deck chairs for laying out, a grill for BBQ and a full bar. Most big companies in Hong Kong keep junks as an employee perk as well as a place to entertain clients. I myself went on several junk trips around the territory. In those days I lived large.

The expat life is a glamorous and hard partying one and nowhere more so than in Hong Kong. After a night of heavy drinking, I’d come to work the next day with little sleep, eyes bloodshot and reeking of booze. This isn’t abnormal- it’s just the way it’s done here. It was expected of the gwailo.

Four to five times a week I met my drinking buddies for happy hour in Lan Kwai Fong. This is Central’s bar district and, with over 100 bars packed into a single block, it is probably the densest concentration of bars and nightclubs in the world. You have to take elevators to get to many of them.

Unlike other nightlife districts in Asia, bar-goers in LKF wore suits- or at the very least they dressed fashionably. Those in t-shirts and shorts were easily identified as tourists.

On any given night in LKF, the guy next to me at the bar was likely an executive producer for CNN or a hedge fund exec who cleared 10 million that year. Many had MBAs from Oxford, Cambridge or the Ivy League. They exchanged business cards over martinis or slipped off to do coke in the bathroom. It was a crowd I was not accustomed to when transfered here from provincial and relatively sleepy Taiwan. And while my job was never as prestigious, nor was my paycheck ever as high as the MBAs, I quickly adapted to the pace of life here.

At 2 am, once Lan Kwai Fong winds down, serious partiers take cabs to late night bars on the dirty side of town. Wan Chai is a kaleidoscope of flashing neon signboards under which middle aged female pimps- mama-sans- yell after passing businessmen, enticing them to enter their dark gogo bar lair with promises of “cheap beer, pretty girl!”. There’s Showbiz, Popeye, Cock Eye, Waikiki, San Francisco, Firehouse, Club Venus and many others.

Many of the drunk businessmen stumbling down Wan Chai sidewalks in the early morning hours still have the agility to evade the desperate streetwalkers who populate these streets at night. These women, mostly from SE Asia and mainland China, are in Hong Kong illegally – and they are in full survival mode. They chase after these businessmen – each one a potential meal ticket – and attempt to latch themselves on to their arms.

The businessmen who lack the agility to evade these hookers might still have the strength to pry themselves free of their clutches once caught. The blotto ones, however- the slowest and weakest of the herd – succumb. They are then dragged away to pay-by-the-hour love motels where, while passed-out, they are unburdened of their wallets, watches and cell-phones.

Wan Chai is not only hookers though. It also has perfectly respectable restaurants- and a few semi-respectable bars, some of which are open (and packed!) 24-hours a day. The party can’t end at 2, right? It must keep going. And on weekends I kept it going at The Old China Hand or The Bridge until 8 or 9 in the morning. Then I would leave for home bloated, sweaty and with the hot sun beating down on my head. The Bridge, by the way, is where I think I was drugged.

One morning I awoke on the concrete floor of a residential building’s stairwell. My head was pounding. “Where am I?” I thought to myself, “What am I doing here?”

Disoriented, I walked to an ATM to withdraw money for a cab home. Funds insufficient? What? I just got paid Friday!

I called my bank. There had been several withdrawals of HK$2000 (the maximum withdrawal allowed) in the early morning hours at different convenience store ATMs. All of these ATMs were in Wan Chai and each withdrawal occurred about 10 minutes apart. Why on Earth would I go from ATM to ATM taking HK$2000 out every 10 minutes? I had no memory of it.

That’s what Rohypnol does. It makes you docile, it make you compliant -and then it wipes your memory clean. And this happened to me not once but twice! You’d think I would have learned my lesson the first time, but no.

Drugging is common in Wan Chai. Rohypnol is clear, tasteless and it dissolves in your beer while you are away in the bathroom. Dear readers- never take your eyes off your drink in Wan Chai! Several Western businessmen have died from this scam. It is Hong Kong’s dirty little secret and nobody knows who’s doing it.

With all this debauchery I still managed to hold down a job. Luckily my job was easy. I got all my work done in the first two hours and spent the rest of the day goofing off on the internet.

Sometimes my company would send me to one of their other Asian offices to conduct training workshops. They sent me to Bangkok, to Shanghai, to Guangzhou and elsewhere. They put me up in nice hotels in each city and at night my colleagues in those cities took me out for a fancy dinner. Then they’d take me to the nightclubs or to karaoke. And it was all on the company’s tab. I got the full treatment, big-shot Training Manager that I then was. I even had an expense account. Can you imagine that? An expense account!

Two and a half years later I would be living in Room 8 across the harbor. I’ll tell you more about those days soon.

