Gary Garbutt left a caravan in Felixstowe with one suitcase, a backpack, and £1,495 cash. Ten years later, he was sitting in Phnom Penh.
It was 2016, and I had basically nothing to lose. The make-or-break holiday to Turkey had broken. I was living in a caravan in Felixstowe, doing the worst job I'd ever had: unloading containers of chilli powder on a forklift, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., with a 15-minute coffee break in the morning and another in the afternoon. Every single day. Then I moved to customs clearance, which was slightly better but still involved unloading 80- and 100-foot containers. This was my life.
Then one of my boxing students, who'd started travelling around Asia with his girlfriend, sent me a message: "I got you a job in China." My first response was more or less, "China — isn't that where the Chinese restaurant food comes from?" Not exactly a well-travelled man at that point.
"You're British. You have blue eyes. That's it. That's all we need."
The recruiter's pitch was simple: £1,600 a month to teach words like apple, banana, rabbit, dog, cat, fish, duck, and a handful of colours to kids in a training school. For someone who'd been breathing chilli dust all day on a Felixstowe dock, that sounded like a fantasy. My boxing student kept messaging every other day. Have you thought about it? Have you thought about it? Eventually, I had.
I handed over the caravan overnight. Someone else took it on. I left with one suitcase, a backpack, my iPad, my phone, a passport, and £1,495 after paying for the flight. That was it. Total assets.
The night before departure I took a train down to London and stayed in a youth hostel, careful not to spend too much because I had no idea what Hong Kong was going to cost me. First time flying out of Heathrow — I'd always gone from Gatwick before. Standing in that departure hall, I genuinely expected someone to tap me on the shoulder and tell me I couldn't go. I got to the boarding door, looked back, and thought: maybe I won't ever come back again.
As I walked through that boarding door, I remember looking back and thinking, maybe I won't ever come back again.
I'd booked a connecting flight through Mumbai. Most people have a one- or two-hour layover. Mine was 12 hours. They wouldn't let me out of the terminal, so I slept on benches that were extremely uncomfortable, bought a pizza and a beer, watched YouTube, and tried to figure out what on earth to expect. Nobody had told me anything useful about China or Hong Kong.
Hong Kong hit me immediately: hot, humid, and enormous. The airport was huge and modern, signs in Chinese and English, and I walked out to see Ferraris, Range Rovers, massive tower blocks. I'd genuinely thought China was supposed to be poor. This was not matching my expectations.
Then I got to baggage claim and waited. And waited. Everyone else collected their things and left. My suitcase was nowhere. Customer services, a young woman with pidgin English, already knew my name. That was when I started sweating for a different reason. Turns out my bag had simply not made the connection in Mumbai. It would arrive tomorrow. Tomorrow. The bag with my boxer shorts in it. I was standing there in jeans, a jumper, and a t-shirt in 30-degree humidity.
"Tomorrow? That's got my boxer shorts in. I haven't got any clean boxer shorts."
I made my way by bus to the Backpackers Youth Hostel in Kowloon, arriving on a street lit up with neon lights even in the middle of the day. Seeing Western faces actually came as a relief. I withdrew £500 worth of Hong Kong dollars from an ATM — thankfully the bank card worked — because I had no idea how much the visa was going to cost or what else I'd need to buy.
The recruiter's instructions for getting my work visa were, to put it charitably, informal. Go to a specific underground station. Find a man with glasses and a brown bag. He'll be at the top of an escalator. Hand over your passport. That sounded suspect to me, but I had a one-way ticket, £1,495, and no other plan.
I walked up steep stairs that reminded me of a nightclub in Ipswich where I used to work the door on Saturday nights — the kind of stairs where people either fell down drunk or got thrown down by security, and neither outcome looked pretty. At the top I found a man behind an old wooden counter, smoking, glasses on, looking exactly like someone you'd find behind the counter of a Chinese restaurant in England. He wrote down names, handed everyone a slip of paper, and said: come back in two days.
I'd been told one day. Now it was two. Luckily I'd booked the hostel for longer. The group handing over passports that morning included a Russian girl, an Albanian, an American, and a Jamaican. All of us going to different parts of China. All of us trusting a man with a brown bag.
With no passport, no plan, and bags that still hadn't turned up, I spent the next two days exploring. Pokemon Go was everywhere at the time — I followed a crowd of 150 or 200 people gathered in a shopping centre courtyard, all staring at their phones chasing things I couldn't see. The noodle shop around the corner charged me less than a pound for a bowl. Watery, not much flavour, but it did the job. The luxury car showrooms nearby were not so affordable.
I went on a bus sightseeing tour, mostly to have something to do. Hong Kong is tower blocks, office blocks, a few museums, and a lot of flash cars. I had a pizza and a beer at a pub one evening, went to bed early, and lay there in the bottom bunk with a curtain pulled across for privacy, running the same questions through my head on a loop. Had I made the right move? Was this going to work? Was I about to hand my passport to a stranger and never see it again?
On the morning I was due to collect my passport and visa, I walked back to that same spot genuinely unsure whether the man would be there. Same group showed up. He was there. Passport back, visa stamped, and within minutes the recruiter was on WeChat with a train booking number and the news that I needed to be at the border crossing by 3 p.m. that afternoon. My bags arrived at two. One hour to get across.
I was genuinely surprised I'd got this far without any hiccups.
Standing at that border crossing, about to step into mainland China for the first time, I tried to take stock. Excited, yes. Apprehensive, definitely. Completely unaware of what the next ten years were going to look like. But the worst thing I'd ever done? No. Probably the best.
Ten years later I'm sitting in a rented apartment in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, having just left China after a decade of teaching English as a second language. Some ups, some downs, some mediocre stretches in between. All of it started with one suitcase, a backpack, and a forklift driver who had absolutely nothing to lose.
