The Cape May-Lewes ferry runs across the Delaware Bay, connecting Southern Delaware to Southern New Jersey. I was ten years old when my dad suggested we take a spontaneous, family day trip. We weren’t visiting New Jersey, we were just going to ride the ferry there and back. A seemingly harmless family activity – except it was 1998 and it happened to be right after we all saw Titanic in theaters. 

We saw the film in the summer, long after it premiered. I remember being very annoyed that I was being forced to see this grown-up, historical film. “But it’s a true story,” Mom said, like that was going to entice a ten year old to watch a movie they didn’t want to see. But I found myself swept away in the story. I was mostly interested in Bill Paxton’s character, the present-day exhibitionist searching through the shipwreck for a necklace, who I knew as a tornado chaser from my favorite film at the time, Twister. 

I sat with my cousins five or six rows in front of our moms and it was the first time I saw a movie without parental supervision. We all chucked popcorn at each other and giggled at Rose’s naked body. I shot a glance at my brother to see if he would look away but he just covered our cousin Josh’s eyes, who yanked his hand away. We all laughed at Josh for being the youngest boy – he was also only ten.

When the boat started sinking, I scurried up to Mom’s row and whispered that I had a stomachache. She took me to and from the bathroom quickly but I stopped outside the theater. I held my stomach again and cried, “I just don’t feel good.”

Mom said, “Do you actually have a stomachache?”

“Sort of,” I mumbled and my eyes wandered to the tiny, circle window in the theater doors. I could still watch the movie from where we stood and felt pacified, like watching a scary movie through your fingers.

My mom caught me watching, “Well, can we go back inside because I want to watch the movie too, you know?” Through the window, an old couple was holding each other in bed as their room filled with ocean water.

“It’s just so sad!” I finally admitted and I broke down crying, realizing I didn’t really have a stomachache at all. I just needed to be emotional about something that didn’t directly relate to my life. It was the first time a movie made me cry and I couldn’t do that in front of my brother.

So I watched the rest of the movie sitting next to my mom and we cried together.

Then, the following weekend, my dad had the brilliant plan of taking us all out on open waters on a ferry boat. We all were acutely aware of the irony of riding a boat immediately after seeing Titanic – except I was the only one who thought this was an obvious suicide mission.

We all boarded the ferry and my brother immediately ran to the front of the boat to crow, “I’m the king of the world!” except there was basically already a line of people waiting to do that. Titanic had already made billions at the box office, playing for almost eight months straight at this point. Everywhere we looked people were riding the wave of fandom – belting Celine Dion, cracking iceberg jokes and whispering, “I’ll never let go,” in Rose’s shivering, dying voice. I took it upon myself to count the lifeboats. If this ferry made the same mistake as the Titanic, there wouldn’t be enough room on the lifeboats to save everyone, so I planted myself on a deck chair for the next two hours where I could easily be first in line. “Women and children first.”

But we didn’t sink. We made it to and from New Jersey without an iceberg in sight. I lived to ferry again.

The next time I boarded a ferry was seventeen years later, this time across the Mediterranean Sea from Morocco to France. Unlike my first ferry ride, I wasn’t afraid of sinking. I had long since outgrown my fear of boats, or more specifically, dying at sea, and actually opted to take a forty-hour ferry over a one-hour flight. It was an experience that the internet had convinced me would be one of a kind. It was the halfway point of my two-month trip. To travel by sea was a poetic transition from one continent to the other. 

I had spent twenty days in Morocco, traveling somewhat aimlessly. Rabat was my home base where I spent most of my time crashing with my friend, Tom, and pretending to be his roommate. Other days, I would take short excursions to other cities: Meknes, Fes, Chefchaoen, and lastly, Tangier. I would spend a couple days alone in new places, testing the waters for solo travel, and give Tom a break from having to host me and get drunk with me. But after three weeks, it was time to say goodbye to Morocco and my dear friend, and set off on my own.

