The Lost Girls (48 page)

Until then, all we could do was take a chance…and jump.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
APRIL

W
ith the scratch of wheels on tarmac in Sydney, everything changed. People scrambled into the aisles, as they always do the instant the captain turns off the
FASTEN SEAT BELT
sign, but Jen, Holly, and I stayed put. We all just looked at one another. This was it: the Last Stop.

During the year and a half leading up to the trip, and even for months after we'd left, I'd been convinced something would happen to keep us from completing the loop together. Amazing things like job offers, promotions, and marriage proposals. Scary things like health issues, canceled columns, or empty bank accounts. Even now, I couldn't believe we'd come this far and grown closer than I'd ever imagined was possible back in New York.

Several of the backpackers we'd met had seemed shocked—maybe a little skeptical—that we'd actually remained friends throughout the whole trip. How had we traveled for this long without secretly plotting one another's untimely travel-related demise? We'd explained that though our time together hadn't
exactly
been fight-free, we'd made it work simply because the alternative was unacceptable. No single issue was so important
that the three of us would be willing to throw away a friendship—or the chance to complete this journey together—for the sake of being right.

But there was another, more important reason we got along so well: The Checklist.

Right from the beginning, we'd secretly tallied all the stuff we'd sacrificed as individuals in order to keep the peace as a group. For months, none of us had mentioned the “credits” we'd get for giving up the bottom bunk or sitting in the seat next to the guy with obnoxious B.O., but we'd all kept score in our heads (knowing Jen, she used Excel charts).

“C'mon, guys, you know we all keep track,” Jen had finally pointed out in Vietnam. “And that's fine. As an only child, I never understood how siblings could fight over stupid little stuff, like who got more juice or who got to ride shotgun, but now I totally get it.”

In some ways, we
had
reverted back to being kids. We'd been forced to share absolutely everything with one another—beds, bathrooms, train cars, battery chargers, breathing space—and still, we rarely wanted to separate. It wasn't just because we adored one another's company. We were all also worried we'd miss something really exciting if the other two went off without us for a day.

Of course, all of that togetherness could also be stifling. At times I battled the subconscious desire to compare my own behavior to Jen's and Holly's and the slightly paranoid feeling that the other two might be assessing me. The flaws that I'd worked carefully to conceal back home—the fact that I can be impatient, forgetful, and neurotic and have weird one-sided conversations in my sleep—were totally unhidable in such close proximity.

But, I soon realized, so were my friends' slightly less lovable character traits. By being so involved in Jen's and Holly's everyday, uncensored lives, seeing the women they are in
their amazing moments, average moments, and superlow, sleep-deprived moments, I finally understood the meaning of “nobody's perfect.” And I mean that in the best way possible: appreciating their imperfections as parts of them made me realize that I could appreciate my own as parts of me.

The rest of the plane had emptied. And so the three of us finally disembarked from our last international flight before returning home. As we zigzagged our way through international arrivals, I started to imagine what my daily life would be like without Jen and Holly in it. Like it or not, the time was fast approaching when we'd be on our own again, making decisions and catapulting through the world without our two strongest lifelines to rely upon.

We'd no longer be The Lost Girls…we'd simply be ourselves.

Crossing the invisible line from the air-conditioned terminal into the warm, salty air of Oz, I felt enveloped with relief. We still had nearly two more months until that would happen.

 

T
he light was rapidly draining from the sky as we stood in the alley behind Travellers Auto Barn, staring at what looked like a space-hogging double-decker camper van on an acid trip. The whole vehicle had been shrink-wrapped in psychedelically tinted cellophane and emblazoned with more international landmark and sponsorship stickers than a stock car.

