Stephen Hawking spent much of his life explaining time, space, and the tendency of an ordered universe to become rather less ordered. At the beginning of 2019, I conducted a smaller experiment: three weeks imposing order on myself in Thailand, six weeks dispersing it across Europe, and one more flight to Seattle.
There were fewer equations, but considerably more beer.
I left Hong Kong because I needed a reset. Thailand would supply the discipline: accommodation, meals, classes, personal training, and a timetable firm enough to prevent negotiation. The UK, Portugal, and Germany would follow. Seattle was added because Abe and Brian were there and, once I had started moving, stopping seemed unnecessarily obedient.
There was no thesis at the time. I had the opportunity to go, so I went. Pragmatism would have kept me at home, working through lists, saving money, and promising myself a better-timed escape later. Restlessness put me on a flight to Phuket. Hawking had taught me to look at the scale of the universe; travel kept reminding me that the part within reach was already too large to finish.
The group in Chalong, Phuket — 24 February 2019.
The fitness part
I had booked three weeks with Ultimate Fitness Holidays, staying at Coco Retreat and training at Titan Fitness in Chalong. On paper, it was neatly contained: accommodation, meals, classes, personal training, and enough structure to prevent a fitness holiday from becoming a holiday with unusually optimistic luggage.
The promise began before arrival. There was an app, a WhatsApp group, cheerful photographs of people working out together, and Vee, the local representative, making newcomers feel included before they had met. I joined the group about a month early and watched other people appear to enjoy exercise in the tropical heat. This should have been treated as suspicious, but it worked. I could not wait to get there.
The administration supplied some accidental warm-up. The app regularly produced server errors, and the directions from Coco Retreat relied upon a green sign with Thai writing that did not exist. I walked the route in advance, got lost several times, found Titan eventually, and made a visual map for the people arriving after me. This was not in the programme, but it may have been my first successful exercise of the trip.
Coco Retreat itself was welcoming, attentive, and rather darker than the word “boutique” had led me to expect. My room looked onto a fence high enough to remove most of the view and quite a lot of the daylight. It did not matter greatly. I was not in Thailand to admire the inside of a room, and the staff were excellent. Most days, I left early and returned with the relieved gait of somebody who had paid money to discover new muscles.
The first session established the terms. I threw up twice.
There are gentler ways to begin a story of physical renewal, but they would be inaccurate. The heat, the effort, and the optimism with which I had approached the class reached an early settlement. My body objected formally, then returned to work.
Titan justified the journey. Ben was helpful, Aof understood what I wanted to achieve and, more importantly, what I was actually capable of achieving without requiring medical intervention. The trainers brought energy, heat, and the occasional theatrical flourish expected of a boot camp. Body360 was initially a blur of stations, instructions, and other people's limbs, but repetition gave it shape. There is a particular pleasure in returning to something that defeated you on Monday and discovering, by Friday, that it has become merely difficult.
My favourite class was yoga with Izzy. I had never done it before. At sunrise, in the warmth before the day became oppressive, it made a different kind of demand. Strength was useful, but so were patience, balance, and the willingness to stop treating every movement as a contest. Izzy could teach people at several levels without making the beginners feel like a separate species. Over three weeks, I became more confident and genuinely looked forward to it.
Training at Titan Fitness, Chalong, Phuket — 4 February 2019.
The training created a daily rhythm: wake, move, sweat, eat, recover, and begin again. Around it, a temporary community formed. People arrived from different countries with different motives and different tolerances for being shouted at before breakfast. Vee held much of it together. She organised the life beyond the classes, checked in on people, and turned a collection of bookings into something closer to a group.
The final days contained some unnecessary business drama and left me less enthusiastic about booking through the same company again. It did not define the trip. Titan's trainers, Aof's guidance, Izzy's sunrise yoga, Vee's care, and the friendships made under physical duress were the experience. The people gave it value.
The island beyond the timetable
Phuket refused to remain a fitness camp. Before, during, and around those three weeks, the island kept widening: Chalong, Rawai, Patong, Kata Noi, Bang Tao, Kamala, Ban Sa Pam, and Mai Khao. Training reduced life to a timetable, while Phuket kept offering reasons to ignore one.
There were beaches that made discipline feel slightly absurd, roads that connected one version of the island to another, and meals capable of undoing a carefully calculated sense of virtue. A fitness holiday is a negotiation between what the body has been promised and what the place insists upon.
Elephant Family Phuket, Thalang District — 10 February 2019.
The water beyond the timetable, Phuket — 9 February 2019.
I left fitter, certainly, but also recalibrated. The point had never been only weight, muscle, or endurance. I had wanted interruption: a sufficiently different routine to break the authority of the old one. Thailand supplied it through repetition. Every day was structured, but none of it belonged to the life I had temporarily left behind.