My last night in Morocco was celebrated with lots of beer in a beach club on the piers of Tangier. Tom and his friend, Matt, had taken the train up from Rabat to see me off and I was treating the three of us to rounds of beer and spending the last of my dirham before I embarked on the next leg of my journey.

This beach club, maybe it was fancy, but in my mind it could’ve been a TGIFriday’s. Which is just to say, it was nothing special. It was an eyesore. On the outside, an industrial gray, square building that could’ve been mistaken for a garage but luckily a glowing sign and blue spotlights around the perimeter of the building let passersby know it was more than a garage. It was a shithole. To be fair, it was a club for foreigners. Which we were. And they served beer. Which we loved. And the beer was on tap – very hard to come by in Morocco – and came in giant half-liter mugs. Which we really loved.

Tom and I both acquired a taste for beer when we served together in the Peace Corps, where we were immersed in a heavy drinking culture. In Benin, beer was served in two sizes: grande, or what Americans call “forties,” and petites, a normal-sized bottled beer you would order anywhere. And there was never a time we didn’t order the larger size. Before Benin, I never opted for beer. But when given the choice between questionable drinking water and a sealed bottle of lukewarm beer, beer eventually became the sensible option when it came to avoiding giardia. And before I knew it, I started to like the taste of beer. I would crave it. In my village, going to the buvette was sometimes the only thing to do, and finding a cold beer on a hot day was sometimes the only thing to look forward to.

When volunteers would meet up in the same villages, we would always be at the local watering hole drinking beers. This was such a custom for Tom and I, that when we were reunited in Rabat and I said, “Let’s get a beer,” I was shocked to find that buvette culture was nonexistent.

Beer is still around, it’s not unheard of. But it’s harder to find. Morocco, being a more conservative Muslim country than Benin, keeps bars in smoke-filled basements and sells alcohol in stalls that keeps their metal doors pulled down waist-high. They would sell us loose petites, wrapping each twelve ounce bottle separately with brown paper and we would drink them in abundance on Tom’s medina roof listening to the call to prayer surround us. 

When those mugs of frothy draft beer came towards our booth at the beach bar on my last night in Morocco, the beer alone felt worth celebrating. It was a salute to all the beers I had consumed over the last two years. It was helping me feed my nostalgia. Tom, Peace Corps, beer, and Africa were all tied together somehow and even though Tangier was only halfway through my solo trip, it felt like the end of the journey I had started years before in Benin. I had already left Africa once that year and to return again so soon felt too special, too lucky to be repeated. This time, I felt like I was officially closing the book on Africa.

This whole long-winded goodbye to Africa began when I impulsively purchased a one way ticket from Paris to New York while I was supposed to be purchasing a ticket from Benin to New York. It was toward the end of my Peace Corps service – twenty-seven months where I made a living allowance of about $220 a month. I was working with a couple thousand bucks in my bank account while I was researching flights out of West Africa when someone mentioned a great deal on Icelandic Air flights in which you can extend your layover up to seven days for no extra charge and for some reason this appealed to me. There were no Icelandic Air flights out of Benin, of course, but there were plenty out of Europe. I had never been to France or Iceland and I needed something to look forward to that had nothing to do with my seemingly bleak and hopeless career path. So, I booked the flight for the week of Thanksgiving later that year before I even knew how or when I would leave Benin, let alone how or when I would get to Paris. That was Future Ashley’s riddle to solve. 

Backwards. I planned my trip backwards – as most journeys are planned knowing where you want to end up, this didn’t seem too illogical to me. Except all I really wanted was to end up in Africa again and be surrounded by the friends I made there. So about two months after my Peace Corps service ended, I decided my trip would begin in Rabat – on Tom’s couch – around the end of October. From there my path began to form – from Morocco to France to Iceland and home again in time for turkey and stuffing.

We were two mugs in, each, and I was less than an hour away from saying goodbye to my friends. My green iPhone was on the table in front of me and I kept flipping it nervously, checking the time and giving my hands something to do.

