Nola lolled around her bed unable to sleep. The flight to San Francisco was today.
Over the past two weeks, Nola and Ben exchanged texts frequently and excitedly, looking to hear back from the other's opinion. "Was this too much?"," How about this?”, “Can we make it there if we only spend one hour here?" Nola rolled around on her bed in bliss and anxiety. Nola had only had the twenty-four working holiday a year to go abroad and last year she used it on nursing Allie when he came up with a high fever. Ben had never gone abroad but for one time, when he moved to Ireland from Morocco at the age of five. This chance was a once in a lifetime journey for both of them. Neither of them have been to the American continent.
She decided to get up and head over earlier than planned to Ben's home. She learnt that he lived in the city centre, close to the bus station that they would take to Dublin airport.
It was 6am. She texted Ben she was going to head over now. She got an instant reply. He was also lolling around his bed unable to sleep.
After washing herself, she dressed up in her khaki shorts and slipped on a plain white t-shirt. She decided to go with glasses instead of her usual contact lens. She grabbed her packed backpack, double checked her wallet and passport and headed out to his home on her bike.
She arrived near his housing estate in fifteen minutes. The map on her phone showed a short cut through a rather shady looking alleyway. She got off her bike and walked through the alleyway that was behind a shopping complex. It was an alleyway filled with rubbish. There was a thrown out mattress that she had to roll her bike over, some hypodermic needles lay broken with glass shatterings on the basalt, rubble everywhere and there was a shopping trolley filled with empty paint cans. This was a side of the city she never seen before. She felt like she was walking through the Detroit of Ireland.
At the end of the alleyway, she made a couple more turns to his housing estate. It was an apartment block. She located his one on the ground floor. The curtains were drawn back but the lights glowed through the sides. She rang the doorbell. She heard the shuffling of chains and keys behind the door. It clinkered and clattered seven times before the door opened up. The dawning morning light lit up Ben. He wore a loose white t-shirt decorated by faded bones of a ribcage. Nola suddenly realised that she had only ever seen him wear two t-shirts, a black one with red skulls and a hole due to thinning of the fabric after many washes and this white one with a faded ribcage. We could go shopping when we get there, she thought and then abandoned the thought as it felt overly girly.
"Hi~” she smiled at figuring out his wardrobe.
"Hi," he smiled back, unable to help himself, "early for once." It was a depreciative joke to themselves as they were both always late to class. She chuckled.
She entered. The apartment was empty save for a couch and a tiny TV. She dropped her backpack beside the couch. There was still two hours to go before their bus leaves for the airport.
"Your house is so vacant."
"That's good. It used to be so filthy here; occupied by hoarders," he smiled slyly to himself. "Not anymore now. Did you eat?"
"No. I was thinking we'd get the earlier bus to the airport and eat at the cafés there."
"I was thinking of that too."
Both felt a slight anxiety having not gone on a trip of this scale. Nola wanted the window seat of the bus but fell asleep for the entire journey. They relaxed at the café in the airport. She talked about her work before she went to college which interested Ben because he never worked in an office.
The flight steward passed Ben his boarding ticket over the check-in desk. She typed Nola's ESTA visa information next. The steward furrowed her eyebrows and called for assistance. The new steward explained the situation.
"This can't be right! I checked the government visa website and it said I was clear! The e-mail said so as well."
"I can check you into Oslo right now. You will need to apply for another one and see if it gets approved by the time you get there for your flight change to the US."
"You got to be flipping kidding me!" she cried out.
Ben could only look along mortified at the predicament. They had spent weeks planning their activities, chatting with each other; they were both ecstatic for this day, until now.
"Looks like this US holiday is going to be turned into a Norwegian holiday," Ben joked.
"Not over my dead grandfather's body."
She applied for a new visa as they walked through the gates and checkpoints, typing frantically on her smartphone.
"Oh god, it's so hard on this little thing," she complained.
"Well, you better hurry up. We're nearing boarding the flight."
