Been there, but have I really "done" that?

-You saw Hadrian’s Arch in Rome?
-Umm…yes. That’s the arch next to the Colloseum right? There are so many…
-Wow – what an incredible experience. I mean, I’ve never been there, but I took a course in Roman History, and wrote a paper about Hadrian. Did you know he built that arch after [blah blah blah]? But, what do I know. I’ve never been there.
-Well I’d “been” to Rome 4 times before this particular trip. I did a degree in Archaeology and didn’t want to go to Rome before I had the chance to really research the place and dedicate a lot of time and effort to do the experience justice. But eventually, I realised I’m never going to have the time to do the experience justice, so on the fifth trip, I finally dove in and saw Rome. But really, there are a lot of places I’ve been where I honestly believe someone who has read a book about the place has “been” there more than I have.

My last trip to Italy was a two-week holiday with my mother as her retirement wish. When she met me in London to depart for Italy, I was in a sorry mental and physical shape – I was recovering from living in Ghana where I was constantly sick, a month in South Africa where I was in chronic pain from some of my medications, and was experiencing quite a bit of culture shock from re-entering the Western World. Despite all of this, our trip was one of the most enriching trips I’d ever had in Italy. Not so much because of places, but more because of the Italian lifestyle, and getting to share the experience with my excellent, and ever-deserving mother.

When travelling, many of our experiences are defined by how hungry/thirsty we are, by the company of people we find ourselves in, by our mental state, and by how friendly people were our first hour in a country. Perspective is important when trying to mitigate these internal and external effects on our travelling experiences, but really, what is travel if not being internally and externally affected by environmental circumstances?

I’ve written before about how travel and living abroad can be vastly different experiences, largely depending on depth of experience [see “Aspiring to be a piece of meat”]. The more places you tackle in a shorter time, the shallower the layers of the experience can be. In one’s lifetime, they can see a thin version of the entire world, a deeper experience of some few key places, or a profound experience of one place. All these experiences are worth having, as long as we keep the objective of our discoveries in mind: vacation, holidays, travels, or cultural immersion?

All inclusive packages. North Americans work very hard, and when we go on vacation, we want a vacation. Travelling means constant decision-making, and it can be far more relaxing to have someone [presumably] in-the-know make all those decisions for you. Plus it’s often cheaper to get the package than the plane tickets alone. While for me a vacation means going “home”, I can entirely appreciate why some people would want to go to Cuba to have the experience of being in a hot Canada, rather than the experience of Cuba. Mingling with locals, gauging expectations, and being a model citizen while travelling is exhausting work, and often requires a recovery period afterwards – a real vacation. Sit, relax, drink daiquiris from filtered water ice cubes, and be served. Just make sure you say “thank you”, try to patronise more sustainable resorts with proper environmental and labour policies, and remember that you are on vacation – you are not travelling Cuba.

Backpacking. Above anything, backpackers are about hanging out with other backpackers, and can be a hugely entertaining way to see the world. Within minutes of meeting these people from all over the world, you will find you have days worth of things to talk about because, regardless of your geographic origins, you all studied social sciences and come from middle-class families in former British or Spanish colonies. You can spot the rookies by conversations about accents or different words we use in Canada vs. the US vs. Australia vs. England. The Aussies will poke fun at the English, the Kiwis at the Aussies, and the Canadians will swear we don’t sound anything like Americans and promise we can tell the difference.

Some of the best laughs I’ve had in my life was with a group of 6 backpackers – 2 from England, 3 from Australia, and me – whom I had the pleasure of spending 24 hours in relentless company with in Lithuania. I had been to Lithuania 3 times before, but as a Lithuanian where my family picked me up from the airport, toured me around, and dropped me off at the airport. I had never experienced Lithuania as a tourist, and wanted to see how my homeland compared with other European cities I had travelled to.

With these backpackers in Vilnius, we cooked a communal feast together for dinner, toured the city together, everyone offering fun anecdotes about how this place reminded them of ____ in ____, and where to go in ____. We drank beer on a creek side terrasse, got shushed by the locals during a Lithuanian poetry reading that none of us could understand, and we will all remember what a good time we had in Lithuania.

This experience can be repeated all over the world, and if stuck to exclusively can become very tiresome. I swore I’d never backpack again after I saw Indian Dreamcatchers being sold in Thailand, China, Vancouver, Venice, and Paris -- all within a 3-month period. But in smaller doses, backpacking is yet another excellent way to enjoy the world.

Travelling alone. The loneliest birthday of my life was spent in the French Alps in 2002. I was an archaeologist in central France, but took the afternoon off of work to spend the weekend in Annecy – a picturesque ski village about 45 minutes south of Geneva, complete with medieval canals and stone buildings. When I arrived, it was already dark, the hostel staff wasn’t answering their phone, and I didn’t have the address of the hostel. I hitch hiked into town and found a cheap hotel room in an empty building in an empty neighbourhood, and didn’t see another soul for the rest of the evening. Sometimes you just need bodies around you, even if they’re unfamiliar.