Holly and Jen had bumped into the promotions director for the Aussie-based World Nomads insurance company nearly eighteen months earlier at the Adventures in Travel Expo. They'd struck what sounded like an unbelievable deal: the company would provide all three of us with a year's worth of travel insurance if we agreed to drive its fully loaded “Ambassador Van” during the seven and a half weeks we were in Australia,
blogging about our experiences for the company Web site as we went. In addition to the free set of wheels, World Nomads would also hook us up with a brand-new laptop, a cell phone to stay in touch with our new bosses, and a special card that would guarantee us free Internet access in locations across Oz. The only catch? That there seemed to
be
no catch.

When Jen and Holly shook hands on the deal, all three of us were still in full-on multitasking New York mode. What World Nomads was asking us to do—blogging three times a week and posting video diaries on its site—seemed like a cakewalk. It wasn't until we'd arrived in Sydney a year and a half and about fifty thousand miles later that we finally grasped the full scope of the task—and the machinery—that we'd agreed to take on.

“That's the
van
?” Holly said as we all blinked hard at the hulking Day-Glo vehicle. “It's just…so…
big
.”

Behind us, a man snorted in amusement. “Well, you know, I hear that all the time. After a few go-rounds, you'll get used to it, I promise.”

The voice belonged to Chris Ford, the publicity rep for Travellers Auto Barn, a man who swallowed up what little alley space hadn't already been commandeered by the van. At six feet, three inches, the guy was built like an army tank with a bulletproof chest and swollen arms where the heavy artillery should be. His comment barely fazed me. Just a day earlier, during a meeting with the World Nomads execs, the company's sales director had asked if we planned to hold naked pillow fights inside the van during our travels—and if so, could we please videoconference him in so the whole office could watch us in action? My gaze immediately shifted to Christy, the one woman who worked with this motley crew of guys. She cracked a smile and let the comment slide, so we followed suit. We'd been in Sydney less than forty-eight hours, but I was already getting the impression that the post–Clarence Thomas era of
political correctness we took for granted in the States had yet to be ushered in here.

Christy had given us instructions to pick up the van from Chris Ford at the Auto Barn and to e-mail them with the list of the Australian destinations we planned to visit.

“Where do you want us to go?” I'd asked her, anticipating getting on the road again. “We're up for anything.”

“Anywhere you want,” Christy responded. “So long as you return the van in one piece, you can go across the outback to Perth and back for all we care. Actually, we'd probably prefer you do that—might make for better blog entries.”

“You mean we shouldn't just stay here and drive it around Sydney till we go home?” Holly tossed out, half kidding.

It was the only time during our two-beer lunch that the executives didn't laugh.

By the time Chris finished showing us around the van the next evening, the alley had gone almost completely dark. He briefly explained the Auto Barn rules of the road:

The oil and coolant must be topped off daily.

No riding in the back.

No picking up hitchhikers.

“That last one's just for my own benefit. It'll help me sleep better at night,” said Chris in a protective way that was kind of endearing.

And with that, we were ready to take off—except for one little problem.

“Hey, ladies, which one of you knows how to drive stick?” asked Holly.

I shook my head. I'd barely driven an automatic since college graduation and had never learned to use a stick shift. Jen unenthusiastically volunteered that she'd done it a few times as a teenager but had probably forgotten how by now. So the buck stopped with Holly, the one of us least inclined to operate electronics, machin
ery, or anything else sold with an instruction manual. Holly even turned to Jen or me when technical difficulties with her camera or iPod cropped up. But now, as the only one of us who'd ever gotten a basic stick shift education, she had to climb behind the wheel of the psychedelic aluminum beast.

Chris looked mildly apprehensive as he flipped the keys to Holly. “You guys signed all of your insurance forms, right?”

We assured him that we had. Holly gave him a thumbs-up, tentatively started the engine, and managed to stall only once as we pulled away.

 

B
osses, jobs, and attention-hogging vehicles weren't the only responsibilities that we took on during our final months on the road. We also scored ourselves a two-month sublet with Simone, an Australian who'd used to date one of my ex-boyfriend Baker's close friends, Jeff. I'd met Sim for the first time nearly two years earlier, after she'd sent me an out-of-the-blue e-mail asking if she and Jeff, who lived together in the Cayman Islands, could be “terribly cheeky” and ask to shack on my futon in New York when they came up for vacation.