“Oh, I forgot I was going to leave my sim card with you. You know, for when your friends visit they don’t have to buy one.” I didn’t have a paperclip to open the sim tray on my phone but I suddenly remembered my earrings and plucked one out to insert in the pinhole and dumped out my Moroccan sim card. 

“What? That’s so innovative! I would never think of that.” Tom was impressed.

“You would if you wore earrings,” I teased.

Tom found a teaching job in Rabat after he left Benin. Matt was his coworker. He didn’t talk much and mainly just served as an audience for the incessant, opinionated fodder Tom and I spat back and forth at each other.

The waiter came to ask us if we wanted another round and I checked my phone again. It was getting close but I didn’t want to say goodbye just yet. Once I said goodbye, I would be on my own, on my way to a new country: France. I had never been to Europe. In fact, my only perception of the world outside of North America was Africa and, frankly, I was intimidated by a foreign first world. I needed more time. 

“One more round,” I said.

Tangier has two ports – one right along the city walking distance from where we were chugging our last round of beers – and another about an hour away called Tangier MED. Most cruise-liners ran shuttles to and from the city center and the port outside of town, otherwise no one would probably use their ferries. 

At midnight, my Mediterranean cruise ship would be disembarking an hour away and headed to France, with or without me.

I was down to the wire but I felt confident that I could wait until the last minute to catch my shuttle based on my very thorough research I had done earlier that day. The Italian-operated ferry boat company I booked with, Grandi Navi Veloci (GNV), had an office in Tangier and I had popped in there that afternoon to learn more about the shuttles to and from Tangier MED. They assured me that there would be a shuttle for every ferry two hours before boarding time and told me exactly where they would be.

Three mugs later, when I threw the last of my Moroccan money on the table, it was 9:50pm and we were rushing out of the bar with my bags. I said a quick goodbye to Matt while Tom hailed a cab and went with me to my shuttle to see me off.

We arrived at a hub of taxis and buses and I looked around for a GNV shuttle. Everything looked even more foreign at night and the beers didn’t help, but I was certain there was no shuttle to be found. We asked around, Tom taking the lead with French superior to mine, and we learned that I had just missed the last shuttle to Tangier MED by about thirty minutes. Before I even had time to panic or get angry at the false information I was banking on or feel stupid for ordering that last round of beers, Tom started negotiating for a ride to Tangier MED. 

“I don’t have any more cash,” I said.

“I got it.” He handed the money to a driver, buying out every seat, and opened the passenger door for me. “This looks like the most reliable car.”

I sat down, flustered but without protest, as Tom plopped my bags on my lap. “Thank you, Tom.”

“Love you. Be safe.”

I felt a lump in my throat form as I realized I didn’t know when I would see him again. I put off my departure so late that I didn’t leave enough time to give him a proper goodbye. He closed the door and I waved as we drove off to catch my ferry.

Next thing I knew I was alone. I was approaching part two of this journey, France, with no friends to host me along the way. I was officially on my own. But, technically, I wasn’t really alone. I was in a car with a strange man on a dark back road speeding to an unknown location. We were really flying. Aware of my situation – I was about to miss my ferry – my driver was taking turns on these winding Moroccan roads the way my brother drove us home from school in his blue corvette on back country roads in Delaware. He knew these roads like the back of his hand and was loving the opportunity to prove it. My driver only spoke Spanish and Arabic. I only spoke English and French. So I just kept saying, “Rapido! Rapido!” encouraging his reckless speeding and he just kept responding, “Mercedes,” giving me a thumbs up every time, reassuring me that he would do his very best to get me to the port in time.

I had romanticized this ferry to France for months now, so much so that I was oblivious to everyone telling me what a let down it would be. And even then, after the reassuring shuttle situation turned out to be a bust, I was still hopeful that this would be the relaxing Mediterranean cruise I had dreamt of: forty hours of easing myself into Europe – ample time to make the transition out of Africa.