The next day, the hostel staff managed to answer their phone, and after a long day of walking around town, I spent the afternoon chatting with the hostel bartender. He and some of the hostel staff were going out that night to celebrate a friend’s birthday that lived on the other side of Lac Annecy, and there was an extra seat in the car. This ended up being one of my most enjoyable evenings while travelling, and would have never been possible if I weren’t travelling alone. I have similar stories about walking from Greece to Macedonia alone, travelling to the Sahara desert alone, and a fun coach to Istanbul alone.

Travelling with friends. I have lot of friends who I don’t think would be very fun to travel with, but I have also had company who have made the best of some pretty dodgy situations. Despite constant obstacles and sickness in Peru, I most remember all the clever banter with Sarah. In Latvia, poor hostel organisation and roommates with grossly different personal boundaries turned out to be a platform for Anastasia’s excellently delivered comedic reactions, even after having to share a bed with a drunk Spanish boy who climbed in with her for 3 hours.

Friends who you meet while travelling alone are great because you instantly have something in common, but equally important are friends with whom you have history. While I have bonded with all sorts of people all over the world, often very quickly because of obvious common interests and personality traits, but there is no substitution time-tested friendships, regardless of how irrelevant you are to each other in contemporary contexts. Human relations are about filling roles, and when we travel we meet people who mutually need someone to fill those familiar roles for the duration of that particular, however temporary, context. Having a lot in common with someone is also really important in friendships and has an important role in terms of familiarity and feeling understood, but old friends have the familiarity of resilience and the comfort of knowing that they can overcome obstacles.

Travelling as a couple. It can be exhausting trying to maintain emotional health by keeping in touch with familiar people back home while building new communities of people along the way. Bringing a partner with you really helps with emotional issues, allows you to share something profound with your partner, and, as a woman, travelling with a man can really help with some of the daily discomforts of being approached by opportunistic men. It’s like you can have your life and travel too. However, travelling with your partner can easily limit how deep your experience is locally, because you don’t need to seek comfort from your environment, and so it’s easier to turn to each other instead. Plus, the only people who want to talk to you are other travelling couples.

Particular knowledge. I live around the world and have friends who live around the world, and visiting them is my favourite introduction to a new place. They understand local customs and some language, can hold your hand through the initial discomforts, tell you the good places to go, and are often excited to use you as a partner in adventure for things they can’t do with their local friends. The benefit of growing up in Canada is that many of my friends are first-generation and have family to visit in other parts of the world. I also enjoy theme travelling -- microbrewery road trips around Cascadia, wine tasting in South Africa, archaeology in the former Roman empire, wildlife viewing – these are activities enriched by developing a particular expertise about one common layer. Or by travelling with someone who holds that particular knowledge.

Expats. There are technical differences between expats and sojourners, but I will combine the two here. Expats are like backpackers who graduated to the next level. Expats vary greatly – in most ex-pat communities, people are some combination of: (1) the expats who only hang out with other expats, whose definition of a good place is based on having cool expats there, who transport their world to different geographical locations around the world; (2) the expats who will have nothing to do with other expats. They do not greet the only other white person in town, they can’t remember the last time they spoke English, they write in their day planners in the local language and only eat non-Western foods; and (3) the expats who have local and expat friends, but whose expat friends are actually enriching their local experience rather than solely being a source of escaping it [also necessary at times].

When I lived in Ghana, there were only really 2 white people who lived in town: Kathryn and me. Kathryn and I didn’t meet until she had been there 4 months, and I had been there 2 months. Kathryn lived with a family, had to learn Twi to get by, worked in a small office where no one drank alcohol, and was living on a much tighter budget than me and therefore ate a lot of street food. I lived with a young Ghanaian woman, my friends were constantly speaking in really fast Twi, I worked in a huge office with all sorts of politicians, private consultants, technocrats, bureaucrats, Community-NGOs, and general members of the public, where the big men would scoff at the idea of street food, but I could cook vegetables at home. I learned more Twi from Kathryn than from any of my Ghanaian friends, learned about taboo subjects like family life and the treatment of children, and ate street food all over Ghana because of her. Kathryn learned about young Ghanaian social life, how Ghanaians drink, how Ghanaians settle a bill, the politics of Ghanaian marriages, and how to tell stories in colourful English to a Ghanaian audience. Our friendship was a necessary escape, but also an enrichment of the Ghanaian experience.

Nomads. I’ve written about nomads a lot. Nomads are everywhere, and yet nowhere, can feel at home anywhere, yet nowhere. Nomads don’t compare how many countries they’ve been to or how long they’ve been on the road. They do normal things in extraordinary settings, have a wide range of insatiable interests, and have gotten really good at letting themselves be in the hands of others. They like to have guest rooms whenever they are temporarily settled, and they know another nomad when they see them.

