Hosted a traveler on a trip? The annoying kind who throw experiences at your daily life. Who won’t shut up about how great it is to drift in out of routine, yours and theirs. I get it. Both sides.
Growing up I did not know any travelers firsthand. In my sheltered childhood, the only real place outside home was my father living away, for work. Fiction-fueled curiosity made everything from Enid Blyton’s breakfasts to Tolkein’s sagas exotic. I still remain in that realm of fantasy. On the other hand, family visiting from Bombay seemed exotic. I’m glad to have found travel is exotic. A different kind of exotic than I imagined. At once the sharpest knife life can throw at you and the kindest lesson in experience.
Travel was a ruse to get away. Then, the reason to earn a living. Now, its the only adventure for the urban-civilized routine. Or, what a brotherhood of men would call civilized. Just saying.
The first journey I took on-my-own was at 19, with a wheeled suitcase that could not climb said mountain. On-my-own then meant no family, no agenda and very little money. Luggage though meant all you can carry. On the next trip I bought a backpack and luggage still remains all you can carry. At 29, on-my-own is finally travelling solo.
From these journeys are sights worth showing and stories worth telling. Most of all, there are things and people worth knowing. Little truths outside and within. That is the wonder of a journey.
Most of these stories come from travel diaries I’ve kept at the time. The rest from memory, which will have to do. I write to remember. I owe my appreciation for independence to the random kindness of events, time, people and places — but its when I travel that I hold it closer. Here's a log of times I've moved onwards and hopefully how I get to otherwise.
This it the third time I'm trying to write. Bits and pieces float in memory. Maybe that's why I'm walking backwards. Some sights you don't forget. Some feelings you carry with.
So a decade to put down from 2015 to 2005.
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