Chungking Mansions are five identical concrete blocks, each 17 stories tall. They are all connected by a common two story mall whose ground floor entrance opens to Nathan Rd, one of Hong Kong’s busiest thoroughfares.

I use the word “mall” for lack of a better description. Crowded, labyrinthine bazaar is more like it. It was a science-fiction dystopia; there were stalls for money changers, grimy food stalls selling Halal meats and Indian curries, stalls selling Saris and other clothes and stalls selling counterfeit electronics. And there were internet cafes where men and women often did their scams.

There was dildo alley- one of the damp, rat-infested outdoor alleys on the side of Chungking that had stalls selling sex toys and pirated porn movies. Another such narrow alley at the back of Chungking had stalls selling cheap, rot-gut whiskey in plastic medicine cups for fifty cents each and cigarettes by the stick for a dime. Here Indian, African and Western men alike would loiter in groups – sticking to their own kind yet united in alcoholism. No, I was never this bad. Not even close.

The five tower blocks that sprout from this “mall” are vertical slums bursting with cheap guest houses, tiny apartments, canteens and the occasional gambling den. They are, according to the Wikipedia article, “known to be a centre of drugs, and a refuge for petty criminals, scammers, and illegal immigrants.” That quote is not incorrect.

To enter one of these five buildings you may either ascend the graffiti and used-condom strewn stairwells, or else you must wait in line for 20 minutes for your turn to ride the small elevators filled to overcapacity with passengers hailing from every corner of the developing world: Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs, Nigerians and other Africans, all resplendent in their respective national dress- turbans, silk robes with colorful patterns, those beige pajamas that Muslims wear, women in veils and head scarves, women covered head-to-toe in black sheets with only their eyes showing though a slit, as well as grubby and disheveled down-and-outs, mostly Westerners who for whatever reason got stuck living in this hellhole. Many of these Westerners are drunks, drug addicts, mentally ill or some combination thereof.

A mainland Chinese family of eight owned the 17th floor of Block A. Together they lived in a crammed apartment occupying one quarter of the floor. The rest of the floor was given over to the Globe Trekker guest house as well as the 24-hour internet cafe- both owned and operated by the aforementioned Chinese family.

The Globe Trekker guest house was a dark rabbit warren of winding hallways that led to rooms of varying size- single rooms, rooms with a shared bunk, rooms with two bunks and a large room with eight.

There were two grimy bathrooms for the tenants to share. There was a small kitchen with a refrigerator chock full of months old food left by former residents now long gone. The main hallway had an old TV on a pivoting stand bolted to the wall. This is where residents congregated and chain-smoked. And there was the 24-hour internet cafe.

A single room cost US$400 a month. Single rooms were where the old-timers like Klaus lived. Klaus, the elderly Austrian pack rat who talked to himself and screamed at the other residents in German if they were too loud. He had saved every South China Morning Post for the last several years. These newspapers filled every available square inch of his room and were neatly stacked up to the ceiling. There were other old timers which I will tell you about later. The real crazies, however, lived in Number 8.

Number 8 was a dark, windowless room with stagnant air and 16 bed-bug infested mattresses- eight bunk beds total. Sometimes all 16 beds were occupied, other times maybe half that. This is where the transients lived. This is where I lived. At eight bucks a night, it was the cheapest room in one of the world’s most expensive cities.

And what a horrible place it was. The bed bugs lived in my mattress, in my sheets and in my underclothes. I could feel them crawling all over my body at night. Scratching the fresh bite marks only made the itching worse.

Eventually I learned to ignore the bed bugs, and in time I was able to sleep soundly in Room 8 of the Globe Trekkers. It’s amazing what a person can adapt to.

A revolving cast of derelicts shared Room 8 with me. Derelicts like Winston, the South African guy who slept on my bottom bunk.

Winston, a fall-down drunk, was wanted in two countries for wire fraud. According to his own drunken boast one night, he bilked thousands of dollars from a few elderly Germans. I later googled him and sure enough he was on Interpol’s website. “Wanted”, it said.

“It’s the Law of the Jungle, man”, he said to me that night. “Eat or be eaten!” Though I can’t prove it, I’m pretty sure he’s the one who stole my wallet.

Then there was Gordy, the pudgy, 50-something Canadian guy who lived on a bottom bunk across the room. One look into this man’s crazed eyes and you immediately knew something was amiss. His long, white hair was cut in a pageboy and he was missing his two front teeth.

He also slept in the nude. Upon waking up in the morning, before getting ready for work (he taught English to schoolchildren), he would fling off the covers and furiously masturbate for the whole room to see.

Then there was Anders the Swede. Anders became my closest friend during this strange chapter of my life. He shared his food with me when I had none -and vice versa. And he helped me find work.