Nola was just about able to submit her new application while they stood in line to board the plane. Turns out there was free Wi-Fi on the airplane.
"Oh, look. There's free Wi-Fi here on the plane." Ben laughed.
Nola, dishevelled at the whole ordeal, was not at all impressed. "Well, it still takes time though. I hope four hours is enough for it to go through."
The second visa was approved by the time they landed. When they tried boarding the next flight, again the computer rejected it.
"You got to be joking! Again?!" she looked at Ben to see him laughing manically. His despair had transcended to acceptance. Nola lost it and started laughing in front of the steward processing her new ESTA visa.
In the end, a higher ranked steward came along and conjured some black magic into the computer system and she was let onto the flight. The rest of the journey went smoothly without any more hitches.
"I thought this was the Land of the Free. I have never had visa troubles before," Nola commented. "They scammed me to pay for two visas."
The flight ticket was covered for Nola by her company but the accommodation wasn't. Cheapskates, she thought. Being poor and crushed by poverty, Ben booked himself the cheapest hostel. It was ten dollars a night in San Francisco. It was a price he could not turn down in a city known for exorbitant rent prices and homeless people.
They dark sky was starting to reveal a cloudless, azure blue by the time they reached Civic Center where their hostel was located. They left at 6am and arrived at 6am. It was like time travelling, Nola said.
They passed a street with a rancid smell filling the air. There was no doubt what that foul smell was. A hobo lay sprawled akimbo on the pavement. Ben and Nola tiptoed on the road around the hob but not before Ben insisted on taking a photograph of the unsightly sight. Nola would also take candid pictures of Ben from time to time like when she photographed him photographing the hobo. It would make for good memories to look back at.
They were playing a game where they counted every hobo they seen. The count was currently at five. An average of one per street so far. Ben would exclaim an archaic phrase every time they spotted one. This time it was, 'Goodness gracious.'
"I think this is it,” he said looking at the map on his phone. They reached the alley street where their hostel was. They passed by two more homeless black men under the doorways. Standing between them and the hostel was a homeless, dishevelled hag with two large dogs.
"Yikes," Ben said, stopping at the sight of the two beasts and their hobo tamer. "Those dogs look vicious."
Nola assessed the situation. The dogs had spotted them and sneered. Then they barked a fearsome sound that echoed off the walls of the alley. Nola could feel the barking reverberating in her bones. The hobo beast tamer wore a dark, filthy trench coat. What colour it originally was, Nola could not say. One touch of the fabric and you would contract some unnamed diseases. Her face was muddy with dirt that was its skin and her hair was strangling down her face. She was a black, scrawny lady and laughed a witch’s laugh at the barking of the horrendous noise.
"GEH! GEH! GEHEH!" the hobo witch cackled a lung cancer sounding laugh. She was missing a few teeth. "You scared? GEH! GEH! GAAH!"
“So this is why they carry guns in America,” Ben said as he snapped a picture with his Sony camera. The flash from the camera shook the hobo beast tamer witch, making her shriek and covering her eyes. One of the dogs was also shocked into blindness. It whined and ran the other way, dragging the hobo witch and its brother beast away.
"Wow, nice exorcism!" Nola said gleefully. Ben let out a shrug.
A toad like man with multiple chins sat behind the reception desk in the hostel. He had his mobile on one hand and the house phone on the other and spoke interchangeably back and forth the two phones. On one, he spoke furiously in Hindi while the other, he spoke English in a thick Indian accent. While still on the two phones, he told them it was fine to drop the bags in the closet beside him and come back at 10am for check-in.
They walked around the area and saw a market with stalls ran by Asians. Probably Chinese, thought Nola. They all looked the same so it was hard to determine which East Asian they were. They came across two vagrants preforming street music between the stalls. One was slapping randomly on an electronic keyboard without rhythm. The keyboard wasn't plugged into anything. The other banged his tin can with a spoon with a steady catchy beat. Together they produced a cacophonous hobo symphony for the onlookers. Ben videoed the hobos this time.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Past the market, they came onto a magnificent plaza and at the end stood a building that resembled a weathered, grey White House. Each side of the road was flanked by an aisle of London plane trees.
