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The last sunset we watched together was on this small island in Sulawesi.

We were back-packing around Indonesia as a group of 4 with our boy-friends in the late 1980s, all of us were still studying.

It was 8 years before the advent of the world wide web, many years before digital cameras took over the market, and the time when we listened to music from self-recorded audio cassettes or the cheap copies, we had bought in Kao San road in Bangkok: Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now, CCR, Holding Out For a Hero, Sade, Chaka Khan or the soundtrack of Top Gun. It was one year before the fall of the Berlin wall.

The last time we had seen each other was shortly after her first daughter had been born, and mine was 2 years old. Then, in the middle of the jungle of importance we had lost sight of each other. And until today I have no explanation for this.

She was a close friend. We shared thoughts and secrets, I didn’t and couldn’t share with anyone else at that time.

We both broke up with our long-term relationships and travel buddies for exactly the same man, with a year distance (which was obviously necessary, but not necessarily a good choice to say the truth retrospectively).

I have always admired her clarity and uncompromising path in life.

When I met with one of our former boyfriends in the past years, we always kept saying: O ja, let’s organize a get together and celebrate good old times. We never managed to do it.

When I started planning my travel last year, I found print-outs of pictures from our journey to Indonesia. And I started looking for her and luckily found some contact details of a woman, who is not active on social media.

When we finally met again after some 20 years, it took only a few minutes to realize that no time has passed. I call this phenomenon “Zeitfalten” – pleats in the course of time: nothing was strange, she was still calling me “Tinalein”, which nobody else has ever done. The sound of her voice resonated like a well-known old song, we were smiling about some 2-word phrases, which mean nothing and a lot, like “… jetzt aber!”, we shared highlights of our lives in word rap style, energy was light and high.

I told her about my plans and two days later we decided that she would come and visit me, that we would go travelling together again, in Laos and Cambodia in January 2019.

She is on her way to Phnom Penh right now and I can’t wait to take her in my arms this evening!