What Travellers Share

“It’s a shame you can’t keep them.” I said. “It’s a shame the most amazing people I meet, I meet when I travel and because they’re travelling, because I’m travelling, it doesn't last.”

“But that’s their beauty.” He replied. “Their beauty is in their flight. They wouldn't have wings if they weren't in motion.”

And that’s what defines a traveller: the motion.

It’s something about knowing it won’t last that makes you open up. You didn't know each other before and you might not meet again, so it all has to happen now. You have to tell the person you’re with how you feel and think because otherwise it will stay inside, unsaid and unshared.

And in that moment, how you feel and think can be however you want to feel and think. You don’t have to be who they expect you to be. Someone you've only just met doesn't expect you to be anything at all. And so you share who you are on that day, in that moment. The person who is a little bit different to all the days before and all the days after.

But part of you did came before and part of you will carry on after. And so you share it all. You share where you've been and where you’re going, because if you don’t share it now, with the person in front of you, you’ll be miles from anyone who knows. You’ll be lost.

You share being lost. You might think that you’re sharing directions or tips, prices, names of places to go, ruins to visit, histories of countries, cafes to sit in, bars to drink in. But you’re sharing being lost. You’re sharing that you don’t know, that you couldn't possibly know.

You might try to take something back from the unknown. To keep a shell you found, a bracelet you bought, a tattoo you got, a photo you took. But you can’t, really, take it back. It will lose its life if you try.

You can’t take the place home with you, so you share it with the person there. You’ll forget it once you've left. You’ll forget what it tasted like; you’ll forget the exact feeling of the hammock on your bare legs, of the ache in your muscles, of the path under your feet. And because you’ll forget, because you’ll forget the names, you’ll forget what you did in those hours where you didn't do anything, because you’ll forget it, it has to be lived.

You have to look at the world around you now. You have to share what you see, the details that you would miss, the language of signs that gives the place its meaning. You lend each other foreign words. And more than once, you lend each other your tiredness, your frustration, your confusion. And then you take it back, because one moment of awe erases it all.

You share a sight, or a sound. You share your thoughts or your bodies. You share nights in and nights out. The slow days, and the ones where you don’t sleep. You share the height of a mountain, the distance of nowhere, the cold of the sea and the heat of a campfire. You think you share the happiness you feel when you travel, but you really share who you are. Because it’s not only happiness you feel when you travel. You feel it all. You laugh and shout and sing and scream and dance and sleep and smile and cry and grieve and long and feel peace and fear and strength and helplessness. You don’t feel happiness when you travel, you feel life.

You are life. Life moving and moving, in circles as it does. The movement through hellos and goodbyes, through arrivals and departures, through day and night, through growth and decay. And that’s what you share. You share life.

How to make a decision in a world with so much choice

In Ted Talks, Barry Schwartz discusses The Paradox of Choice. He comments that the more choices we have, the harder it is to choose. Some of us become paralyzed by this choice and are unable to make any decision. When we do choose, we’re less likely to be happy with what we have, because we can imagine the alternatives we didn’t choose. The more alternatives there are, the higher our expectations. The more likely that one of those options must be perfect.

Schwartz claims that the secret of happiness is this: low expectations.

Well, I don’t see how I can ask for less choices please. When I stand in the wine section pretending I know anything about regions and grapes and bottle shapes, I can hardly say: could you just hide a few of them?

There’s no escape from decision making, or from choice. So there has to be a way to turn it to your advantage. Maybe you have to throw away the idea of the “right" choice and instead have fun with how many wines there are to taste, how many types of food to try, how many countries to visit, how many people to meet.

Then again, some decisions you can only make once. Those are the ones you should think about. Are you going to talk to that person? Or let them get off the bus. Are you going to end something that’s not working, knowing you can’t then get it back?

But even these decisions can be remade. Not in the same place, with the same person. But with someone else on another bus, another person, another place, but the same thing: opportunity.

What really counts, are the decisions you make over time. The ones that add up to how you spend your time, your life. To quote from the film Cloud Atlas:

"Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future."

