travel-writing

Keep traveling, even if you don't know where the road will end.

Choose to live life.Choose your own career paths.Choose your own destiny.

That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.

The ride back to Kathmandu was comfortable and relaxing. There were more overturned trucks (the gas-powered ones seem to tip the most often, I__ surprised there weren__ more explosions), goats being herded across the highway by ancient women, children playing games in traffic, private cars and buses alike pulling over in the most inconvenient places for a picnic or public bath, and best of all the suicidal overtaking maneuvers (or what we would call __assing_) by our bus and others while going downhill at incredible speeds or around hairpin turns uphill with absolutely no power left to actually get around the other vehicle.

Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years.

It is high time that I learn to be more careful about hope, a reckless emotion for travelers. The sensible approach would be to the expect the worst, the very worst, that way you avoid grievous disappointment and who knows with a tiny bit of luck, you might even have a moderately pleasant surprise, like the difference between hell and purgatory.

...how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.

Instead of more consumerism _ the buying of experiences, the accumulation of things, of eating the __ther_ _ perhaps writers should name their own environment. What is the shape of your watershed? How is your electricity produced? Where is your water treated? Where is your food produced and by whom and how does it travel to your local market? What are the names of the rocks under your feet and around you? What formed those geological features? Who were the first humans here? What flora and fauna live upon it and what are their habits and interfaces? What stars whirl above you and what names have they been given, what lore? How can one trace the relations, find the slippages between histories, the linkages, to find the complexities in naming and of the named? Travel as one__ carbon footprint; travel as a footstep, travel as a naming in a landscape in all its complexity. Homing as a way to place oneself in a constellation of process and being.

The most amazing journey on earth is the journey of oneself.

When you travel, appreciate the culture of the people in the land.

Wherever you travel to, appreciate the culture and beauty of the place.