GNV apparently has many cruise-liners that operate along the Mediterranean. I was to arrive in Sète, a port town in Southern France, almost two days later. I booked a sleeper which I would share with three other women in a lady berth. Visions of Titanic danced in my head – the first half anyway, where Rose is having rebellious adventures of love, not the part where everyone is sinking. My ship was christened the Fantastic. 

So much of this trip I left for myself to plan along the way which, in retrospect, I can’t understand why. To disembark on a month-long trip with whole weeks of it unplanned, unbooked, seems extremely irresponsible and out of character. But part of the healing process I diagnosed for my delicate emotional state post-Peace Corps involved allowing myself to delay decision-making. This cruise experience across the Mediterranean Sea on the Fantastic, however, was one of the few legs of my journey that I had booked in advance. 

I had never been on a cruise before and the photos showed me a movie theater, a piano room, a pool, a fancy restaurant – not to mention an opportunity to see the stars from a boat deck on the Mediterranean Sea. Yes, this would be my connection from Morocco to France. It would be relaxing and indulgent and glamorous. I would arrive in Sète feeling refreshed and properly first class.

When me and the Mercedes arrived at the port, I hooked my hands in all my straps preparing to hit the ground running with my bags as soon as the car stopped. He pointed to glass doors and I took off towards them shouting, “Gracias!” 

My footsteps echoed around me as I ran through the near-empty port. I was still unable to see my boat and I didn’t really have a back-up plan if maybe it just wasn’t there. Hop on the next boat? Would there even be another boat to France? It just had to be there! 

There was a security checkpoint with a metal detector but they waved me past and I kept running without anyone checking my bags. At the far end of the room, the man waiting in the booth to check my passport waved his hand as if to say, slow down. They were going to let me on this boat no matter what at this point. I didn’t need to run anymore and I smiled to show I was grateful and relieved. He seemed comically far away and I still had to zig-zag my way through a maze of stanchions before I reached him. I guess if I wasn’t late, the room would have been filled with other passengers, and it wouldn’t have seemed like I was endlessly running through an empty building. I scooted past him too with no questions.

Finally, I was trotting up the ramp to the GNV Fantastic – a large white ship with big blue letters painted on the side. I was the very last person to board the boat. It was past midnight and I was happy to go immediately to my lady berth and crash. The ferry wasn’t hard to navigate, someone ushered me around the red carpeted corridors as people bustled around me settling in. I came to my small room, a bunk bed on each side with about four feet separating them and three Moroccan women already claimed three beds. Leaving me to crash on the top bunk above an already-snoring grandma. I was happy to immediately clamor up in the bed, pull the eye shade over my eyes and wake up on a cruise.

Except, I didn’t really wake up on a cruise. I woke up on a ferry. 

I know there should be a subtle difference, but if you’re spending more than a day on board there needs to be some accommodations. This was a way to transport bodies to another location across a body of water. It was not the form of luxury entertainment I was anticipating. The piano room and movie theater that were advertised were in fact just extra sleeping spaces for the numerous Moroccans who wanted passage to France without paying for the berths like I had. Every room I went in – and even in the corridors – people were sitting on the floor creating makeshift privacy walls by surrounding themselves with their luggage. Similar to your boarding gate at an airport when a flight has been delayed and everyone finds a place to set up camp in a space big enough to stretch your legs – except there were over two thousand passengers and at least thirty hours left to go. 

The pool was an empty tub. The grand piano was strapped closed with a thick chain and covered in luggage. The restaurant was closed except for the couple hours it would be open for dinner service. There was a little food counter where some provisions could be bought, including WiFi, which could be purchased in thirty minute intervals. I spent the first day on the boat realizing how disappointing and expensive the whole experience was about to be. 

I walked a lap around the boat, popping my head into all the communal spaces multiple times to see if anything had changed. And then I lapped it again. From bow to stern and back around again.

