Bah Humbug! (or Lessons Learnt from Travel)

My dear friends,

those of you not on Twitter or Facebook will not have heard my sad news. The man who has had my heart for the last 18 months, who I loved like nobody before, passed away on the 19th December. While he has been seriously ill since March, I still had hope (as did he) of a recovery and return. My world has been devastated, and it is only the routine of travel that allows me to put one foot in front of the other at the moment.

So you will forgive me if my posts are tinged a little by grief and a lack of enthusiasm. I will try and continue to document my activities and to take photos - although I did little to contribute to either over the last two days. I had, however, written the post below but not uploaded it. The final thoughts seems rather prescient now...

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LONDON - December 2013.

So, here I am again in the home of Doctor Who - having sadly missed by three days, the BBC iPlayer window of opportunity to catch the Doctor's 50th Anniversary episode which aired over a week ago here (and will no doubt miss its airing before I arrive home in Oz!). Talk about being trapped between worlds. But travel is like that. Never quite in one world or the other.

And talking about the Doctor, we always assume that should we invent a time machine we would want to go and look at the future, or even investigate what really happened in the past. But I think the best use of a time machine would be to make time stand still. How wonderful it would be to leave Washington at 10pm and arrive in London at 10pm - no jetlag, no time wasted getting between point A and point B. No screaming baby for six hours...

I have now flown eighteen flights in 8 weeks. I suppose I have been quite lucky given the time of year that there has only been one substantial flight delay (but let us not talk of Argentina - it was a disaster from start to finish!). And weather wise, central America was actually the worst with all its tropical rain and humidity. It literally put a dampener on that trip! Although, I then managed to get in and out of the US just before the weather shut down the very airports I was in. The prize, though, goes to Washington DC as the most bizarre - in four days I had blue sky and sunshine, pelting cold rain, fluffy snow followed by hail and slush, and then fog!

Physically, I feel much fitter - but then lugging 10 kilos of luggage up and down stairs, across the kilometres of airport walkways, and just standing with it on your shoulders for hours in a queue will do that! But I also feel quite weary. Sleep patterns are frequently disrupted, especially by overnight travel, and each room has different noises, lights, configurations - bed legs in waiting to break a toe (it now aches in the cold and rainy weather)! The longest I have made use of the one bed was for 7 nights in New York - and that had to be the bedroom with no window, in the coldest and darkest city I had been to yet (okay, it had a semblance of a window that looked onto a ladder in a lightwell...).

I think it's worth recording these things - because after we have travelled, these are the memories that fade. We tend to forget the time wasted sorting out everyday things:

The broken phone. RIP (and the $300 to replace it!);
The broken toe. Not helped by a 30 minute uphill tropical mountain trek the next day to look at a half-grown coffee plant... not even I like coffee that much!
The bitch of a room-mate (for two nights) who got everything her way. I won't say more, I will believe in karma...
Wifi that is so slow it is criminal to advertise you have it! (Yet I still waste time trying to get it to work...);
Safes that won't open, so you have to hang around in the room while several men drill into it;
Getting stuck in the lift, fortunately with a tradie who had a cell phone (and I had the card just handed me in the lobby so he could ring them!)
Post offices that are never where people direct you to - and when you do find them, that take four attempts to complete and send a parcel (at an excessive cost). Parcels not ordered online, are truly a bygone technology;
Laundry that you "think" has been washed - that they claim has been washed, although you're sure you could do a better job in the sink yourself;
Sandfly bites that you still have (and occasionally still itch) months after the event;
Deciding that it's ok to get felt up by the New York jewish corsetry lady, even though the bank decided it wasn't and stopped my credit card for the experience (yeah, thanks Westpac!).
Discovering that privatised telecommunications means you never have the right company on your hotel phone or mobile phone to make a collect call to an Australian bank...
Getting the phone bill for receiving said call from the bank ($20 for 8 minutes). Yeah, thanks Telstra!
Toilets that won't flush because in your absent-mindedness you forgot and put paper in it, and not in the bin... (it was almost force of habit by the time I got to the US to look for the bin!);
Water that runs out mid-shower, so you are condemned to spend the day all in a lather (literally!);
Rude waiters, indifferent flight crew, bored tour guides...

Even now, the memories are fading! Which is probably as well. When we remember our travels, it's with pictures of fantastic sights and amazing experiences. But I think it is this voyeuristic lifestyle that after a while makes the traveller even more of an outsider. Of course it's easier to see a culture from the outside, and easier to compare when you have seen many cultures - the comparison is not just to "at home" but to a wider range of experiences, which you'll never have if you stay on the tourist bus.

By far the more rewarding travel is getting to see someone's house, their job, their families, their parties. The things that are never included in a tour, but that you often get the chance to participate in or glimpse by accident. Sadly, in the interest of safety (and my mother getting some sleep in 3 months) I have declined the various invitations to people's houses (I think one lunch invitation might have been a veiled marriage proposal - the taxi driver kept coming back to the fact that I would pay less tax if I were married... huh?)

I was asked by my American friend how the US compared, particularly to South America, and to Cuba. I think my answer surprised her. We are so consumed with having things, and yet the people that seemed genuinely happiest on my travels had very little. I see few happy faces in "Western" cities - perhaps that is the influence of this so-called "silly season". Or perhaps people in poorer countries just appreciated more what they had to struggle to get. It is a universal truth that we only appreciate what we have not always had (and often only once we've lost it).

I am sure they would not write a post whinging about such a unique experience of travelling around the world! And it has certainly not been bad (is that the same as being good?). After all, I've discovered that I don't like jungle holidays, or beach holidays very much. That I had some unforseen morbid fear of swimming with stingrays (I got in eventually... when there were less of them to tread on!). The challenges have often been the innocuous things - like stepping up into a mini-van that's too high for your short legs - and strangely not customs, immigration, money, accommodation, even though they have all presented their own problems. I don't know when I started thinking more about the things I can't do, rather than can do, but that is something I will work on. So. If I am learning, then it has been worthwhile. We can't ask for more, really, hmm?

So a Merry Christmas to all. I am spending mine on a train for 9 hours crossing Germany. Be thankful for what you have, be it much or little, and I thank you for taking the time to read this post.

Season's cheer! Aveline. xxx