I arrived at Sydney airport and took a taxi straight to my work. Work has been rather busy due to all the changes that have taken place during my absence. I came back to restructure the new classes and meet the new teacher, after which I headed straight to my psychologist’s appointment. It’s so strange to be back and looking at our photos. Max remarked how it was sad that these images have turned into memories. It does feel strange to be back to our peculiar little life here in the sleepy Sydney.
Travel is not only the bourgeois past time, par excellence but has become a rite of passage for many young adults. Around-the-world trips, extended stays in developing countries and other exotic locations have all been enjoyed by the college or just-out-of-university set as much as the middle-aged folks of the package tour. There’s a whole set of reasons as to why people travel (other than work ). Many young people seem to believe in the astounding ability that seeing another part of world can in some way magically transform them, that, in some way we’ll learn about human values through adversity or hardship (or in many cases by simply viewing it) or understand ourselves by our difference to others. I find this kind of search questionable, or at least, comic, as the pilgrims of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Most of my circle of acquaintances are regular cynics as I am (great minds think alike or is it that fools never differ?) and we take the travel enterprise with a fair bit of skepticism. While it’s ‘safe’ to have a bit of critical distance from everything (and scoff at fellow travelers that you have the awkward misfortune of coming across on a remote mountaintop) sometimes it’s hard to wholeheartedly enjoy some vacuous pleasure, like hanging out on a beach in a rented banana lounge or eating local food with tribal minority people and your English speaking tour-guide. Despite this disenchantment that hinders a complete suspension of disbelief it’s sometimes the painful and sublime awareness of your actual situation that punctures your sense of reality and can be one of the best moments of a journey. I had this very experience in Vietnam. Just a brief moment, a staggering sense of being in and of the world and the interconnectedness (is that even a word?) of everyone and everything. It’s an inexplicable phenomena and its very evanescence makes it even harder to describe in words now. I remember it as a child looking at the full moon from our little apartment near the train line in Sefton and another time looking down at the ant-sized people from the top of the Centre Pompidou on the first warm day of spring.
I think travel offers the conditions in which this fleeting ability to be sentimental about the world and life can be experienced and it’s that which makes even a hardened cynic like me think about where I should plan my next trip.
Leave a Reply