I eventually stopped at the front of the boat. I wanted to stand at the very tip of the bow and shout, “I’m the king of the world!” and crow manically and freely. But my heart wasn’t in it. I was anything but free. I was trapped on this boat for a hundred hours. And besides, I couldn’t get to the actual bow – the very front deck was off-limits to passengers. Instead I dragged a plastic, white chair to the very back of the boat, sat with my feet up on the railing watching Morocco fade away, and muttered, “Well this sucks.”

I went back to my room and thought, a nap. That will help pass the time. I was already so bored and so tired of being on this stupid boat. I barged into my lady berth grumpily, startling my three berth mates, who were all on the bottom bunks – two sitting up facing the grandma, who was awake now but still lying in the bed. They were sharing food, laughing at shared jokes, and speaking rapidly in Arabic.  

They were three generations of women, a younger woman in her twenties like me, and then, I assumed, her mother and grandmother. They had coolers of snacks and bottled water to last them the whole trip. I wished I had thought of that.

The younger one tried to talk to me, but neither of us were very good at French, so we politely gave up and just communicated by smiling.

I climbed in bed and cracked my head so hard on the ceiling that tears immediately leapt in my eyes. I grabbed my head with both hands, having forgotten – despite growing up with bunk beds – how fucking painful it is to hit your head that hard. The two younger women laughed in spite of themselves. The grandmother said something that I could only imagine was, “What happened? What’s so funny?” and I’m assuming they responded with something like, “She bumped her head!” and then the grandmother laughed too. Suddenly my tears of pain turned into actual tears and one of them immediately cooed sympathetically as one would with a fussy baby. 

I was crying not only out of humiliation but also out of sorrow and loneliness and grumpiness and disappointment. And I was really hungry and I wanted their snacks. I rolled over in my bed and put my headphones in, opened my laptop and watched old episodes of How I Met Your Mother until my computer died and I fell asleep. 

When I woke up, my berthmates were still talking and my stomach was growling. The prices at the food counter were unreasonably high and, on principle, I decided I would boycott them and try my best to wait until the restaurant opened to eat. Days before, when I was building up this cruise in my mind, I imagined I would go to dinner in my loveliest outfit, start with a cocktail at the bar, mingle with other passengers, be charming and flirty and witty and eventually maybe even probably allow myself to be seduced by a male with a cabin to himself. 

Instead, I showed up in the same outfit I had already been wearing for twenty-four hours, leggings and a t-shirt with a hoodie I got tailored in Benin from my favorite African fabric. The restaurant was more like a banquet hall, no bar to be seen, and no passengers to mingle with.

I sat at a huge round table set for eight and waited for a server to greet me. They were extremely polite which made up for their abhorrent prices. Eventually, I wasn’t the only customer. A group of well-dressed, loud German men came in and took a table near mine. 

I ordered pasta, a medium-priced thing on the menu, and a salad. The Germans, after settling in and getting a round of beers, all laughed gregariously and kept looking at me. I think they wanted to include me in their jokes, but I couldn’t understand and it just started to feel like I was the joke, eating alone at a giant table, too poor to order booze. 

I’m not pathetic, I thought to myself. I have friends too! 

And if the indignant self-deprecation couldn’t get any worse, I let my mind wander to the last time I was at a party and started to emotionally unspool. 

Back in Rabat, I was surrounded by people I didn’t know, but I was with Tom, and he had a way of effortlessly tackling a room of strangers that I wanted to replicate. We were on the bougie side of town where most of the expats live. We showed up early to his coworker’s house and we walked in on the hostess, Annie, painting the birthday girl’s face like a skeleton. It was a Día de Muertos-themed birthday party. “Wow, it looks really good!” Tom said politely of Nicole’s sugar skull. And it was. She had beautiful pink flowers painted around the black circles around her eyes.

Annie turned to Tom excitedly, “Oh my god, can I paint your face? Can I?”

Tom politely declined and when Annie looked disappointed he said, “Ashley, you should get your face painted.” Annie turned to me then, even more excitedly, “Can I? Can I?” Tom tried not to giggle.

