The Best Nights

The best nights are the ones we never want to end – the ones where our minds create secret photo albums as we race against the sunrise. Laughing. Smiling. Living.

Over time, I’ve noticed that I tend to spend my last night in any given place doing something special, hoping to capture the night with a lasting memory. There’s just something about the end of a journey that makes me want to enjoy the final moments even more than those that have led to them.

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I’ve only known these new friends for a week, but the sun will soon set and there are only hours left of our stay. The New Zealand dream is coming to an end, and our last night is at a cozy hotel overlooking Lake Ohau. In an attempt to capture the lake’s beauty on film, I explore the walking paths by the water alone, but the light is disappearing and my breath is beginning to become visible, so I join the others inside. Our group of friendly strangers is gathered by the bar area, pretending we’re meeting for the first time instead of saying goodbye forever.

The drink of the evening is cider, and I grab a pint before joining my Australian friends at the pool table. Trash talk fills the air as we boast about our nonexistent sharpshooter skills, but our bluffs are quickly called once cue ball is launched, missing the other balls entirely. It takes us over two hours to clear the table, and when the final ball drops, we all agree to give up pool for the next five or so years of our lives.

We find a place to sit and spend our last hours talking about how quickly the week has passed. Memories leap from mouth to mouth, from eating peanut butter and jelly every night to the ritualistic singing of OMC every time we boarded the tour bus. I mention that I’m headed to Melbourne to study for the upcoming semester, and these new friends live near the university, so we decide to meet up again in a new country. We are young and full of wonder, but it’s late and we don’t know each other enough to see the sun rise, so we turn in for a good night’s sleep.

The next day on the bus, we sing “How Bizarre” for the last time together.

~~~

I’m traveling with the girl that I think I want to marry, and we’re seeing Australia through each other’s eyes. Our last night is in Cairns, a town by the Great Barrier Reef, and we’re drowning in gelato. We find a dessert shop and make friends with the owner, a transplant from Italy who makes a living selling heaven on a stick. The universal rule is that everything is better on a stick, so we have one gelato. We have two gelatos. We have three gelatos. We have ten gelatos and fill up an entire page in his guest book. He tells us to come back later that night, and he will have a customized new flavor ready for us to try.

We find a food court and eat the best fried fish I’ve ever eaten in my life. I eat octopus on a stick and the universal rule remains true. We walk through town and recount the amazing six-month adventure we’ve had in this country. We went to Melbourne. We went to Sydney. We traveled the Great Ocean Road and visited the Neighbours television show set. We saw the Outback and camped in tents infested with tiny jumping mice. We catch ourselves in a wave of nostalgia for a country we haven’t even left yet, so we stop reminiscing and try to enjoy our last hours of tuition-funded wanderlust.

We stop by the gelato shop one last time and order a custom delicious green and yellow kiwi blend. Our feet carry us along the boardwalk, and we watch the sun kiss the horizon before staring off into the darkness together. We hold hands and gaze across the ocean to the family and friends we left behind over half a year ago. We dream that this isn’t the end, but the beginning to our travels together – to Europe, to Asia, to the moon.

Instead, we break up after graduation.

~~~

Hearts heal, and I’m on a whirlwind journey to the other side of the world with someone new. We’re catching an early flight home in the morning, but the Singapore heat invades our hotel room and pushes us onto the streets for our final night abroad. We decide to forgo our pre-flight nap and catch a cab to Bugis Street, a maze of local vendors and greasy foods on the other side of town.

The city pulses through our veins as our bodies are shuffled around, swimming against a sea of strangers to work our way to the center of the market. We weave through the crowd, desperately searching for an adventure to bring back to our friends and family. At one of the stalls, we buy matching shirts with pictures of cats on them, a surprise that will be perfect for my first Thanksgiving with her family, or so I’m told.

We spot another stall selling freshly squeezed fruit juices, and the heat and humidity dissipate as we down cups of these exotic nectars. But on this night, the market is especially busy and our legs are especially tired, so we find a bridge and a few cans of beer to cure our aching bodies. We talk about bucket list travel destinations that we will one day accomplish together until we run out of darkness and hail a cab to the airport.

~~~

I’m on someone else’s dream vacation in Ireland, a spectator on my girlfriend’s bucket list journey. We’re in Dublin for our last night, and we wind up in an old church that’s been converted into a bar. The menu is overcooked burgers and cheap beer, but the place is a tourist attraction so we stay for a second round of drinks. By the time we leave, the sun has set and the River Liffey glows with reflections from the buildings that line its edge. A cool breeze pushes us down to the water, where we recount the trip’s highlights in final-night form.

Our breath clouds the air, and we wander into a bar near our hostel, once I’ve wanted to check out since day one. The bar is divey and the wall behind the bartender is covered with foreign currency carrying different messages from wandering nomads, so we add another US Dollar to his savings account. We dedicate the night to Irish alcohol, coating our stomachs with glasses Guinness and shots of Jameson. When the bar gets crowded and we can barely keep our eyes open anymore, we walk back to our hostel, commemorating our second international vacation in a long line of future trips we will take together.

But our priorities shift just as our hearts change, and this is the last trip we take together before becoming strangers once more.

~~~

There is a snapshot forever etched in my mind of ten friendly strangers gathered in a small room around an overworked karaoke machine. It’s my last night in the Philippines and I want it to last forever. I’ve quit my job in DC to volunteer on a rebuilding project for Typhoon Yolanda relief, and these last thirty days have felt like a dream. It’s too soon to leave this new family, but my flight is early the next morning and my other family is waiting in America.

The girl to my left smiles as our friend takes the microphone, and I appreciate her courage and perseverance to put other’s needs before her own. She is the youngest of the group and has forgone university to travel the world and discover life lessons that a degree could never teach.

The girl in front of me is majoring in architecture and has taken her school vacation to serve a country she’s never been to before. She wants to dedicate her life to disaster response and recovery, and she’s learning firsthand how to become part of a solution.

The man sitting at the edge of the couch has been traveling for seven years and can be anywhere in the world, but chooses to be sitting with the rest of us, carrying cement and gravel every day. The man sitting next to him chose to book his first ever international flight to do hard labor with the rest of us because he knows it’s more important than taking a tourist holiday.

The volunteers in the middle couch are university students born and raised in the Philippines. They’ve been our local eyes and ears and they show up with a smile when they come to work. They don’t get college credits and they don’t get compensation, but they still shovel sand and pour concrete with the rest of us.

In between songs, I look around the room and remember all of the great times I’ve had with the people sitting beside me. I feel honored to have been given a chance to touch these people’s lives, and to let them touch mine. I let out a sigh as I realize that these moments will be stored as memories and the likelihood of us all crossing paths again is slim. So I breathe in the night air and close my eyes, listening to the music, a soundtrack for my final evening in Tacloban.

~~~

The best nights are so often the last nights, but they don’t have to be. There may always be that longing towards the end of a journey to create a storybook adventure, but stories are more exciting if every page is a masterpiece as well.

As I outline the chapters of my Korean adventure, the entire country is on the tip of my pen. The best nights are every night – from weekdays in Seoul to weekends budget-traveling around the rest of the country. I’m only four months into this story, but I have an arsenal of pages to choose from, and I don’t think I could pick out the best night, even if I tried.