Nola did a jumping pose for Ben to snap with his camera. It was the right choice to invite Ben, it was like having a personal photographer and a travel logger. He was also a beautiful model to the photos she kept taking of him.
They went back to the hostel afterwards after exploring the city randomly by foot. A new Indian man met them behind the reception. He led them to their rooms. They started to see why the hostel was cheap, dirt cheap. The carpets were filthy with dirt and crumbs, the wallpapers were peeling off, there were a worrying number of flies and other insects, a barefooted, skanky hippy girl walked barefooted across the crusty carpet and a sick musty smell lingered in the air. The middle-aged Indian unlocked the door to the room for them. It needed to be turned exactly right and accompanied by a hard shove to wrench the door open. He left Ben and Nola with the key and prodded back downstairs.
"I don't know about this place," Nola said.
"It's only ten dollars in San Francisco," Ben told himself. "It's a good deal," he said unconvincingly. Nola thought she saw desperation in his eyes.
He flipped up the bed sheet to lay them and found brown muddy looking dirt underneath the bed sheets. Ben retched at the sight prompting Nola to look over only to make the same retching sound.
"That's it. We're out. I'm paying for a five star hotel for the both of us."
"No, you see. We put these white sheets over the be- I'm joking let's get out of here."
Ben insisted that he would pay as well so they ended up in a compromise to stay in a five star rated hostel instead.
Before they left, they used the WI-FI to book the new hostel. They made some excuse to the receptionist and cancelled the remaining days. The Indian was nice enough that he only charged them for half the cost of the first day. As they trekked to their new accommodation, they passed by underground hobo blackmarkets on the footpath. The hobo auctioneer asked the other ragged hobos want they needed and told them he'd get it for you to trade. It was a bartering system. Street lights and neon signs lit up the tents of homeless people on the streets. The tents only covered half of their bodies and their legs stuck out. Car lights flashed by an alleyway to reveal hobo dumpster diving. Two homeless people stood bare footed on top the heap of the rubbish hill like kings. The dark shadows shouted joyously and danced. All these homeless black men, and the rare woman, were quite a sight to behold for the two country bumpkins.
"This is what I imagined India to be like," Ben said, "what a sight."
Nola agreed. What a sorry sight indeed. It was an eye opener.
They rang the bell at the hostel and spoke through the comm to verify themselves. They found the new hostel to be incredibly stylish. The lounge was decorated in a Victorian style; large leather armchairs, bookshelves filled with thick books, vintage style lamps and other antique furnitures. It was an entirely different world from the outside.
They took a much needed shower in the new hostel and slumped in exhaustion onto their bunk beds. The biggest plan for their trip was tomorrow to see what they thought was the most important sites of San Francisco. They planned to visit Muir Woods, The Golden Gate Bridge and rounding off the journey at Fisherman's Wharf.
Nola woke up with great relief that the place they stayed in now was actually liveable for human beings. She dressed up in her khaki shorts and put on a fashionable loose black t-shirt that exposed her shoulders. One of her favourite clothes.
She looked down at the bunk bed below to find the curtains opened and Ben sitting there playing on his phone. She dropped her hat on him to spook him. He looked up unfazed and greeted her. He was begging to be tousled in Nola's mind.
After they brushed their teeth in the sink in the bedroom, they went down the spiral staircase to the basement where the kitchen and laundromat room were. The fancy hostel proved well worth for its modestly priced value. It provided an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet.
Nola looked unwell.
"What's wrong? Not hungry?"
There was a plate of toast and a small bowl of strawberries and blueberries on her plate.
"Buffets and I go way back. I shoved myself so much that I got a form of buffet PTSD."
