The journey. Travelling. How I first got bit I’m not sure, but the bug certainly had me.
The only inhabited continent I’ve not visited is South America, and I have some good excuses up my sleeve for going there in the future. Every time you travel you end up with stories, have adventures. I’ve enough to write a book. Several. A lot of them you wouldn’t believe. I have a hard time doing so myself. But they’re true.
I ran into a lot of gangs when travelling. Not touring – that’s different. Artificial, unreal, harder to understand what a country is truly like. I’ve dined with elders from rival gangs, been chased and cherished by them, threatened with broken teeth or worse, turned down their invitations and stood my ground against them.
I hitched around the States with only my side bag, excess baggage stashed at some yank’s pad in some place along the way, always a party and a ride, to another party, another ride the next day, another place, another party, another person. How it goes. I’ve been lucky, attracted beautiful souls. Sometimes uglier ones. That’s life.
I’ve been attacked in Corsica and welcomed in New Zealand, chased in India and loved in Greece, robbed in Tunisia, and treated in Portugal. Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, France, Switzerland, Australia, Mexico and Wales. Oh the tales I could tell, would love to tell you.
One thing about travel is returning to your native land. Small things change, but big things get stuck. You move on, tumbled against the polishing stones of foreign souls and climes, but the culture doesn’t. On the surface, Numa Numa dance may have been replaced by Gangnam Style, but deep down it’s the same nonsense. Travelling is a wonderful way of deciding what really counts in your life, a way of pruning things that no longer serve you. If you’re stuck in one place, day in day out, it can be harder to do this essential life spring cleaning. One can take stuff for granted, get comfortable, stagnate, slip into bad habits. On the road, journeying, that does not happen.
In other cultures, tiny similarities and differences make you stop. People waiting for aeons in Japan to cross the empty road because the man hasn’t turned green, staring at bearded gaijin with audacity to walk through empty space. Or strolling down the middle of the road in Delhi, where pavements are more for decoration.
Crossed wires: eating snails in Japan, I described them as “Chewy!” The table jumped. I’d told them “Attention!”, army style.
At the end of the day, we’re all people. When we love ourselves, love each other, love the lands we live on, we get along. Despite language differences, there’s always a way to share a good story. I relish the opportunity now, after years of travel, to plant roots in the south of England, write that epic fantasy novel that has been gestating throughout my journeys, see where that takes me… I dream of writing other books in the sequence, in a hammock on the porch of a beach shack in Thailand, in homes of South America, somewhere warm and sunny and green and friendly.
A toast: to the journey, may it take us ever closer to ourselves and our dreams!
Wherever we go, however we get there, may we appreciate and revel in our journeys!
May we be all that we are, more than we ever dreamed!
May we meet on the journey…
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