When we arrived in Hawaii it was necessary for every single person on board the cruise to meet with a United States border official in order to receive permission to depart the ship. The border officials actually came onto the boat, and each and every passenger had to file through into one of the lounges in order to pass the inspection. Of course I wasn't sure if I was going to be allowed to enter the States, what with my having been radicalised in Iran and all, but I hoped that I'd have a better chance in this relatively informal border procedure than I might otherwise have. But with so many people needing to go through this, the process had supposedly been simplified by each passenger being assigned a colour with a different time on to go for the inspection. With Dea needing to get to her appointment with Dr. Chee we had requested the earliest possible time, and in fact headed down to the required deck before our 'grey card' had even been called.

We headed down the stairs at the front of the ship to the entrance of the lounge and were dismayed to find that there was already a long line of people queuing up. We diligently followed the queue, looking for the end, all the way from the lounge doors, down a corridor that stretched halfway back up the ship before taking our place and preparing for a long wait. And it was a long wait, a good half an hour before we even heard that the border officials were ready, and the queue could finally begin trickling forward. It was soon after this that I noticed everyone else was physically holding grey cards in their hands. I didn't have one. “It was in the envelope!” Dea said, referring to that which had been delivered to our stateroom. Oops! Realising I might possibly not be allowed through without this I left the queue and ran up to the room to get it. When I came back down the stairs I was at the door to the lounge again, and saw that the queue of people who had been waiting patiently still lined the corridor. It was pretty annoying, then, to see that other people, only just arriving down the stairs were filing straight into the lounge without having to queue at all.

I waited a while at the front until eventually the queue moved enough for me to see Dea almost arriving. Now a group of four just arrived down the stairs and walked towards the lounge. One of them was holding a pink card, a colour that had not been called, and the female member of staff standing nearby laughed and let them through. This irritated me. Poor Dea had been patiently queueing up for ages, and some people who weren't even supposed to be here yet, who hadn't queued at all, were cutting in ahead of her. I was sufficiently annoyed to hold up the people and call Dea forward “Come through here Dea,” I said, “these people have got pink cards.”

The man who was directly being held up by me at this point laughed and said in a German accent “Only one of us has a pink card.” I responded by informing him that Dea had an eye infection and needed to get to a doctor. I thought this was a perfectly reasonable justification for my insisting she not be held up any longer, and what was more, I imagined it might garner a little sympathy. Not a bit of it. The man laughed at me. Something between a snigger and a chortle. Under normal circumstances I would have let that go, but after the week we had been through, I was really rather stressed, and I reacted heatedly. “Do you think that's funny? My girlfriend needs to see a doctor? Is that funny?” The man, a big fellow, old of course, but broad-shouldered, round-bellied, and at least six feet tall, responded by laughing again. A hearty chuckle this time. He really did seem to be quite amused. Now the red mist really did descend upon me. I wasn't going to stand by and let someone laugh at my girlfriend's misfortune. I moved towards him, asking again if he thought it was funny that my girlfriend needed to see a doctor, and pushed him in the chest. As I said, he was a big man, and of course nothing actually happened when I pushed him in the chest. I really should have punched his stupid grinning face, but I can't say as I'd thrown a punch for at least a decade, and, once again, he was really a very big man, so I settled for flicking his baseball cap off his head.

This rather silly fracas was broken up by the female member of staff who came and stood between me and the man in the queue. I calmed down a little and, realising that we were only a few metres away from the United States border officials who were going to determine whether or not I was fit to enter Hawaii, decided to let it go. This wasn't that easy of a thing to do, considering I could hear the German giant was continuing to laugh behind us in a manner seemingly designed to antagonise me further.

We finally filed through into the lounge and my attention turned away from the unsympathetic idiot and onwards to the four or five border officials that were flicking through passports just ahead of us. I scanned them and tried to look for one who didn't seem to be checking thoroughly, but it was no use, they were all going through the passports. The previous night I had folded every page of my passport out except the one with the Iranian visa, in the hope that this page would not fall open during the inspection, and now the moment of truth had arrived as I stood before a stern looking man and gave him my passport. He flicked through it and I held my breath as his finger landed on the Iranian visa. But he moved straight past it and continued.

“Travel a lot?” he asked.

