Pt II Discover Travel Series: The Embarkment

You cling to the familiar
You're flooded with doubt
These crazy ideas
How have they come about?!

'Things are fine the way they are!'
Your mind shouts in vain
'You're not ready for the world!
Not equipped for its pain!'

'NO!' your heart screams
As you fight through the tears
'I'm ready as I'll ever be
It's time to face my fears!'

The barriers are broken
Nothing stands in your way
You take a step forward
It happens today. 

Pt I Discover Travel Series: The Motivation

A question comes to mind

for those who want to find

the reason for travel:

what do you want left behind?

Routine sex, the daily grind

a stale perception, temptation to resign?

Travel is a gift, so take a moment to revere

the possibilities that are offered: are your intentions sincere?

Are you ready for the road? Have the guts to adhere?

Or else there’s no difference if you’re there or here.

What is your motivation?

Do you really want a change?

A leap of faith, an adventure

or a getaway vacation?

What is your motivation?

Do you really need a break?

A quick fix, a holiday

or spiritual revelation?

A question comes to mind

for those who want to find

the reason for travel:

what must you leave behind? 

Date A Girl Who Doesn't Travel

Date a girl who doesn’t travel. A girl who doesn’t travel is easy to track, easy to predict. She’ll always be there. She’ll be on your couch at home, or hanging with her friends waiting for your call. You’ll know where to find her. When you do, you will talk about your day and she’ll talk about the latest episode of Jersey Shore. With you, she’ll be secure from the dangers of the world. She’ll be happy with her virtual one. She will be safe. She’ll enjoy a night-in with a movie or a PS3 game. She won’t expect, or even want, extravagant, expensive, creative days and nights out. You can pick her up a bottle of nail polish and be in for a good night.

A girl who doesn’t travel is very well-groomed. She can take the time in front of the mirror and have tidier eyebrows, even complexion and smooth, smooth skin. She won’t have the wiry mane of a girl who travels who pulls faces for photos in front of yet another landmark. Her hair will be glossy and maintained. She will have the perfect picturesque pout.

It’s fun conversing with a girl who doesn’t travel. She’ll believe everything you say and then giggle politely when you tell her you’re joking. And then laugh louder when she gets it. She will let you take the social center stage. She will watch you from the sidelines with admiration. She won’t challenge you with the wit of a girl who travels. She won’t one-up you with stories from the foothills of the Himalayas. She will like everything you like and go everywhere you go. You will be the light of her life. She will turn to you for every lip tremble, every tear. She will wrap her dainty arms around your neck and embrace you with a need so powerful you know that she can’t live without you.

Don’t invest your time and love in a girl who travels for she CAN live without you. She knows how to take things in her fearless stride. She would be fun for now, not forever. She’ll never be around. She will come and go and laugh melodically at your pleas to stay. Don’t get caught up in her spiritual depth and hippy ways. She’ll just plant grand seeds of thought and question everything you ever believed in. Her passionate rants about the beauty of the world will send tremors and quakes through your foundations and belittle your existence.

A girl who travels will drive you crazy with her sporadic emails and unreliable contact. She will send you mad with video calls where you can see her but can’t fucking touch her. She will make you cry with longing. You will realize that distance doesn’t make the heart grow fonder – it fucking rips the heart apart and smirks at the shreds of despair. Date a girl who doesn’t travel because she won’t do that. She will take the tender steps to keep your heart intact. She will fold it up in cheesecloth and hum to its soft rhythmic beat. She will keep you in your realm of familiar and sit demurely in the passenger seat as you drive on that 6-lane freeway to the white-picket fence.

Let the girl who travels go off into that other dimension. Forget all the romantic stories she tells of pristine white beaches, gushing jungle waterfalls, and tropical wildlife encounters. Dismiss her tales of the whack-jobs she met along the way and the adventures on which they embarked. Let her endanger herself with military run-ins, frightening South East Asian traffic and storm-whipped boat rides. Let her try quench her insatiable cultural thirst in countries with makeshift beds, dank toilets and parasite-ridden water. You don’t need it. You don’t want it. Not one part of it.

