我的（不）完美人生 - 第四日

“Want to meet me in South America next March?”

He asked me at the end of the one-week trip in Beijing. It was my very first overseas business trip for the first job after stepping out of university to the then still 100% communist country all by myself. I still remember after being met at the airport, I was led to the car park full of bicycles (not cars, we are talking about some time last century when there were real people guiding the traffic instead of traffic lights at major junctions.) He pedalled forward while I tried not to let go the small suitcase sitting sideways on the back seat.

If I must be honest, the trip to Beijing was kind of impromptu when I knew I could go and see an exhibition on behalf of the company, he happened to be traveling through nearby countries. (Serendipity?) A few months before that we said good-bye on a small platform where we said keep in touch (by letters and phone calls) but never expected to see each other again.

So, after a week in Beijing, he popped the question, shall I say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’?

I was about 3 months into my new job and had another business trip to Germany lined up. If I say ‘Yes’, it’d give me 6 months to prepare and save up enough money. The biggest challenge is how to tell my folks that I want to quit the job and go backpacking in South America instead? It was still a fancy idea before ‘gap year’ or even budget airlines, and I was just a young female who’s graduated from uni less than a year ago, and not to mention that I was going with a foreign devil.

Long story short. That first 3-month Sought America trip was just the beginning of many things. I guess I was perhaps the 2nd female out of Taiwan to drive (a shitty jeep) through the Atacama Desert and on the Pan-American Highway after Echo (三毛). We stayed on a floating island in the Lake Titicaca where the only light at night was from the moon and the sky full of stars. Machu Picchu was conquered by foot (all the way in and to the top peak) not on bus…. And we are still together, still traveling, happily married.