To see Barry Schwartz on Ted Talks click here.

A Romance with Travel: The Night In Florence

Sometimes I decide I am through, forever through, with travel.

I had spent a beautiful weekend in Rome with someone I had left behind in England. The cost of travel was seeming pretty high. (And au pairing had mostly brought cleaning up food and soil and oil and having plates thrown at my head.) So after three delayed trains in a row, I ended up stuck in Florence for the night.

I know, it sounds like a good thing. But not after Rome, not after seeing him again.

Wandering out of the station with the intention of finding a hostel, I bumped into this guy. Well, he stopped me asking where he should go next. Then said, 'wow, you have such presence.' At which point I was already thinking, ‘will you just fuck off? I’m heart broken.’

When I asked him how old he was he said 17000 because I live every day as if it’s ten years. I asked him again and he said 3, because I never stop asking questions and the world is new. I said will you get to the fucking point, and he said 19. 

Pretty much the same thing with asking him his name:‘I don’t believe in names as they tie you to an identity’. 

He also made his own clothes as he thought we should express ourselves more freely. It was some kind of long dress that had an elegance and looked quite Eastern, as well as filthy and in desperate need of a wash. He also had shoes that were too big, and I might have thought he was homeless, except that he had a macbook pro.

He’d come to ‘Italia’ (I’m pretty sure ‘si’ and ‘Italia’ were his only Italian so he insisted upon using them constantly) to get a pen handmade by someone who promised to do it if he wrote an important essay with it.

He said one and only one interesting thing: Apparently ants use significantly more energy than we do (20 times more?) and yet they have no damaging impact. His explanation: clearly the Fourth Dimension. He then went on to write in reverse to show me the new 4D language he was forming.

So, I ended up wandering through Florence at night with him.

Him and a Portuguese guy who we met when he stopped us in the rain by saying, ‘Look! That’s where the cloud stops! I’ve always wondered where that happens…’

The Portuguese guy actually seemed fairly down to earth, minus his really annoying question to nameless guy: ‘So you like philosophy; does that mean you smoke weed?’

And there was a girl from Rome. The Portuguese guy's temporary girlfriend. They would break up when he went to Venice.

So the four of us went to ponte vecchio at night, and there were the padlocks. I don’t care what other people say. I think they’re cute. Each of them is where someone has said to someone else, ‘I care’. And that’s beautiful. 

It was pretty but I was trying to get back home after my Roman adventure. I’d done Florence another time, my head was spinning from the guy I'd left to travel, and I just wanted today to be yesterday so it could be a little less raw.

And there was Roman Girl blabbing on about, ‘where chance meets chance… destiny is at the crossroads’ meanwhile Too Much of a Twat for a Name Guy was sounding like he was being laid. ‘Oh yeah! Oh wow! Ahhhhhh! Where chance meets chance!’

Around 4, through the rain, I made it back to the train station. No Name still following. He took it up again, despite my insistent and explicit Not Interesteds.

‘Am I not courageous enough for you?’

Well, I've never been asked that before.

I got the train and had all of half an hour's sleep before going straight to another day of 4 crazy Italian boys.

And still, I didn't break up with travel.

Things I Miss About Travel: A Very Indefinitive List

Not cooking unless I wanted to

Drinking horchata with ice cream

Falling in love, constantly, with everything

Learning new words

Not knowing where I would spend the night

Laughing at how stupid what I'm doing is

Thinking that people who spend years travelling are normal

Listening to 80s music on old school buses

Being a stranger (and all the questions that came with it)

Speaking to strangers (and all the answers and even more questions that came with it)

Not having a plan

Not feeling like I should have a plan

Being in places I'd seen photos of

Seeing petrified waterfalls (well, one)

Not going home when I was meant to

Meeting people who do what they love

Replacing "goodbye" with "until the next time"