There are limitless ways of experiencing the world, and while some classify them as being a greyscale of shallow to deep, I think of them more as different axes across a landscape. Depending on an individual’s interests and objectives, they are all experiences worth having, none being necessarily more important than another. While my journey seems to be profoundly geographic, others chose to understand a variety of contexts in one place, or concentrate on their relationships with their partners, or study something like meditation, or yoga. If I didn’t travel so much, I think I’d be a much deeper person.

[De]Evolution of a Tan.

I associate excessive doses of sun and perpetual summer with having a tan. I have been in summer since I went to Peru in February 2006, after all. I think sun=tan is a reasonable association, and yet contrary to popular belief, I am not very tanned. Every time I see someone I know I seem to get the same reaction.

-Wow. You really aren’t very tanned. Haven't you been in Africa the last 7 months?

1. GHANA. I worked as a Community Development Planner for 6 months in Ghana. Half of my time at work was spent in my office, a quarter of my time was spent at workshops, in meetings, or at public sensitization events, and the last quarter of my time was spent in the field monitoring and evaluating projects. Ghana is extremely hot, and Koforidua is the capital of the most humid part of the country. And no swimming pools to quell the heat. I'd manage to get most of my desk work done in the mornings, when my office was cool enough to think. After lunch, it was too hot to sit at a desk, and I'd usually retire to one of the two air conditioned offices in my building and socialise for the rest of the day. In the late evenings, hours after the 6pm sunset, it’s hot enough that basic un-animated conversation provides enough activity to sweat profusely. Fanning oneself produces more exercise and heat than the cooling effects of the mild breeze your producing. When on site visits, I wore a hat, sunglasses, sunscreen, and covered my skin with something to protect it from the burning sun, and still never lasted more than a few minutes before having to head for the shade. It’s HOT. Not in a nice warm blanketing way, but in a painful, retina-burning, planning-what-to-wear-such-that-you-don’t-sweat-through-your-outfit, hammering down on you, kind of way. I always wore a hat outside and drank copious amounts of [yuk!] water, and still had heat stroke twice. In fact, the darkest my hair has ever been in my life as a blonde was at the tail end of my time in Ghana.

2. SOUTH AFRICA. My Ghanaian friends had told me that the reason there are so many whites in SA was because the climate was just like in Europe. I arrived in Jo’burg in late summer with very high expectations, and was very very excited to wear long trousers for the first time in 7 months. My friends in Ghana had never seen me wear trousers before. I spent a whole day at the poolside – not just 10 minutes of sun before having to retire to the shade – and then off to Cape Town. The Cape Peninsula had some of the most beautiful and inviting beaches I’d seen before, and the strong breezes made even the hottest of days feel very mild.

Inland in the wine country, the air was dry and the heat soothing, and it was finally possible to hit a terrasse in the sun. Finally I was going to get the tan I needed before my return to the temperate world. I didn’t have any freckles, but my cheeks were pink...then darker pink...then red. Was I burning? Should I put on my hat? No, it’s just the South African red wine we were enjoying -- enjoying enough that you could read it on our cheeks.

SA’s most famous beaches surround Durban, but floods in Mozambique and along SA’s east coast pre-empted any beach ambitions we may have had. Instead, we headed for the hills – the Drakensburg, to be exact, where we climbed up to 3200 metres. This was the closest I’d been to the sun in a long time – although I lived in the “mountainous” region of Ghana, none of those “mountains” even compared to Burnaby Mountain, which we Simon Fraser alumni always referred to as “the hill”. SA’s mountains, on the other hand, were very impressive, and we returned from our expedition up the Drakensburg with a respectable shade of skin for someone who claimed to have been living in Africa for 7 months. After spending 4 hours out to sea great white shark cage diving, parasailing on the Garden Route, climbing the Drakensburg, and going on a 5-day camping safari in Kruger National Park, I was finally exhibiting the 7 months I had spent in Africa.

3. ENGLAND. When I left Canada in August, I packed for 7 months in Africa. I knew I’d be in Europe too, but figured I’d cross that bridge when I got there. And besides, how cold could it be? It was April.

-If you need to borrow any of my coats, help yourself. Oh. And I have an extra pair of gloves for you too.

Gloves? I had bought no less than FOUR scarves/shawls in Ethiopia, anticipating the European cold. I had lost my hat somewhere in the Indian Ocean, a sacrifice to the Gods of shark cage diving, and all I had was a thin safari jacket and four scarves/shawls. I had entirely forgotten about gloves. And I suffered for my thoughtlessness.