I didn’t want my face painted but I wanted the hostess and the birthday girl to like me. And I was trying a new thing where, unless there was a good reason not to, I should say yes to everything.

“Sure,” I shrugged and took the seat in front of her.

She painted my whole face white and looked up ideas on her phone for how she wanted to do the rest while it dried. She picked a design with a spider web-like crown and red detail. “You’re the artist,” I said, when she asked for my approval, and closed my eyes, enjoying the physical attention. 

Guests started arriving and Annie kept getting up to play hostess between layers of paint on my face. People were tentative around me, like they couldn’t recognize me, not realizing that they didn’t know me with or without the paint. I kept telling myself I didn’t care enough to be embarrassed. Annie was nice and I was being a good sport.

Eventually, Annie rushed to finish, so she could bring out the tres leche cake that she managed to make vegan, and Tom stood over her shoulder taking pictures on his phone. When he showed me what I looked like, I just rolled my eyes and whispered, “Oh my god. I look ridiculous.” Tom shook from silent laughter. It was obvious that I was not pulling off the look as well as Nicole. Then I watched as all the other guests were able to dodge getting their face painted as Tom had. The only people with their faces painted were the birthday girl and me, the girl no one knew. 

That party was actually a lot more like this boat dinner than I thought. No matter how many times I told myself I didn’t care enough to be embarrassed, I still felt like a spectacle. I still felt isolated and alone.

Forcing myself out of the emotional hole I was digging, I rolled my eyes to keep from crying again and motioned to the waiter. Fuck it, I thought, the only way to get through this is to splurge. And be drunk. I needed a beer. I deserved a beer. The waiter handed me the drink menu. The wine was cheaper than the beer. Maybe it was time for a change? “A glass of pinot grigio, please.” As I took my first sip, the Germans cheered and toasted to me and I laughed into my wine glass in spite of myself. At least I didn’t have my face painted.

After dinner, I went to the service counter to purchase thirty minutes of internet and treated myself to two more mini bottles of white wine. I went back to my berth, tucking my wine under my arm, and found my berthmates all eating yogurt together. They still had not moved and they were still talking. I smiled to communicate that I wasn’t staying, snatched the blanket off my bed, and promptly left. Then I dragged a plastic chair to the upper deck, the highest I could go, curled up with my blanket and sipped my wine and texted all my friends to complain about my failed adventure.

One of them responded, “Ashley, you’re on the fucking Mediterranean. Stop complaining and look at some stars.”

I put my phone to my chest and sighed. I was beginning my solo journey. I took a swig of wine. If beer would always remind me of Africa and the friends I left behind there, then maybe wine could be tethered to France, and this boat, and misadventures, and making the best of any situation, and independence. I leaned back in my chair to look at the sky. It was cloudy. But luckily, I find clouds at night to be just as beautiful as stars.

The next morning, I awoke in my lady berth to an announcement that we had bypassed a pitstop in Barcelona and would be arriving in Sète several hours earlier than originally scheduled. 

I leapt down from my bed euphorically. If this boat was going to be the biggest let down of my trip, then getting off early was the biggest stroke of luck I could’ve asked for.

I ran out for an overpriced coffee and pastry and more internet. I needed to make sure I knew how to get to my hotel once we arrived in Sète. It would take me less than twenty minutes to walk there and I decided that was something I could manage even with my bags. 

When I got back to my cabin, my berthmates were packing their bags too, and they were still talking. They really never stopped talking. From what I could follow, the middle-aged woman had a car on the ferry and she said goodbye to the other woman. Suddenly I realized, they were not family, or even old friends. They had all just met on this boat. As they were all bidding each other a safe journey, it hit me that I could’ve made friends with them too and it made me a little sad. Sure there was a language barrier, but that never stopped me before. 

First lesson of my solo journey: be open to opportunities to make friends with total strangers. There’s already enough alone time on the agenda.