Find yourself a nice girl who doesn’t travel. You just can’t know where on earth a girl who travels has been.

Shimmering Shimla

16th June, 2010

Welcome to Shimla! 2000 metres above sea-level and 2000 metres closer to the sky.

As nice as it is to travel in groups, I have found one major flaw: you take for granted that someone else will remember how to get back. Or in my case- if you get left alone and you have no one to follow back. I was lost for 3 hours. Three. Normally I wouldn’t mind. But in this case I was walking up and down the steep slopes of Shimla in circles with burning calf muscles and without a clue. In hindsight, it was fun, I guess. I stopped wherever I wanted, walked at my own pace, ventured down curves, stairs and alleys that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Shimla is so nice. In every sense of the word. The people, the nature, the buildings, the history, the food, the atmosphere, the vibe…nice. I felt no sense of danger or irritation. I was just left to my own devices to wander as I pleased. No beggars. No pushy vendors. No vulgar wolf-whistles or wet strawberry air-kisses. Just the odd, curious stare for looking so out of place. Very pleasant. What I love about Shimla is that it’s a complete 360 degree visual splendor. Whichever direction you look, including up and down, there’s something interesting. The multi-leveled infrastructure of this densely populated mountain city is a fusion of mother nature and man’s creation. When looked at from a distance, all the hotels, restaurants and housing look like they’re loosely placed and balanced on top of one another. From a further distance, the mountains look as though they’re snow capped with gleaming, fresh snow… at nightfall the town is even more impressive: the twinkling of nature’s stars is mimicked beautifully by the man-powered ones below.

So finally after trekking through the Mall, the Ridge, down to Lower Market, past Gossip Place, back up to the Ridge, through the Mall again, back up to the Church (on the Ridge), pausing at Gossip Place, then back down to Lower Market, and then longer pause in the middle of the Mall, I at last admitted defeat and asked for directions. Perhaps something I should have done 2 hours earlier. Turns out the hotel is near ‘High Court’, literally 10 meters away from where I kept stopping and turning back to head back up to that bloody Church on that damn Ridge. As I made a beeline for High Court, I noticed this strange figure that kept falling into step with me. A small, skinny, hunched figure in a bright green vest and bucked teeth kept reappearing at the corner of my eye. Finally I stopped and looked at him in the eye. He spoke (sort of):

‘tualekghossjgheia High Court?’

I took that to mean ‘are you going to High Court?’ I gave him my raised eyebrow look and decided he was harmless enough and let him follow me. My question was: why the hell was he following an obviously displaced foreigner when he could speak the local language? Not wanting to be nasty, and empathizing with the embarrassment of being lost, I led him to a comfortable distance away from my final destination. I stopped. Held my arm out to keep him out of my space and motioned that he stay and I go. He was a strange character. His stature and demeanor reminded me of a tortoise. His eyes flickered away from mine and looked defeated. Oh well. And I skipped down a steep set of stairs, out of sight and happy to finally reach ‘home’.

I made it back just in time for dinner with the rest of my group. We were all heading out. To the Ridge. DAMNIT!

It’s a shame we’re leaving in the morning. I only just figured out how to get ‘home’.

Transit to Shimla

15^th June 2010

All aboard! Transit by train to the foothills of the Himalayas- Shimla! If I was to be sick during this 2-week trip, yesterday was the best day for it. Well rested and fully rejuvenated, albeit a little hungry, I was bright-eyed and enthusiastic for the 12-hour journey.

The streets of Delhi are a lot more bearable when one is not half-comatose from exhaustion. Although the elements of the city described in the previous entry remain true, the ride to the train station was much more enjoyable as we sputtered and jerked our way through traffic. The infrastructure of Delhi is gobbsmacking. It’s more like infra-no-structure. In preparation for the Commonwealth Games that are taking place in 4 months time, the Indians have ambitiously torn up all the main roads with pick-axes and chisels to build more adequate roads. Piles of concrete and rock litter the streets, creating new terrain for drivers and pedestrians alike. I didn’t see much heavy machinery to help with the process, nor did I see much man power, save a few skinny women scooping small piles of dirt from the ditch to the growing pile next to the ditch. I’m scratching my head. I’m no town-planner or civil engineer…but something tells me there’s going to be a bit of struggle. I was glad to be heading out of Delhi. The hustle and bustle of a chaotic, polluted, overpopulated city was certainly not for me.

