Nearly home

I'm in Singapore and flying to Darwin tomorrow and catching the train back to Melbourne. So for all in Melbourne I'll be home in about two weeks. Since my last email I've travelled down through the tourist-popolis of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Through Malaysia which was a pleasant suprise. I knew the food would be good but I didn't expect to be so impressed with the Indian, Chinese and Malay fusion. Its refreshing to go to a country which is developed, everything works and the people are not white. This email is more of a reflection on my trip. I've been gone a little over a year, have traversed the Silk Road from start to finish, Venice to Xian, followed one of the routes Marco Polo took to get to China, made the pilgrimage to Amsterdam, went to a country that no one recognises and have now visited around 60 countries. I am not too sure how many kilometres I've travelled by train, bus, truck and car, but I know I never want to do this again. So many rides of discomfort where I thought I might snap that I can't name the worst or make a top ten. Next time I travel its by bicycle or foot. Still I feel a tinge of dissapointment, it has been less exciting than previous trips. I can't identify any new ideas, or wild experiences, its felt a little like I've been goign throug the motions. Maybe this is just memory slip, what I remember from before never happened. Maybe its just what has been before, the older I get the more difficult it is to be shocked. If I had done this trip without any travelling before it would have been a lot more momentus. It is by contrast that I have failed. Next time I have to do something a little more extreme. Maybe bicycle the South Africa to Egypt. Maybe its just time to find something else to do with myself other than travelling. The great disaster is to have a pre-conception validated. I had no picture of Central Asia, this is the ingredient that made it great. Tajikistan has been the highlight of this trip. For two weeks I travelled my dream. The contrast between this and the rest of my trip makes me feel like I've wasted twelve and a half months plus the entire South America trip before this. My abaility to travel seems to decrease with time. Travelling up the Nicaraguan coast, walking into the corner of Bangladesh and walking along the Tajik-Afghan border have been my favorite experiences. I have an idea of how to find this, yet I seem to waste my time doing tick box tourism, seeing things I have little interest in before, at the time or after. They are the done things and must be done, leaving my feeling like a robot. I travel without a guide book to avoid this, then for some reason ask others peoples advice who travel by trail on where to go! I stuffed up Iran, of the places I've been on this trip, this is where I want to go back to the most, followed by Spain in a close second. In Iran I should have gone walking between villages, or at least caught random buses and dragged myself away from mosques and ancient ruins. No maybe it has not been a waste, it has just failed to shock. I have a collection of stories which I'm not too sure are real. The stamps in my passport give my comfort that maybe some of it is not made up. There is a slip in travel, my life disjointed and unreal, my memories implanted, a dream. After six months with only a few moments of altered consciousness I feel more insane than at any point in the previous 12 years of drug abuse. My memories are not mine, my life is not real, a thousand improbable stories, I know myself, not what I've done. I tell a story a dozen times then it is no longer me. There is a break in recollection, a retuning everytime, I want to write, for my life to read like a book, I look back and can't tell what happened or not. Probably time to get home. It was slightly interesting travelling through south east asia again after a few years absence. It tears me between two thoughts, a feeling that I must go to a place before it is ruined and on the other, the utter stupidity of this mentality. Laos is now overrun with tourists, when I went there before there were only a handful. Maybe I should pick places to travel before they join the circuit. Yet still I met people who had life exchanging experiences in Laos. It makes me think it is not the time that you go, to think what it would have been to visit south east asia, or anywhere before tourism, before colonialism, before trade, before people. These thoughts are a waste. The experience of travel has nothing to do with time or place, new or old, visited or un-touched, it has only been about understanding myself. Placing myself in new situations, without a marker I can view myself by comparison of action, not by others by my own over time by context. Maybe this is crap as well, my three favorite travel experiences have been in Bangladesh which has no tourists, Tajikistan which had four and the caribbean coast of Niacargua which had one. Maybe a summary of the highlights of this trip. Waking up in a graveyard at a gypsy festival in Serbia, visiting Nagorno-Karbakh and seeing a town that had been completely obliterated, the freak show of Turkmenistan, capadocia and the taliban I met in eastern Turkey, an idea about Europe, drinking all night in Spain at bottellon, my first foray into farm work in France, smoking and the mirage of liberalism in Holland, walking through the gates of Babylon in Berlin, flying to Bangladesh to make my fortune, crossing the 4600m high border between Kygryz and China, the Iranian's, bullet holes in Georgians, the lost empire of the Armenians, drinking in Hong Kong, police in Central Asia, meeting my sister in Budapest and definetly the highlight, walking along the Tajik-Afghan border, bribing border guards to cross into Afghanistan, the mountains of the Pamirs, the blue and green eyes, their culture and religion, riding on top of wood trucks, freezing at -29, my beard, eyebrows and eyelashes covered in ice. Maybe it's been an alright trip after all.

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