4. ITALY. I used to have freckles when I was a kid, but hadn’t had freckles since 2003 when I lived in Turkey, a summer where I spent 16 weeks in persistent, unyielding sunshine. I assumed I had outgrown freckles and was old. It was just another reminder that life peaks at 27, wasn’t it?

-Actually, freckles represent damage from the sun, so it’s probably a good sign that you haven’t had any freckles since 2003.

The temperature in Italy was excellent – it was the perfect temperature to walk around all day without needing to bring an extra bag just to put all your excess clothes into. Montreal springs are always like that – you need to pack for everything between +28 and -15, sweating underneath your spring jacket while the sun is up, and then catching the flu in the evening as the temperature drops by 5 degrees per hour, every hour after sunset. The same day I remarked about my lack of freckles since 2003, I came back to the hotel after a long day of siteseeing and noticed the appearance of freckles on my nose and cheeks! It was a lose-lose battle – sun-damaged skin, or feeling past my prime?

Italy was perfect – cool enough to be comfortable wearing proper walking shoes, but warm enough to eat gelato every evening for dinner. The sun was soft and embracing, not stinging and hammering, and just the right temperature to enjoy my daily half litre of wine on a sunny terrasse in the late afternoons.

5. MOROCCO. I arrived in Morocco dawning blonde hair, freckles, and a respectable tan – or as respectable a tan my Northern European self can get. I couldn’t pass as a local, but I clearly wasn’t some fresh-off-the-boat European tourist, inexperienced in the ways of Africa. Or maybe it was my permanent aura of un-approachability I exude when travelling in pushy countries. I spent 3 days in the Sahara desert and in the Atlas mountains, under patchy clouds perfect for photography. I thought I was going to the big sand dunes, but was instead at Zagora where the dunes were barely high enough to act as toilet camouflage.

I arrived at Ando’s apartment in Casablanca exhausted and lethargic. In fact, I think Ando’s quite disgusted by just how little I can manage to do in a day, but still feel good about myself. In 4 days in Casa, I hadn’t left more than a 3 block radius from Ando’s pad, and my bronze was fading.

Finally, she managed to drag me out for a day on the town – we went to the medina, I bought two tapis, and we went to the market and bought camel meat from a meat store that had a freshly slaughtered camel head hanging from it [yes, of course we took shameless pictures of ourselves standing behind the camel head, which conveniently hung at my shoulder length]. We found someone to grill our kilo of camel meat for us on the side of the road, went to the beach, and then we finally went to the hammam.

At the hammam, you sit in the steam room for an hour painting yourself with a seed ingested and defecated by a goat, and then a woman comes and scrapes all your dead skin cells off. She actually stopped halfway and showed me just how much grime was peeling off me. All I could do was shrug, conveying the international sentiment of "what are you gonna do?" -- passive acceptance of one's own disgustingness.

I emerged from the hammam satisfied that I had finally managed to get myself clean since taking that 6 hour tro-tro to Bui National Park last January [see blog entry “Ando can officially sleep anywhere”], realizing that maybe I had had a tan underneath all the layers of dust afterall. If only I could get my clothes as clean! [I really just want a box of chemicals and a machine to wash my clothes at this point]

In any case, along with the layers of dust, she had certainly managed to scrape off whatever progress I had made in my plight to actually look like I had been in Africa for 8 months now. I didn’t see any women at the beach wearing swimsuits, and I’ve been pretty careful about not exposing myself too much while I’m in Morocco, so I don't know how much sun my skin will actually see while I'm here. I guess I’ll just have to wait until I get to Spain and Latvia before I can have my African tan!

[In Casablanca on 1 May, post-camel lunch, but pre-hammam]

La Dolce Vita.

What an art of living the Italians have mastered. We had such an enjoyable time in Italy, eating and drinking our way from Milan to Rome. I think I must have spent every afternoon for 2 weeks drinking a glass of wine on a terrasse, eating a gelato for dinner, a two course lunch, and -- at times -- even enjoying a room with a view.

This picture was taken from our balcony in Sienna, on the eve of St. Catherine of Sienna's day. Each of Sienna's 17 boroughs mark the occasion with a procession, and the next day they gather in the square where the annual horse race is held.

When we first arrived in Sienna, another Tuscan hill town which has declined in influence since its height in the Renaissance period, we were a little Tuscan-hill-towned-out. But accidentally spilling onto this procession literally re-ignited our love of Tuscany.

We had seen lots of crowds in Italy already -- the 2 hour queue at the Uffizi in Florence, the millions of tourists blocking any genuine experience of Venice on Good Friday, spending more time letting tourists pass rather than hiking the Cinque Terre on Easter Monday, 80 000 people per day at the Vatican museum -- but this time the queue of people were NOT the tourists, and we, the tourists, got to be the ones to blissfully watch from outside the mass of people.

La Dolce Vita? Sometimes it's watching, rather than participating.