Little Princes by Conor Grennan

nodding.
    “Crazy good or crazy bad?”
    “Crazy good. Strange, huh?”
    “I knew you had that in you. Awesome!” We stepped out and he went to lock his door. “But no more orphans now, right? We’re hanging out? We’re biking? We’re drinking and meeting women? This is your year, buddy. It begins now. Right, let’s rock this town . . . wait, my key. I gotta find my hotel key. Here, hold my beer.”
    Glenn was serious about both the biking and the drinking. Two days later we purchased mountain bikes, jettisoned most of our stuff, and set off riding across Thailand. We rode several hours per day. It took us two or three days to get to towns that took most backpackers a few hours on a bus, but when we did get there we were rewarded with impressed stares from women when we told them how we had gotten there.
    “I told you, man—I told you!” Glenn would shout across the bar at me.
    We rode until we reached the northern border between Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), then turned right and rode until we got to Laos. That’s where the road ended.
    “There’s no road? Anywhere around here?” Glenn was asking the woman in the tourist office. He was studying the map behind her head.
    “No, sir, I am very sorry—the only road is back where you came, back into Thailand,” she said with an apologetic smile.
    “Wait—what’s this? Is this a road?” He was pointing at a long purple line that bisected Laos.
    “That is a river, sir. The Mekong.”
    “Well . . . you got boats?”
    Four hours later, our bicycles were strapped to the roof of a boat. We floated down the Mekong for two days until we reached the former capital of Laos, Luang Prabang, with its fading colonial homes and buzzing night markets. The road reappeared in Luang Prabang, and we took off again.
    We pedaled our way up twelve-mile ascents, stopping to rest in jungle villages. Children ran to greet us and held on to us, our bikes, our legs, our saddlebags, studying us like fireflies they had caught in a jar. I would get off my bike and lie down in the grass and let the little ones pile on top of me, grabbing my face and touching my hair and untying my shoes. The older boys, those who reminded me of Anish and Santosh and the others, would sit a few feet away with wide grins, enjoying the scene but tinged by just enough self-consciousness not to join the pileup. I would sit with them too, unable to communicate. Glenn, having found some water in the village, would join us, talking to the kids as if they were old friends of his from Prague. The kids couldn’t stop giggling at him.
    I traveled to sixteen countries over the next nine months. After six weeks of biking with Glenn, I convinced Alex, my friend from Kathmandu who famously had his camera stolen and traded for a chicken, to catch up with me. He too was going around the world. When I told him what I was doing, he bought a mountain bike and met me in Cambodia. Three days later, we were biking south, sixty miles into a headwind, to the Cambodian coast. From there it was over the border into Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), which, according to the guidebook, had two million motorcycles ricocheting through its streets. I believed it. It felt like a dam had burst above a Kawasaki factory and we were caught in the floodwaters. But we escaped after a few days and some very late and drunken nights with our fellow backpackers, then it was north through the rice paddies and along the coast until we reached Hanoi.
    I thought I would sell my bike when I returned to Bangkok, but it gave me such a sense of empowerment, not to mention detox after the nights of drinking, that I was unable to part with it. So when it was time to say good-bye to Alex and move on to Sri Lanka by myself, I packed up my bike and brought it with me. For three weeks I rode alone through the jungles of Sri Lanka, another country almost empty of tourists after the tsunami. After that, I cycled for a few days in Indonesia before giving