"Uh-huh..."
They left at 9am and took the bus to Marin City. There were only four buses for the entire day from Marin City to Muir Woods. They walked around Target and sat at Starbucks for an hour until the next bus came to take them to Panoramic Highway. In the bus was a fat, scruffy bearded man riding with them. He would wipe the sweat from his forehead every few minutes. Ben guessed he was a software engineer. Nola couldn't help but chat with the fat American to see if what Ben assumed was true. It was. He started talking about the redwoods seeing they were tourists. The man told them about how the redwoods stretched for miles and miles. How there was a massive one with the width of a motorway known only to a few surveyors of the land. The location was kept a secret.
He bid them farewell when he got off the little white bus. Ben told her that the next stop was theirs using the GPS on his phone.
They were up in the mountains where the canopy of forests faded into a haze in the great distance. They hiked down through the woods to Muir Monument. The weather was dry and hot but the two didn't mind it since they were both physically fit, Nola with her boxing and Ben with cycling. They found it adventurous and a welcome break from the constant gloom of the Irish weather.
They reached the bottom and saw and saw an ominously looking wooden gate surrounded by looming tall trees behind. There was a reception building on the right side to the gate.
"I read about this online. You don't need to-"
Nola was already through the gate, meters ahead.
"Com'on!" she called out waving back.
Ben ran towards her. Yes, of course. Time was a limited commodity, especially if it meant that missing their next bus would leave us stranded here until 9pm.
They walked through the magnificent forest park, admiring the massive girth of some of the redwood trees. Most were actually of an average girth with a taller than average height. Ben was a bit disappointed at this as he was imagining they were all massive abomination sized trees.
"You didn't study Irish right?"
"Yeah, I only moved there with my family when I was eight so they let me off. Thank heavens," she said.
"Yeah, it's mandatory if you are born there. I was young enough that I had to learn the dead language." He paused to take a picture of a large tree. "Muir is the Irish word for forest," Ben said. "Kinda cool right, my Irish has finally come in useful for etymology purposes all the way over in America." He smiled smugly at himself, proud that the dead language was finally good for one thing and probably the only thing it would be for the rest of Ben's life. Nola gave a genuine compliment to him.
As they walked deeper in, they reached a point where the path led into different hiking trails. The sign gave out the difficulty of the course. They decided on the longest and most difficult path to challenge themselves. The path would wound back to the top where the highway was. Ben made sure that the downloaded map on his phone showed that they could make it back in time. It didn't but if they ran, they could make it.
They trudged up a hilly path, always climbing higher. They were left alone in these paths, not a tourist in sight. They hogged the serenity of the forests all by themselves. At one point, the path became so narrow that they walked in single file in silence. She looked above and saw the familiar shifting patterns of leaves, the rustling sounds of them, the cries of birds and gushing of brooks. The forest brought her back to her childhood, when she played with her sisters and neighbours. A distant memory she had forgotten.
They reached a three way path with a sign.
"Boss?" she asked.
The moment Ben took his hands out of his pocket, his small rectangular microcomputer somersaulted in the air before smacking screen first into the trunk of a tree. They stood with dead fish eyes as they witnessed the spectacle. A crow cawed and rustled the leaves of the impacted tree as it flew off.
Ben walked over and picked up his phone. The screen was shattered and gave off an accurate reflection of his inner thoughts. He turned the screen on.
"How is it?" Nola's voice was tight and she was grimacing in pain.
"I've fixed broken phone screens before. All you need to is order a LCD off the Chinese eBay and unscrew the components onto the new screen. Apply some isopropyl to glued components to free them. It typically takes about one to two months for the screen to travel through the seven seas to Ireland. You don't have to worry about customs since the screen will cost less than twenty euro," Ben paused in reflection, "I can't fix it until then. So do you have the maps downloaded on your phone?"
"No, I don't."
"Oh, right," Ben thought for another second. “That’s not good." There was a bus they needed to catch and they needed to know the way.