“Yes. I'm going around the world by bicycle.”

“Why did you go to... Uzbekistan?” he queried, thankfully landing on a non-Iranian visa for this question.

“Cycling. I cycled across Asia.”

“Oh you're a professional cyclist?”

“No, I just travel by bicycle.”

He looked at me questioningly, but nevertheless there was a long queue behind me, and he stamped me in.

It was a great relief that I was allowed to at least accompany Dea to the doctor. We got off, and walked the short distance through downtown Honolulu to the clinic of Dr. Chee.  We had arrived with time to spare in the end, which was lucky, because Dea had to fill in a large number of different forms, detailing all of the medication she had been taking, which was a lot. After all the forms were filled in she was finally allowed through into a worryingly dilapidated doctor's room to wait for Dr. Chee. A little while later he showed up, and, apparently not having had the time to check the forms Dea had taken the time to complete, asked what was wrong and what medications Dea had been taking. He was a small Chinese man, kind of shrivelled, wrinkled skin, you know how people get when they're almost 80. Dea answered his questions, and he quickly examined her eye. With a shake of his head he gave his verdict. “You need to go home,” he sighed, “You need to go home.” 120 dollars well spent.

Whilst Dr. Chee's expert opinion wasn't exactly what I'd hoped we'd hear, it did seem that Dea somehow welcomed the news. As we walked back to the ship she seemed relieved, as if she'd been given permission to go back to Denmark and get this thing sorted properly. The doctors there were obviously going to know what they were doing, and with all of her friends and family around she would have a settled base. Dr. Chee had confirmed it was likely to take months to heal, whatever demonic little being it was that had so rudely invaded her eye. There was little doubt that going home was absolutely the best option for Dea now. But what about me? What about my trip? Somehow, without actually saying it, it had been mutually agreed that I was staying. That I'd given too much to this project to abandon it now, and that Dea did not want to be the reason for my abandonment. So the plan we now agreed on was for Dea to fly to Denmark, and for me to get to Denmark as fast as I could by bicycle and boat which, considering we were currently basically on the exact opposite side of the world, was a bit of a challenge. Still, cycling across Canada seemed like it would be a breeze, and I at least knew of a cruise ship heading across the Atlantic in September, and I desperately hoped I could find one sooner than that.

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After grabbing a quick bite to eat back on the ship I grabbed my laptop and we headed back into Honolulu to look for a place to use wifi. This wasn't as easy as I'd hoped, and the streets were more rundown and filled with homeless people than I would have expected. But finally we located a crepe shop with wifi, where the young waiter even gave Dea a free coffee. It was a moment of light in an otherwise dark day. There were plenty of things we needed to organise, most urgently a flight for Dea. This turned out to be a monumentally difficult task. We tried to book one for 7pm that evening, but the booking did not go through. We had to wait four hours for this failure to be confirmed, by which time of course it was too late to try and book again for this flight. So we tried to book a different flight. Again it failed. I phoned the booking agent from the ship's phone, and after a great deal of time spent on hold, I eventually found out that the problem was that my bank in England was blocking the payment.

Using Dea's card we finally succeeded in making a flight booking, after about nine hours of trying, on a flight that would leave Honolulu at 7am in the morning. As it happened the ship was spending the night in Hawaii, and so Dea could get a few hours of sleep, much deserved after another extremely stressful day which had involved a great deal of back-and-forth to get the flights booked, as well as packing and trying to get everything ready for her unexpectedly premature return to Copenhagen.

After a few hours of sleep we awoke sometime between three and four in the morning. After a quick breakfast of food smuggled into our room, I escorted Dea and her backpack down to the gangway of the ship, and she stepped off the MS Noordam for the last time. The great hulk of the sleeping ship dwarfed us as we walked along the dock, Dea no doubt feeling some relief to be leaving the cursed boat behind. Through a cold hangar we walked and out into the street, where a taxi sat idling, ready and waiting. Dea loaded her backpack into the back and then asked the driver to wait. Then it was time for the tears to roll as I held Dea in my arms and didn't want to let go. This was a gut-wrenching, totally unfair, absolutely-not-in-the-script goodbye. It was the worst of goodbyes. But it was goodbye. She slipped out of my arms and into the cab. It drove off into the night, and I was alone once more.