Getting perspective on how much I have

Moments of kindness from strangers

Huge acts of kindness from strangers 

No one caring if I only have 3 tops

Not having a mirror

Coincidences

Trying to get to know someone from scratch

Sharing who I am with people I barely know

Change: constant and unstoppable

Learning what I can do when things don't work out

Reading about travel whilst doing it

Rarely having to be anywhere "on time"

Spending all day in a hammock

Spending all day walking around a new city

Spending all day in the sea (or on top of it)

Being slightly less pale

Pinching myself and thinking: I'm so lucky to be where I am right now

Not thinking in pounds or dollars or euros but a currency I'd never heard of before

Waking up for sunrise

Watching the world through a bus window

Celebrating Christmas in the jungle

Riding on the top of buses

Trying to understand what the hell is happening around me

People wearing tops with English slogans they don't understand

Getting wolf whistled (it gives me an excuse to get self righteous)

Following other people's crazy whims

Following my own crazy whims

Surrendering to the unexpected, the inconvenient and the irreplaceable 

Being in the moment

The Vain Traveller: Clothes

One too many bottom-of-the-rucksack-outfits has led me to rethink my packing. Unlike my last trip, this time I am not going to delve into the hostel's bin to retrieve a pair of some stranger's shorts which turn out to be far too big and have a broken zip (but which I wear anyway).

It's time to review some of the highs and lows of my travel wardrobe.

Blending In

1) Without a doubt, sunglasses at night is always a good idea.

This formed part of an incognito disguise where me and an American friend assumed fake identities. We were very convincingly French until entering a bar we got out our IDs. Ah well, it avoided any more Americans insisting that in their culture they kiss strangers on the lips.

2) The short skirt however, is always a risk. In Portland, Oregan, (a supposedly liberal and forward thinking city) a man started shouting at me as I waited for a bus. He told me that he knew my dad was a policeman and I could tell him that he (the shouting man) wasn't going to sleep with me, so he (my dad the policeman) should stop sending crack whores (me) to come and see him.

3) Don't even joke about being rich. (I once did that in Paris and my sarcasm went right over their heads as my purse went right out of my bag).

Adding Style

1) Every traveller needs appropriate headgear. I mean, with all that wearing the same clothes business, you need something to jazz it up. Plus pants give you special powers.

One of the best moves I made here was accidently  buying a fur hat back when I was a vegetarian. It was so warm and soft.

2) Never forget to pack a razor. Unless you want someone to confuse I need to shave with I need a shower and offer to take one with you. Which I might have taken up, if I hadn't been so long without a razor.

The Vain Traveller: Hair

I was recently given some cringe-worthy travel advice: dye your hair.

      1) Never have I found blonde hair to be a problem when travelling. (People I meet tend to overcompensate for the ‘dangers’ of me being a female traveller, the result being I get a lot of help).

      2) In Nicaragua, or anywhere else in the world, never will I ever pass for Latina.

My initial reaction was pure self-righteous scorn. Then I got thinking… how about if not standing out as much makes me look a little more local? How about if I could pass for half Spanish? How about if it gets me in touch with my ‘black swan’? And then the cosmetic industry’s foundation: How about if changing my hair changes me?

And so I did it. I dyed my hair darker.

Later that day I got harassed by a group of fourteen year olds in Bristol’s Victoria Park. After ‘can I have your number?’ failed to work and I bent down beside my dog, I got the oh-so-romantic chat up line:

‘If I shit, will you pick it up?’

Gotta lurrve Brizzle. Surprisingly (I mean, come on, have you seen this face?) that was the first time in a lifetime that I have received any interest while walking the dog.

Then evening arrived and I went to my Spanish/English language exchange. As I was talking to an Argentinian man, the light hit my hair. ‘Wow, your hair is so blonde! Is it your natural colour?’ I tell him my actual colour is in fact lighter. His heart visibly breaks. But by the time I get home, I find his comments all over old photos of me on Facebook.

Conclusion: I guess I have to wait until I’m in Central America for the real verdict. But for now, I think getting malaria tablets should have ranked higher on my To Do list than dying my hair.