WHAT SHE SAW – A TRUE STORY
A Prophecy, a Lost Love, and a Journey into the Unknown
Volume 1 of the "STATIONS" series
A fortune teller takes his hand. What she sees there will haunt him for years.
At the time, Christoph dismisses her prophecy as hocus-pocus. Later, he will remember every single word.
At the beginning of 1985, Christoph travels alone through Asia. After Sri Lanka and a few weeks on Koh Samui, he returns to Bangkok. There he meets Suzanne.
A fairly trivial question about sugar turns into an encounter for which, just a few months later, Christoph is prepared to leave everything familiar behind and fly to the other side of the world.
To Australia.
But it isn’t only the woman he has fallen in love with who is waiting for him there.
In a small chapel, a fortune teller takes his hand. She speaks of dark forces and sinister demons. Of a difficult trial awaiting him in a distant place. And of a second lifeline already appearing in his palm.
Christoph doesn’t think much of such hocus-pocus.
Not yet.
Soon afterwards, Suzanne leaves him.
What follows is a journey across Australia. With no real plan and, most of the time, remarkably little money. Christoph sleeps in strangers’ homes, works on a sheep farm, narrowly escapes an Australian wedding, meets two remarkably likeable car thieves and eventually ends up in Cape Tribulation, where a man in the rainforest apparently has his own ideas about hospitality.
And as Christoph travels on, the fortune teller’s words keep resurfacing.
What did this woman really see?
What She Saw is the opening volume of the autobiographical series STATIONS and the beginning of a story whose significance Christoph himself cannot yet recognise.
With warmth, self-deprecation and dry humour, Bernhard Christoph Lichtinger tells a story of love, departure, freedom and those strange detours that only look like signposts in hindsight. A true story that still makes you laugh when, really, there is nothing left to laugh about.
What She Saw takes us from the beaches of Thailand to Western Australia, along endless highways and across remote farms, into the tropical rainforest of Cape Tribulation and out onto the Great Barrier Reef.
Along the way, we encounter a bathtub in a palm tree, a chicken coop in Fremantle, an almost Australian mother-in-law, two car thieves with surprisingly good manners, an amorous surfer, a dive boat and a prophecy that stubbornly refuses to be forgotten.
What at first looks like a fairly crazy journey becomes the beginning of something much bigger. Because some moments in life seem completely insignificant while you’re living through them. Only years later do you realise that perhaps those were the very moments when the course was set.
What She Saw tells the story of one such moment.
Bernhard Christoph Lichtinger writes from lived experience. His stories are about freedom, loss, detours and new beginnings, and about the absurd sides of life.
If you have not yet read a volume from the book series “STATIONS”, you can begin with one of the following books. Each volume stands on its own and explores a different aspect of our lives.
Volume 1: WHAT SHE SAW – A TRUE STORY
Volume 2: THE MAN WITH THE CRUTCH
Volume 3: TRANSIT – THE LAST DAYS OF FREEDOM
Volume 4: DEPARTURE INTO THE UNKNOWN
VOLUME 5: IN THE TIGER CAGE – SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN THE BASEMENT OF RUMMELSBURG
Volume 6: FRIDAY THE 13TH (IN PROGRESS)