Anders had been stuck in the Globe Trekkers much longer than I, and he knew the ropes. Plugged into the Chungking Mansions shadow economy, he knew how to make cash when all other attempts to legitimately do so failed.

Anders was involved in a cigarette smuggling operation between the Mainland and Hong Kong. Once a week he took a train across the border. There he would buy several cartons (Mainland Chinese cigarettes are 1/5th Hong Kong’s price). He would then smuggle the cigarettes back though customs and deliver them to his contact. He was paid $50 for each trip.

The cigarettes were just a side gig for Anders. His main gig, I would later find out, was the smuggling of people.

Before you start feeling sorry for me, know that I am hardwired for impulsive risk taking. I seek out danger, though I have mellowed over the years.

Don’t confuse this with being an adrenaline junkie. I have little desire to bungee jump or sky-dive. Instead, I am an “experience junkie”.

Let me give you an example. In 2001, when my English teaching contract was up in Taiwan, I decided to take a solo backpacking tour of some Asian country. I couldn’t decide which.

Indonesia was headline news at the time. Their economy had collapsed, riots were breaking out and violent revolution was imminent. Indonesia just had another revolution a few years before this where thousands were killed in the unrest.

“I’ve always wanted to experience a revolution”, I thought. And so I promptly booked a ticket to Jakarta.

I also had vague professional ambitions in taking this trip, as I once aspired to be a globe-trotting journalist. I arranged to serialize my Indonesian journey with a weekly magazine in Athens, Georgia- though once my travels began I could not focus on writing. I never submitted any articles.

I spent the next two months backpacking throughout the archipelago. I climbed volcanoes, relaxed on tropical beaches, ate psychedelic mushrooms with local villagers and visited all the famous ancient temples. It was- and remains- the most beautiful and exciting country I’ve visited.

I went off-the-beaten-track when I could. Instead of taking a tourist coach (few tourists visited at this particular time), I rode the slow passenger train. I did it local style, riding in the company of peasants, some of whom carried live chickens with them. I even rode atop the train with the slum kids, enjoying the scenery in the hot open air. At a languid pace, the train crawled past peasants bent over in the rice paddies, groves of coconut palms here and there and a perfectly conical volcano spewing ash on the horizon; the volcano a black silhouette against a red equatorial sunset.

The train stopped at every run-down village along the way. Peddlers would board the train at each stop selling fruit and other snacks, lottery tickets, trinkets for kids and newspapers. They would then scurry to disembark once the train began moving again.

Without fail, at every stop a blind man with a portable karaoke machine hanging around his neck would board the train. He and his female guide were locked arm-in-arm and together they shuffled down the aisle- he bellowing an Indonesian pop-song into his microphone while she, with her free hand, accepting charitable donations from the passengers.

On these train rides, and while walking throughout the shanty slums of Indonesia’s cities, I saw all manner of sick, handicapped and deformed people- this in a country too poor to provide adequate healthcare to its people. I saw those who looked as if they had leprosy, elephantitis and AIDS. I’m no doctor- I’m just guessing- but clearly something was wrong with them.

I wanted not to be a voyeur of misery. I wanted to experience the daily reality most people here lived with; reality we Westerners see only on TV commercials asking for donations. This was life and I wanted to experience it, ugly though it often was.

I finally got my chance to see some of the violence and mayhem I was anticipating. I had a 5 hour train delay in Surabaya – Indonesia’s second largest city -and I set out to explore.

While walking down the city’s main boulevard, I heard a loud swarm of engines. I looked to see where the sound came from. Up the boulevard, thousands of motorcycles ridden by young males- two or three of them to a bike- were barreling towards me. They were wearing white t-shirts with anti-government slogans written on them in marker. They were shouting, some waving machetes over their heads. They were baying for blood. I thought to myself, “Oh, shit.”

It was too late- they saw me. There was nowhere to run. As the mob approached, a dozen bikes parked. The youths got off and rushed towards me on foot. “This is it”, I thought. “I’m dead.”

I was smoking a cigarette when the mob of youths encircled me. In broken English: “Hey Mister, you got cigarette for me?”

“Sure!”

I opened my newly bought counterfeit Marlboros and a mad rush of hands devoured the whole pack in seconds.

“Hey, Mister! You want come with us? You ride my bike with me!”

I briefly considered it. How cool would it be to participate in a revolution? But common sense prevailed.

“No thank you”.

“OK, Mister. Bye, bye!”

They were gone as soon as they came. I hightailed it back to the safety of the train station.

In the train station’s waiting room lounge, TVs showed live coverage of an angry mob smashing storefront windows and setting cars on fire. Mentally, I checked “revolution” off my list.