They stood in front of the sign that read Bootjack Trail, Troop Trail and TCC Trail. To them it was a sign that pointed to three directions, left, slightly less left and right. The bus was scheduled to be coming at 6:15pm and the bus after was scheduled to be at 9:15pm. They had been walking for over three hours from the entrance gate. It was 5:30pm right now. Tracking back was not a viable choice if they wanted to catch their bus. The only way was forward, but which way, there was no way of knowing.
"Do you remember anything before your phone shattered?"
Ben's thought hard, his caterpillar thick eyebrows furrowed on his handsome face. "No."
They both knew that once they set on a path there was no heading back. There was no time. Nola looked at Ben who had a poker face.
"Don't worry," she said. "This is what makes holidays exciting. When plans go haywire, that's when the fun begins." A night under the forest and stars with Ben, hunting bears, scavenging berries and sleeping on hammocks made of bear hide, not a bad night. If worst comes to worst, we'll hitch a ride, the American way.
"There's no time. I don't think we'll even make it to the bus stop if we set out now."
A man in his late-forties with grey sideburns appeared behind a tree. He wore a safari hat, carried a walking stick and more importantly, he had a map on the other hand. Ben ran up to him in relief.
Nola slowly walked over to them, her plans foiled.
"I'm telling ya, take this route down," the seasoned looking hiker pointed on a yellow route that did a loop around the mountain side. "There I'll head back and I can drop you off Marin City."
Holy jellybeans, no, Nola thought. He came from the top and was just starting his hike. It would take at least three hours and by then they could have gotten the next bus.
She then saw that the route to the bus stop on Panoramic Highway was a lot more than a thirty minute walk. They wouldn't make it in time.
"Alright, thanks. Let's go," Ben said. "We'll take this route."
They left the man and headed to the right route. They picked up a fast pace.
"There's no way we'll make it to the bus stop," Nola said, her hope gone. "We were too far."
"Yeah, we said we could run." Ben said coolly. They didn't factor in how tired they got after three hours of hiking. "I don't think we have the energy. I have a backup plan though. The route we're on has a side path that leads to the highway."
She realised his intention and laughed. "That's your plan?"
"There is a flaw. There was a fork after the bus stop we got off from the map. If the bus isn't coming back from the road on our side of the mountain, where we're heading now, then we'll be stranded."
They reached the mountain highway with still a long distance to go until the bus stop. It was 6:00pm, the bus would reach its stop at 6:15pm. The minutes ticked on. Every ten seconds, Nola would turn her head back to see if the bus was coming. They walked on the left side of the road beside the drainage. To the right was the endless sea of redwoods. She felt thirsty. Nola was out of her water, Ben passed his to her. She drank it without wiping the mouthpiece.
"Wait, wait!"
"The bus?!" She looked back.
"No. Aren't you going to wipe it first?"
"No." She looked directly into his eyes as she took a sip. Nola saw him blushing while he shuffled with his camera bag, stuffing his camera back in.
It was 6:18pm. They didn't even make it to the fork in the road and the bus hadn't passed their mountainside road. The heat was sweltering and her back was soaked. Nola felt despair. It was over. She was sure of it until she looked at Ben waving frantically.
"Yes!" Ben shouted back to Nola. "Look, Nola! We're saved!"
Nola screamed joyously and jumped and waved like a deranged lunatic. Ben kept his usual cool but was grinning widely.
The bus stopped on the side of the road, letting them on. When they got on, they realised they didn't have enough small change for the fare. There was an American man with an Asian lady and a whole group of children on the bus. The chivalrous American man paid for both of their fares.
"What a kind and hot American man," Ben whispered to Nola. Nola lay as exhausted as a drunkard but still had remaining conscious to snicker at his joke. It was a joke right? She was too exhausted to think anymore.
Just to test and tease him, she rested her head on Ben's shoulder.
"Wake me when we get there." she dozed off, smiling in her sleep.