After I left the room, I took my bags and staked out a place as close to the gangway as possible. I was going to be the first one off this ferry if I could manage it. Another gentleman must have had the same idea and he plopped his stuff near mine. He immediately decided to strike up a conversation and my initial reaction was to blow him off. But, I remembered the lesson I just learned about being approachable and overcoming my adversity to strangers who want to chit-chat.

He asked me about my hoodie. I was still wearing the same clothes I boarded the boat with, plus a beanie to hide my unwashed hair. He struck a chord, because I really loved my hoodie and talking about Benin was the easiest topic for me to talk about at the time.

In a mix of French and English I affectionately call “franglais,” I explained how this fabric was from West Africa and I had my hoodie custom made there. “Tu connais Bénin? C’est le pays à côté du Nigeria.” You know Benin? It’s the country next to Nigeria.

“Ah, Bénin!” he repeated, inflecting the vowels slightly differently than me. “Oui, oui! There is a Béninois here, he is biking here all this way from Bénin.”

“There’s a man from Benin on this boat?” Now I was intrigued and, for some reason, felt my stomach flutter, my heart still aching to be tethered to my Peace Corps life. How serendipitous to find myself on this terrible ferry boat with a man from Benin! A cyclist! Who biked all the way from Benin! I didn’t know anyone from Benin who actually rode a bike except Peace Corps volunteers. Only children rode bikes, we were told this all the time by Beninese men who thought we should all have motorcycles.

Suddenly, I found myself wanting to find this Beninese cyclist. I scanned the crowd for dark skin or a bike. There wasn’t much time left on this boat and there were thousands of people crowding around us now waiting to disembark as our ferry slowly crept up on the southern coast of France. I couldn’t believe I wasted so much time feeling sorry for myself when there was a Beninese guy on this boat the whole time that I could’ve been hanging out with!

When we finally arrived, I was one of the first to make my way down the ramp and into France. I had finally made it to Europe. Sète was cloudy and chilly and the air was misty. The pale-painted buildings along the shore provided a stark contrast to the Moroccan fortresses we left behind. The harbor was filled with hibernating sail boats. I felt relieved and serene to be arriving in a sleepy, quiet town. 

Customs in France was exactly as it had been in Morocco, just another quick glance at my passport. I put my bags on the table and no one bothered to rifle through them or put them through a metal detector. It made me realize I could easily be a smuggler. But I guess there were thousands of other passengers to get through and the agents picked their battles.

Once I was officially out of the port, I spotted him. The Beninese cyclist!

He was perched on his bike surrounded by a mini entourage of old white people. I suspected they were the French people who might be hosting him through the next leg of his journey. He was wearing bike shorts and a tight, tech shirt. He had one large saddle bag on his bike. 

 

I lingered nearby, looking at my phone, eavesdropping, waiting for an opportunity to interrupt. I started to walk by with my rolling suitcase and tried to make my introduction look casual. But for some reason, as soon as I was in earshot, I blurted out, “Je viens du Bénin aussi!” I come from Benin too!

He gave me a two-second glance, looking me up and down in my custom-made Beninese hoodie, and, very bored with me already, said, “Ah bon?” A common phrase used the same way we say, “Oh really?” which, just like in English, can be used both sincerely and sarcastically. This guy did not give a fuck about me. And I realized suddenly how stupid I was that I thought he would.

He turned back to his entourage and didn’t give me another second of his time. It stung a little. I really wanted him to be as excited to meet me as I was him.

Second lesson of my solo journey: not everyone stranger you meet is going to want to be your friend.

I held my head high, maybe a little too high. Fuck that guy, I thought, trying to scrounge up my dignity as I made my way on foot away from the port and into Sète. I paused only to pull my tan trench coat out of my bag and pulled it on over my hoodie. Maybe it was time to start wearing my old clothing, the stuff I wore before Africa. Benin was my past. So was Morocco. It was time to move on.

I took one last look at the GNV Fantastic, happy that fucking ferry was also in my past. But I was in France now, and there were still many more lessons to learn.