Due to the rushed nature of my first day and therefore my first entry, I was grateful for the peaceful train-ride. We boarded the second-class (second best) carriage of the express train from Delhi to…not sure where…found our cushioned recliner seats, plugged in our iPods (it was too early in the day for chit chat) and looked out the window with glazed eyes and I began to reflect and absorb my presence in this colourful, mystical country.

In the immediate sense…I have no money. Mistake number TWO. Argh. I was trying for the minimal approach to travelling and extended that philosophy to cash. I waived the need to withdraw money back at home to exchange into Rupees, assuming (in typical Gen-Y fashion) that ATMs would be readily available anywhere and that my card would simply be accepted. Enter Mother Jen. Without so much as a blink, and thankfully without me having to ask (oh the shame!), she loaned me R2000 (AUD$65 or so).

In the intellectual sense, it hasn’t quite hit me that I’m in India. I didn’t really give myself time in Melbourne to register that I was leaving. LEAVING. For a YEAR. Not to set foot in Australia for a YEAR. My plan is to be in India for just shy of a month, and then head for Kampuchea to resume work with the NGO, Senhoa, contracted there for a whole 12 months. India was a spur of the moment decision that was inspired by the well-anticipated event of a dear friend’s wedding. A full-blown traditional Indian wedding! When Kiwi, the groom-to-be, mentioned casually in conversation that he was heading home to India to marry, the back of my head immediately began to tingle with excitement and I just KNEW I was bound for India. So, like the good friend I am, I invited myself to the wedding, found out the dates and organized a holiday around it. Ta Da!! Here I am!

In the spiritual sense, I’m in India to discover MORE. And where more appropriate in the world than the birth place of Buddha Himself??? As I suggested in my first entry, I was rather unhappy at home. My feet and heart were itching for something new, different and exciting. In the last couple of years I’ve developed this seemingly insatiable desire to learn more of this complex world that we live in- of both the physical and non-physical. Life in Melbourne was becoming far too habitual, routine and comfortable. Much to my discomfort. It’s strange. The times that I am most comfortable is when I’m not.

Zooming out of my pensieve of thoughts and back into the physical events of the day, the first half of our journey was smooth and uneventful. Air-conditioning, recliner seats, serviced meals, story-swapping with Traveller Karin…but it was the second-half of the trip that made the memories…

We hopped off the train of luxury (as luxurious as you can get in India anyway) and hopped on to the heritage-listed Toy Train. Absolutely adorable! It looked like a train set that Reverand Lovejoy would have in his collection. It was a no-frills ride with BYO food and drink- like a picnic on rails. The rattling rhythm of the train sychronised all the passengers as we swayed from side to side, looking out to the amazing scenery that unfolded before us. We snaked up the mountain gaining more and more height and altitude. My ears popped as much as my eyes did at the greenery. It was especially fun when we plunged into darkness through stone tunnels, and the kids would all scream with joy. The idea was that if you’re going to be fearful you may as well have fun doing it!

The highlight was the people. The local people, that is. They were absolutely fascinated with foreigners. Even me! They couldn’t seem to comprehend an Asian-looking girl speaking perfect, concise English. And also why I was with a bunch of Caucasians (one of these things are not like the others…) There were a few points of the journey where the train stopped at a station for longer periods at a time and the young Indian guys from another train would spot us (when I say ‘us’ I really mean my white-skinned, blue-eyed counterparts) scrambled up to our windows to take photos of and with us! Some even had the spunk to board our carriage to shake our hands, pose right next to us and one had the balls to raise my hand to show his mates and kissed it! The best part was when their train whistled and started rolling away from the platform. They all panicked and had to run after the train and fight each other through the tiny carriage door. Oh, the affect young, attractive women have…