The Inconvenient Truth About Travel

I recently came across a paragraph from an Italian writer, Cesare Pavese:

Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.

Like great minds often do, Pavese captured, in just a couple of lines, what ordinary people feel but cannot express. His words got me thinking: travelling is brutal, no doubt about that. It can be truly uncomfortable and intense. But we keep packing our lives in a bag and buying one-way tickets. Why? 

I’m not exactly sure what kind of travel Pavese had in mind when he said it was a brutality. Whatever his meaning was, when I read it, I thought about backpacking, which is one of the extremes of the cline. The other extreme are those organized tours and predigested experiences in which tour guides herd tourists to and from buses instructing them where to look, what to see and even how to feel, in stops where long blacks and continental breakfasts are served, even if the holiday destination in question is a remote area, where the usual morning meal is rice. Two entirely different experiences. All backpackers know this well. All backpackers who have ever gone travelling on a shoestring and spent every last cent on flight tickets, know it even better.  

When backpacking, there are times when we are thrown in at the deep end and left with no option but to wade through certain parts of our trips with limited resources, as best we can. Yes, sometimes, being spontaneous and lunging bravely forward into the unknown (as backpackers often do), get the best of us. Take the ‘behind the scenes’ of instagrammable photos, for example. What happens backstage, just behind the lens of the camera and before the filter is applied, is not always as glamorous or adventures, dignifying or even worth sharing as might be expected. There’s a chance that the ''I was here'' photo does not reflect the travel experiences that sometimes shake us to the core or that -at least- unveil brand new perspectives from which to look at the world (new to us, that is). To put it simply, real travel experiences are sometimes not the most photogenic, but no one looking at them from the receiver end of an Instagram feed would ever know.

I myself am constantly poking my head through my virtual window, which is also open for anyone who cares to see what I’m up to --strange how we all seek and get validation of some kind or another this way. With a quick look at my Instagram account, you’d know where I’m going or where I’ve been, although neither my smiley self nor the landscapes I smile from, hint at the constant dialogues, arguments and occasional fights I have within myself and with the world around me -figuratively- as I go from place to place.  Not to mention the contingencies and other minor but nagging details inherent to a travelling lifestyle. 

Melbourne, Australia, November 2016

Almost five weeks since I arrived and I’m still out of work - my search hasn’t  exactly been exhaustive, has it? Moving countries like this throws everything off balance. My life has become a mess and it bothers me, I can't help it. Maybe that's the reason why I feel bloated and my stomach looks like an oversized football lately. There you have it, by the time I'm forty I will have aged past my actual years because of the stress that being happy will have caused me... by which I mean travelling around, constantly changing jobs and the place I call home, meeting and getting to know new people as if it was an everyday chore, making new friends and starting all over again and again.

Something that became a considerable inconvenience for me after a while, was luggage. Being picked up from the door was a luxury I don’t remember indulging in, instead, I always trudged my way to the train and bus stations under the weight of a backpack. All the belongings I decided to take with me had to fit in it, and the backpack had to fit in lockers and under beds in hostels and it had to comply with the restrictions of the cheapest possible flight deals. 

It won’t come as a surprise that, the more I travelled, the less fond of perfumes and creams and matching shoes and extra pairs of anything I became. Sometime in 2018, when I was in Sydney, a friend video-called me from Cairns in the northeastern coast of Australia, to open a suitcase of mine and see what was inside. It had been sitting in her garage for a year and it was heavy and unwieldy. 

 - Knowing you, this must be packed full of books and creams. 

She said, raising her eyebrows, in an I-know-better-and-you-should-too tone, while putting the suitcase in a horizontal position to open it.  She was exaggerating, I thought. But then she opened it, pointed the camera to the contents of the suitcase first, and then to her own accusing face that said told you, you're a mess.

Somewhere in the Philipines.
The lightest I ever travelled was in South East Asia.
I had already left the suitcase at my friend's by then.

Over time, I told myself that less was more and, before buying anything at all, I applied a useful rule of thumb by asking myself the question, will this fit in my bag? If the answer was no, it meant I didn't need it. At the same time, I realised that the things I really wanted to take with me every time I left a place, could not be packed at all. It was things like my Melbourne yoga teacher’s aura, which rippled out during yoga sessions, like widening rings flowing outward and around the rest of us, filling the air with positive vibes and warm sweetness; or the look of innocent elation in a bunch of Vietnamese children’s faces who, upon hearing us walk past, had taken their bicycles out not to lose sight of our seemingly otherworldly figures, while we wandered about their dusty village; or the coincidences conspiracy that led me to the right people in the right time for years, so that I could learn from them in moments when I needed enlightenment of some kind, and so that I could have a shoulder to cry on when I would have otherwise crumbled, and so that I would have same-minded people around me with whom to share memorable trips and exchange knowing glances when we found ourselves on top of the world together; or one particular hug which, on one warm autumn evening somewhere in the southern hemisphere, made me marvel at the striking realisation that I genuinely wouldn’t have cared in the slightest, had the whole world melted around my feet while I stood right there, at my front door, yet so far away from home; or the affectionate ways of a mother in a small pretty town in the northwest of France, who had never seen me before, nor understood any of the languages I could speak, but still put me up and made me breakfast, lunch and dinner every day like I was her daughter, instead of her son’s foreign friend; like the toothless smile of the waddling toddler while he slided down the carpeted stairs at my friend’s house in Ireland; or like the full moon in an Australian coastal town, round as a bright disk, emerging from the dark edge of the sea, projecting a striky silver trail of light that extended right to the shore, where I worked... The eternal, according to Pavese.

I clearly couldn’t pack any of those and yet, they all belonged to me, somehow. The eternal belonged to me... and so when the time came, I returned home with much less luggage than I had packed all those years ago, but with a lot more baggage for which I can now only be thankful.

After all, the inconveniences brought about by travel put the traveller to the test, and it would take a thick head or a fair amount of arrogance to not learn anything from the obstacles or to excessively regret their interference. As I see it, travelling is one forked road after another. We are constantly choosing paths as we go, so that it all becomes a trial and error learning experience. Looking back on the times when I took the wrong turning and ended up trudging my way along thorny roads, I can see it was exactly there where I learned the most.