Better days
When you are traveling nothing is quite as tempting as home. When you are home the life style sometimes feels like a straight jacket and you wonder where the next bit of travel will take you. Its a conundrum that continues I guess until you give up the travel. Which is worse, sitting in a foreign room by yourself when the day has been rough and you really just want to talk to someone but the call home will make you feel worse and if you go out you will;
1 Get drunk and feel even worse tomorrow,
2 Finish up talking inane ideas with some hooker or kindred sole, sometimes it is hard to sort the two out, and feeling bad the next morning.
Travel is not for the weak willed, those who cannot take the pressure end up on drugs of some kind, usually as alcoholics.
This is not meant to scare people, those for whom travel is the annual vacation, but to point out that the world is a big place and it can be fun but it can also hurt. This whole thing today is meandering out of control, I meant to write a few lines about something else and ended up here.
I love the concept of traveling, you cannot do it for all these years and not love it, I remember early on sitting with a bunch of guys and one of the older ones said, "if you have not stopped traveling after 3 years you never will" and how right he was. There was one other mantra that I think I came up with and that is "you are a virgin in every new country that you go to" that was when sex basically was my reason for existing.
Travel has been good to me. I was lucky to start out at a time when it was becoming easier but not common. I have been privileged to go to places and see things that you simple cannot do now, climbing the hill of the Acropolis, driving to Persepolis, climbing the cave temples in Ipoh, sleeping on the beach in Penang, getting riotously drunk in villages in Greece, meeting matadors in Madrid, and Bilbao and Valencia, Walking into villages in Burma that had not seen a white man since the second world war, walking along paths in Papua New Guinea and knowing that you are the first white man to go there, sleeping out on the shores of Lake Titicaca, partying till there was no tomorrow in Calli and then starting again.
I have seen brutal military regimes from Argentina, watched an attempted coup in Bolivia, seen the dreadful effects of the American colour wars, seen and listen to a thermal inversion crystallize the water vapor directly to ice, its like thousands of little wind chimes, I have urinated into both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at the same time, its a little brook near Bampf that divides and flows to both.
I have drunk with fishermen from Indonesia to Peru from Australia to Norway. I have seen the pack ice at the northern extremity of the earth and the bergs off the coast of Antartica.
If there has been a problem it is that it has all gone past so quickly and no one told me that what I was doing, the life I was leading, was unusual. I never thought how lucky I was, I really thought that there were lots of us who did this. The result is a million memories cleansed by the brains filters and very few other images. One day I must sit down and write about it.
1 Get drunk and feel even worse tomorrow,
2 Finish up talking inane ideas with some hooker or kindred sole, sometimes it is hard to sort the two out, and feeling bad the next morning.
Travel is not for the weak willed, those who cannot take the pressure end up on drugs of some kind, usually as alcoholics.
This is not meant to scare people, those for whom travel is the annual vacation, but to point out that the world is a big place and it can be fun but it can also hurt. This whole thing today is meandering out of control, I meant to write a few lines about something else and ended up here.
I love the concept of traveling, you cannot do it for all these years and not love it, I remember early on sitting with a bunch of guys and one of the older ones said, "if you have not stopped traveling after 3 years you never will" and how right he was. There was one other mantra that I think I came up with and that is "you are a virgin in every new country that you go to" that was when sex basically was my reason for existing.
Travel has been good to me. I was lucky to start out at a time when it was becoming easier but not common. I have been privileged to go to places and see things that you simple cannot do now, climbing the hill of the Acropolis, driving to Persepolis, climbing the cave temples in Ipoh, sleeping on the beach in Penang, getting riotously drunk in villages in Greece, meeting matadors in Madrid, and Bilbao and Valencia, Walking into villages in Burma that had not seen a white man since the second world war, walking along paths in Papua New Guinea and knowing that you are the first white man to go there, sleeping out on the shores of Lake Titicaca, partying till there was no tomorrow in Calli and then starting again.
I have seen brutal military regimes from Argentina, watched an attempted coup in Bolivia, seen the dreadful effects of the American colour wars, seen and listen to a thermal inversion crystallize the water vapor directly to ice, its like thousands of little wind chimes, I have urinated into both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at the same time, its a little brook near Bampf that divides and flows to both.
I have drunk with fishermen from Indonesia to Peru from Australia to Norway. I have seen the pack ice at the northern extremity of the earth and the bergs off the coast of Antartica.
If there has been a problem it is that it has all gone past so quickly and no one told me that what I was doing, the life I was leading, was unusual. I never thought how lucky I was, I really thought that there were lots of us who did this. The result is a million memories cleansed by the brains filters and very few other images. One day I must sit down and write about it.
posted by Ean Craigie at 12:08 AM
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