Follow The White Rabbit

A few days later, I was wandering down to the gym when I ran into a familiar face.

"Nikki?" a voice said.

"Dain? How long have you been in Medellin? I don't think I've seen you since-"

"Since that Shanghai trip, yeah."

I flashed back to the couple of weeks we spent in China, singing karaoke, eating hotpot, visiting jazz bars, and working from the new office.

We chatted for a short while. He'd rented a nice place up the mountain with a few other nomadic entrepreneurs. Business was going well. The usual. He mentioned a mastermind they were holding in a few weeks and invited me along. We parted ways, and I marched onwards to the gym.

There was only one other person who worked out at the same time as me, in the middle of the day. He'd always take his shirt off and spend several hours doing all manner of grueling exercises. He looked like he'd walked straight off the cover of Men's Fitness magazine — dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, chiseled jawline, ripped body. I tried to guess his nationality and assumed it to be American.

"Can I use this if you're finished with it?" I asked.

The stranger looked up at me and smiled. He had a movie-star smile. Who the fuck looks that good in the middle of a workout? Honestly...

"Of course," he replied with a strong European accent. I couldn't quite pinpoint where it was from, but he definitely wasn't American.

A few days later, we ran into each other at the lockers.

"Hey," the stranger said as he packed a drink bottle into his backpack. "I've seen you around for a few weeks but never said hello. Where are you from?"

"Hey," I replied. "I'm from Australia. I've just been floating around Medellin for a few months. What about you?"

"Vienna in Austria. I'm Mikel, by the way." I could tell he wasn't a native English speaker.

"I'm Nikki," I said as I closed my locker door.

He asked me where I'd been traveling and why I was there, in Medellin. I asked the same. He was an architect, engineer, and property developer. He'd spent the past few years traveling on-and-off, doing what he loved — hiking, training, and sports.

"My Spanish tutor is waiting for me," he said as he zipped up his gym bag. "Will you be here tomorrow? Do you want to have coffee with me after training, around four p.m? It's Friday, so I don't have anything on in the afternoon."

"Sure," I replied. "I'd love to."

We exchanged numbers, and the next day we wandered down to our favorite local coffee shop near the gym. Several hours went by as we sipped cappuccinos and shared a croissant de almendras and spoke about all kinds of things. As the sun set, we moved on to drinks, then dinner, then drinks again.

There was something mysterious about him. He was like an enigma, a puzzle. I liked puzzles. I couldn't quite figure him out. Talking to him was like a throwback to a simpler time. Unlike most of the people I hung around with, he made his living offline in physical property development. He loved building things and talked with such passion about a house he wanted to build when he got back to Austria. He didn't have any social media and kept his life very private. You could tell he'd been raised with old-school European chivalry and manners — opening doors for me, walking on the outside of the footpath, making sure I got home safely. It was nice.

We quickly became friends, though he was leaving in a few weeks to head to the US, then Canada, then Thailand to train at a Muay Thai camp. "You should meet me in Thailand!" he said as he leaned against the treadmill I'd just chosen. "You'd love the training there."

"Maybe..." I replied. I loved Colombia. I had a good, productive work routine and social circle there. However, my visa was going to expire in a couple of months, and I needed a new place to go — preferably a cheap one. I still kept all my money in my business for growth, so I'd only withdraw the minimum salary needed to live comfortably. Luckily, 'living very comfortably' could be done extremely affordably in foreign countries — way cheaper than having a mediocre lifestyle of ramen noodles in a place like Sydney. I still found it funny when people assumed I had a ton of money, just because I lived a decently adventurous life. I don't think the general population realizes how affordable travel is if you can work remotely. You're never locked into a long term lease, and you don't have the suitcase capacity to buy shit you don't need to impress people you don't like. It's an exercise in minimalism.

"Come on," Mikel coaxed, flashing his movie-star smile. "It's an all-you-can-eat buffet of training. There are so many things to try: Muay Thai kickboxing, yoga, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, fitness classes, traditional boxing, Thai sword fighting-"

"Sword fighting?" My ears pricked up. A new recurring motif had been surfacing in my consciousness over the past few months: a sword. I wasn't sure what the symbol meant, but Mikel's words caught my attention. "I used to do sword fighting with my best friend, Canna, when we were kids," I said. "I had a whole collection of plastic swords."

"Then you will love this. I promise."

There. I felt it. That gut-level clarity. It was a voice that whispered, Follow the white rabbit, Nikki. Follow the white rabbit.

"Okay. I'll look at flights tonight."

He flashed me his movie-star smile, then left me to my running.

I turned up the speed. My feet began to pound the pavement.