Two sites that I mentioned in passing last week merit closer attention.
Both Vagabonding and The Quiet American manage to convey to me, a non-traveler, what it must be like to visit other countries.
I've lived within a 25-mile radius of Canby my entire life. The most foreign place I've ever visited is Houston, Texas. The furthest I've been from home is Bemidji, Minnesota. Canada is the only foreign country I've visited. I am not a traveler; my journeys are vicarious, through books, through the travels of friends.
Our friend Linda Kavan makes travel a priority. Every spring break and every summer, she travels to some other exotic country. She returns with stunning photographs and with tales of adventure from remote corners of the world. She also returns with first-hand accounts of life among other cultures. (Kavan is a high-school social studies teacher, and I suspect that her extensive travel must lend an immediacy to her lessons that is lacking in other teachers' classrooms.)
In the fall of 1997 (or was it 1998?), Paul Carlile took several months to travel through southeast Asia, through India, through the Middle East. Paul is a travel advocate:
Paul:The video from the Vagabonding site about the Varanasi spurred me to think about a similar experience I had in India. I traveled to Amritsar to see the holiest temple of the Sikhs.
The energy and power of that that temple made me cry. I sat on the dirty, white -- but cool -- marble and felt the air thick around me. By that time I had come to be comforted by the strange air of India, and the marble and huge pool of water in the temple provided a wonderful contrast.
The Sikhs of this temple have been chanting continuously from their holy scripts for hundreds of years. They are continuously hand-lettering another script to replace the one that is used day-in and day-out. The chanting of the "priest" from the loudspeaker is not overpowering, but it follows you in to the nooks and crannies of this old monument.
I was approached by a man who became my personal tour guide. I told him of my experience working in kitchens, so he made a point of showing me the most rudimentary outdoor kitchen I have ever seen. Flat bread was made on the ground and passed to the next person, who put it on a wood-burning stovetop to cook. The bread was then flipped from the stovetop to a burlap sack, where it was stacked and taken to peasants to eat at once.
A bare-chested man stirred the largest vat of vegetable stew I have ever seen. Large logs were used to keep the fire hot. The wonderfully aromatic stew was scooped into wooden buckets to be given to people so that they could wick up the stew with the freshly made
flat bread.This kitchen broke all the rules. No sanitizer was being used; wooden buckets and wooden spoons cannot be cleaned thoroughly enough to pass inspection in the United States. Needless to say, no inspections were going on here. The bread was made on the ground, cooked, and then sent back to the ground.
My guide led me to the dining hall. There we sat on the floor with our metal trays, waiting for the stew and bread. This broke all my rules of good eating habits, but I did not flinch. I ate my lunch without remorse or hesitation. I was surrounded with authentic love for god and its people. Sickness was going to come from my head -- it wasn't going to come from the food. I let the power and energy of the temple
free me from traditional constraints.Like the man in the video said, "If you think you will get sick, you will get sick. If you drink and are free, then you are drinking as if taking mother's milk."
The golden temple allowed me to understand that statement. I wept because I had not understood that kind of unconditional love of others or myself to that extent in my life. I wept from joy and freedom. I wanted to cry my childhood away, I wanted to release tears to free me so that I could experience life anew.
Travel....travel inside yourself...travel to confront unnecessary barriers and then let them go...travel to be free...travel to appreciate aqui.
You are quite lucky to work for a family business that could possibly do without you for months at a time. Job security (knock on wood), flexibility, team leadership, cross training, as far as I am concerned you are working in a position in which you could see the world easily in your life time. What is the barrier to traveling to the extent that those two websites highlight?
J.D.:
There are two major barriers: family and fear. Kris and I have a loving, flexible relationship but I don't know how we'd feel about spending so much time apart, you know? More to the point: I'm scared to travel. I'm scared when I'm outside my element, even in places like Minneapolis or Los Angeles. Big cities? Ugh. A foreign country? Yikes!
Actually, I could probably learn to travel by doing so with a group, and by confining my travels to "safe" countries like England and Japan. It's something to consider for the future.
One possibility that I've considered as an alternative to foreign travel is domestic travel. Part of what makes traveling so new, so much an adventure, is that travelers are not living the day-to-day routine of the countries in which they're journeying. They're vagabonding, moving in-and-out of people's daily lives. Why can't that be done in the United States?
It can, of course, but it's more difficult to appreciate. A U.S. traveler journeying across the U.S. is still a part of this society's fabric, has a connection to it. But I think that there's enough dissonance to make the experience unique, valuable. My only exposure to this kind of lifestyle has been through limited vacations and through my adventures selling insurance door-to-door.
When I was selling insurance, I felt myself inserted -- only briefly -- into other people's lives. I have vivid memories of certain circumstances: the snow in LaGrande on Halloween 1991 while I'm sitting in the living room of an eldercare home, trying to sell insurance to the owner while six octogenarians watched. I wish I had taken time to talk to them! Sitting for an hour talking about literature with a couple in a mobile home in Hood River, completely forgetting my purpose there. Watching the buffalo outside Joseph (they're not free-range, but they have huge grazing lands).
Or vacations: experiencing L.A. as an outsider, but not as a tourist. Ditto Minneapolis. Even my recent night-time photography trip to downtown Portland was, in a sense, traveling. I was seeing the city through different eyes, you know?
Paul:
I think it is harder to vagabond in the US within the circles that you and I negotiate. Americans are so private and individualistic for the most part that it is hard to create real contact. In India, residents approached me because they wanted to know about me. Xenophobia was subtle. That is not the case in the US. There are festivals (Burning Man) and communities (Rainbow Gatherings) that invite people to interact without the typical social barriers present.
Nick is a travel advocate, too; maybe he'll share some of his experiences.
I posted The Quiet American to Metafilter, though it generated little discussion (the good links never generate much). Other posters recommended the following sites:
- Wandering Camera -- notes about St. Petersburg, Russia and its suburbs
- Photographica, which isn't really a travel site but does have travel photos from time-to-time
- Who lives here?: apartment Earth.
- On Hiatus, in particular the On Hiatus travel journals
- Audible Frequency: a weblog in which the author posts a variety of ambient noises that he's recorded
Nick hasn't been doing much real-life travel (though he's going to London next week), but he has been playing the ambitious massively-multiplayer on-line role-playing game (there's a mouthful!): A Tale in the Desert.
Every day Nick tells me about growing flax, making papyrus, building mines, etc. etc. This game is an amazingly (and hilariously) complex simulation of life as an ancient Egyptian, but coupled with all of the problems of modern-day on-line communities.
Nick: "I haven't been able to learn Advanced Charcoal-making because I haven't been able to make any charcoal yet."
Some of you (e.g. Joel) might want to check this out!
On this day at foldedspace.org
2005 — Unseasonable This weather is unbelievable. It's gorgeous. I love it, though I know we'll pay for it come summer.
2002 — Twenty Minutes I've done little aerobic exercise during the past three days. Instead, I've done from six to eight Nautilus machines per day, concentrating on leg strength.