I'd met Jeff only once or twice before, and was entirely unacquainted with his new girlfriend. Impressed by this chick's ballsiness (and perhaps to show Baker that his friends still wanted to hang out with me even after we'd broken up), I not only prepared the futon for my houseguests but also planned an extensive weekend of dinners, parties, and social events for them. I knew almost instantly upon opening my front door that I'd love Simone. She was a gregarious, charismatic force of nature who'd spent the previous six years living in various glamorous locations around the globe. She was organized and pulled together in every way that I wasn't and had a passion for travel that matched my own.

Over the next several months, I visited Simone and Jeff in the Cayman Islands and then again in Vegas for Simone's twenty-seventh birthday. Though the couple split not long after our trip to Sin City, she and I stayed in constant e-mail contact, joking that if they'd done nothing else, we could thank our exes for bringing us together. And when she'd heard that our paths would cross again in Sydney, where she now lived, she wouldn't hear of us staying anywhere else. “My flatmate will be moving out just as you arrive. It's fated!”

When she offered to rent us the spare room in her apartment, where all three of us could sleep on a pair of air mattresses, we agreed to the deal straight away. Even through the rent was $1,000 per month (a staggering amount compared with what we'd been paying to sleep in Southeast Asia), we could justify splitting it. It would be cheaper—and infinitely more comfortable—than hopping between $30-per-night hostels in Sydney.

It wasn't until we'd had the meeting with World Nomads' execs that it dawned on me that we had a problem. If we paid Simone the two full months' rent that we'd promised her and took full advantage of our living situation by sticking around Sydney, there would be no way we could make good on the assignment to drive and blog across Oz.

At this point, we all had a cash flow shortage. Holly was so far in the red that she'd almost turned magenta, Jen had depleted far more than she'd actually saved for the trip, and all three of us were depending on credit cards to bridge the financial gap. Writing a check to Simone and shelling out more cash to camp up and down the continent would push us way beyond our budgetary boundaries. At this rate, we wouldn't even be able to afford our flights home.

Backing out on Simone wasn't an option. She was counting on us to make her rent. But we couldn't just give the van back
to the World Nomads team either. Not for the first time, we were torn between settling into city life and our desire to hit the open road.

The longer we sat at Simone's kitchen table trying to figure out the best course of action, the tenser things got between us. A low-grade level of stress radiated within our group. We tried to pretend that we weren't completely freaked out by the fact that we'd somehow managed to take on a sublease, a massive vehicle only one of us could operate, an ongoing writing assignment, a cell phone, and yet another laptop two months before we'd even thought about reentering our “normal” lives—but we couldn't.

Finally, after a few friction-filled days, we came to a compromise: we'd stay in Simone's apartment for six weeks (but pay her for eight) and use World Nomads' van to take long weekend trips to locations in New South Wales and one final road trip up to Byron Bay. It wasn't ideal, but we'd just have to hope that our Pulitzer-worthy blogging skills could make up for the fact that we'd fall 2,030 kilometers short of Alice Springs (the unofficial capital of the Australian Outback) and a full 3,300 kilometers short of Perth.

I was disappointed that we'd come so far around the globe only to skip the continent's most iconic sights, but there was an upside: once we made our decision to break up our Sydney stay with short road trips, everyone seemed to snap out of the funk we'd fallen into. Jen began organizing urban-based adventures with renewed vigor (“We can blog about the Sydney Harbor Bridge Climb, right?”), Holly jogged down to the Bondi Junction shopping center twenty minutes away to check the cost of gym memberships (“If we're gonna be city girls again, we might as well take advantage of the amenities—plus, they're offering a big discount this month”), and I did my best to track down which tourist offerings were authentically Australian.