The transition back into Melbournian and Australian life after a long hiatus is exhilarating. It is a time of renovation with renewed acumen, of putting new-found perspectives and confidences to the fore and weaving new paths through Modern life that all too often celebrates and rewards the regularity and predictability of well-managed lives versus the synthesis and judgment of well-lived ones. Perspectives are not given; they are earned, and genuine travel is never a diversion from a centre but a movement towards a core.
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it. George Moore, The Brook Kerith
Things
I started this journey just over one year ago, and in a pragmatic sense, everything worked out fine. I returned with the same small backpack that I left with, and apart from an expensive mobile phone snatched in Kolkata and a much-loved Kindle carelessly dropped from my motorcycle in Colombia, I survived for the entire year with the same stuff (see: ‘How to pack for a ‘minimalist’ one year journey). The important lesson here is to travel as lightly as possible, with high-quality gear, as travel is one of many contexts where more is not valued (just like Cafe Lattes!)
To be invisible, paint yourself with the direct shade of zero. Leave nothing to chance, by taking nothing with you wherever you go.
Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not FOR SALE
Itinerary
I visited thirteen countries in twelve months and followed the loosely sketched route that I initially fashioned (but I never considered that most of the time would be spent on a tiny 125 cc motorcycle!) (see my Itinerary on Google docs). Itineraries are primarily subjective, and unless you understand yourself (and your inner android), you have little chance of discovering the world around you with your own eyes. For instance, people from many geographies with no cultural mindsets tend to fly vast distances in aeroplanes while missing all the good bits. It is like picking up a book by Dostoyevsky, reading the title, taking a selfie with the book, and then claiming an insight into 19th-century Russian literature. Travel is as much about unlearning as it is about learning, and it is not always about where you go; what you take with you (or do not take with you) counts.
A good traveler is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from
Lin Yutang
On the meta-scale, I constructed my itinerary around old paths and new ones, meaning that in the first four months of the journey, I visited seven countries that I had visited before. In the last eight months, I visited six new countries. I have not fully reflected upon what this meant in practice, but re-visiting a country during critical junctures of your life is tremendously rewarding on several levels. It reminds you that not only do countries change over time, but perspectives change. Countries are largely˜imagined communities, and if you do not understand your community and how it and you travel through space and time, you have little chance of understanding how others do.
Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.
Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
In terms of visiting a country for the first time, this is perplexing as, like a child, you have to wade clumsily through all the nasty bits before you get to the good bits (and South America has a lot of bad bits!) Countries are inductive, not reductive, meaning that you need to go to them and move through them to discover how they embrace or resist the world (in a holistic sense, not just via lazy symbols like the Sydney Opera House or the London Eye or trophy skyscrapers in the Middle East). And while doing this, perhaps you will learn something about that particular country and unlearn something about your inner android.
I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses. Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe
Time
One year is an incredibly long time to travel, much longer than I assumed at the beginning of the journey. This is because while doing equivalent things, year-in-year-out, years may seem flavourless, similar, and of the same long stretch of highway. It is like travelling across the Australian Nullarbor desert, looking out the window at a landscape that does not appear to change. A hundred kilometres looks like the past one hundred, and each new day looks like the previous day.
But a year of travelling is like no other. Every day is full of challenges, such as finding food and shelter, discovering exciting things to do, building common ground with strangers and continually improving the skills and motivations required to enter geographical and cultural contexts bigger than oneself. One year is just about right for unlearning, as one never unlearns until about eight months into a journey. This is when the imagined communities we inhabit (with their android views of the other) are well and truly behind us, and then we can finally discover the world with fresh eyes and a clear intellect.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
Distance
I learnt much about scale and distance during the past year as I did not use many aeroplanes, which have become what McDonald’s has become to food! I love walking, and at a conservative estimate, I must have walked over two thousand kilometres in the past year. This includes walking the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, about 200 KMS, the Camino Portugual in Portugal/Spain, about 240 Kilometres, and the W Trek in Chilean Patagonia, about 80 KMS. Plus, there were other shorter one- or multi-day treks in Peru, Ecuador, and Argentina and days upon days of rambling over the cracked and uneven pavements of major South American, European, and Asian cities and towns.
Then there were trains, taxis, jeeps, buses and boats. Still, most importantly, there was an enduring Yamaha 125 cc motorcycle that hauled my ass twelve thousand kilometres for five unhurried months down the spine of the Andes from Santa Marta in Colombia to someplace near Santiago in Chile. Again, this may not seem like a long way in raw numbers, but remember this was through deserts and snow and over five thousand metre mountain passes, through the relentless winding valleys of Peru, the sweaty and sketchy Amazon, and on the isolated unsealed roads of Bolivia. One of the most significant takeaways from the journey is that the environmental world is as spectacular as the cultural one as it challenges, extends and motivates an individual in a similar, enduring way.
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Gustave Flaubert
Books
Travelling and reading go hand-in-hand; I have read twenty-seven significant books over the past year (download .pdf reading list). This may not seem like a lot, but books like Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov took a slow reader like me eighty hours, or two weeks, to read! I am attracted to well-read travellers, and I think it is one of the best aspects of travelling (and indeed, it gave me something to do during long, lonely nights in dingy hotel rooms). Before I left, I asked many friends to suggest a favourite book to read and requested fellow travellers along the way. Many books I read had little to do with South America, such as Crime and Punishment, but then again had everything to do with a universal human condition.
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination and the journey. They are home.
Anna Quindlen
Health
The durability of my health was a surprise as I travelled much healthier for one year than usual during an average industrial year (few colds and flu, etc.). Plus, I was in some pretty toxic and unhealthy environments where it was not always easy to find healthy eating options. If not for the inexpensive Menu del Dia for lunch (set menu), ubiquitous in South America, I would have returned emaciated and scraggy. I put good health down to exercise, regularly washing my hands, drinking lots of water, sunscreen and a hat, but perhaps more importantly, my body’s adjustment to survival and the following fresh, physical challenge (I think you call this being alive!).
We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us. Anonymous
Digital
Analogue guidebooks such as Lonely Planet are a component of independent travel’s tired, stodgy, and inflexible institutionalised aspect that should either innovate or die. I have much to say about travelling as a digital humanist and how to apply digital communication tools to enhance twenty-first-century travel sensibly. But this deserves an article that I will write about later.
Consequently, I took approximately 2,000 photos during the year, wrote hundreds of pages in a digital journal, blogged weekly, and read dozens of e-books coupled with numerous audiobooks (see pictures on Flickr). A small four-hundred-dollar tablet helped sustain me throughout a very long and lonely year, and I am unsure what I would have done without it. Travels with Herodotus became travels with Samsung!
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs, Susan Sontag
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