Then I went to Europe and began converting portions of the achievement into beer.
Six weeks of practical sabotage
The UK came first in the next movement: familiar people, familiar places, and the peculiar experience of returning home while still feeling in transit. Fitness acquired fewer scheduled sessions and considerably more opportunities for lunch. The discipline of Chalong did not vanish; it simply lost its institutional support.
Royal Hospital Chelsea, London — 28 March 2019.
Portugal was not reflection; it was momentum. I arrived in Lisbon on 1 April and, the next morning, went to Sintra. Pena Palace appeared above the trees in yellow, red, stone, and architectural excess, the sort of building that looks as though several centuries had contributed ideas and nobody had been authorised to remove any of them. It was absurd, theatrical, and wonderful.
Pena Palace, Sintra — 2 April 2019.
Back in Lisbon, the city rose and fell beneath my feet, its hills making a plausible argument that walking still counted as training. The light caught the tiled façades, trams appeared at angles that suggested gravity was optional, and the river kept reappearing at the end of streets. Along the waterfront, MAAT curved towards the Tagus like a piece of the future that had landed without disturbing the older city behind it.
MAAT beside the Tagus, Lisbon — 3 April 2019.
The days moved from coffee at a pavement table to champagne later. Between them came streets, viewpoints, food, conversation, and the satisfying ache of covering a city on foot. Thailand had measured progress in repetitions. Lisbon measured it in distance travelled without a plan. I had not abandoned the fitness programme so much as translated it into Portuguese and removed the shouting.
The Tagus from the Lisbon waterfront — 4 April 2019.
Germany was less ambiguous.
German beer has many excellent qualities. Respect for the previous month's fitness programme is not among them.
There is no reliable conversion between hours spent doing Body360 in Thailand and litres of beer consumed in Germany, but I became interested in the research. The work had been real: the early starts, the sweat, the first-session vomiting, the yoga, the PT, and the repeated decision to continue. So was the beer. One did not cancel the memory of the other, although it may have obscured some of the abdominal evidence.
This was entropy with table service. Thailand had been an attempt to create order: measured meals, repeated movements, scheduled exertion, and an increasingly cooperative body. Europe scattered that order across family tables, Portuguese streets, railway platforms, airports, and German bars. The arrow of time continued forwards. My fitness results became harder to observe.
This was not failure. It was a broader understanding of balance, reached several drinks after the word “balance” had ceased to describe my physical condition.
Brandenburg Gate, Berlin — 8 April 2019.
The practical sabotage continues, Berlin — 8 April 2019.
One more flight
There was still Seattle. I went for a week to see Abe and Brian. Friendship supplied the reason; the city supplied the setting. It was not a grand expedition assembled for posterity. It was a visit, which was reason enough. I crossed the distance because they were there.
The Space Needle and MoPOP, Seattle — 19 May 2019.
By then, the journey had stopped pretending to be a practical reset. It had moved from Thailand's imposed discipline through the UK, Portuguese hills, German beer, and then across another ocean to friends. It was messy, expensive, occasionally strenuous, and difficult to defend on a spreadsheet. It was also exactly what I had needed.
I returned to Hong Kong with the trip still close enough to feel physical: stronger from Thailand, softer from Germany, and carrying the accumulated fragments of several countries in photographs, messages, and laundry.
Seattle and Elliott Bay from the Space Needle — 20 May 2019.
A few weeks into the new reality
I am writing this a few weeks into the first COVID restrictions in Hong Kong. The journey is still too recent to feel historical, but the world has already narrowed with extraordinary speed. Borders are tightening, journeys are disappearing, and friends and family are becoming rectangles on screens. Fitness has moved indoors and been repackaged as determination in small spaces. Nobody yet knows how long any of this will last. That uncertainty is what makes the photographs feel newly improbable.
That is the horrifying part. I have spent weeks travelling through Thailand, the UK, Portugal, Germany, and Seattle, yet already it feels as though I barely went anywhere. The flights, train journeys, wrong turns, shared tables, and badly drawn routes have acquired a significance they did not possess at the time. My personal universe spent months expanding, then contracted with remarkable speed.
I did not predict COVID. Hawking was far too careful about the future for me to claim cosmic foresight on the basis of a fitness camp and several boarding passes. My prescience was entirely accidental: I chose movement over postponement without knowing how completely the world was about to get fucked up.
Had I known, I would have done more. I would have stayed longer, taken the photograph, accepted the invitation, ordered another drink, and complained less about the airport.
But the record is annoyingly clear. I trained until I was sick, watched the sun rise through yoga, crossed Phuket, went home without quite going home, revisited Portugal, surrendered several hours of fitness to German beer, and flew to Seattle for Abe and Brian.
For once, before the world changed, I had already gone.
It was not a theory of everything, but it covered a surprising amount of ground.