Tag Archives: water
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
I love CouchSurfing. I have probably already said it, but I love CouchSurfing. For everything it brought to my trip – locals’ recommendations, discovering cultures from the inside, meeting great people, sharing joys and, most importantly, making amazing friends – I am eternally grateful, and in debt to all the CouchSurfers around the world. They will be most welcome at my place, when – or rather every time – I will be settled down somewhere.
Nevertheless, despite all the qualities of the CouchSurfing project, it does have one major drawback. It needs the Internet.
I am not talking about the problem of accessing the Internet, though. Travelers can find, nowadays, an access to the Internet – may it be a Wi-Fi hot-spot or a cybercafe – relatively easily (thank you McDonald’s and Burger King, aka Hungry Jack’s for our Australian friends); as for the hosts, it is obvious that CouchSurfing cannot expand to the regions of the world that are not reached by this powerful medium. This is something that will improve with time; and after all, on the other hand, it is sometimes a relief to find that you can be impossible to reach in some parts of this world. Yes. It is.
I am, actually, talking about the fact that CouchSurfing needs messages between the host and the surfer if they are to organize the latter’s stay. Such a conversation, obviously necessary, takes at least a week, if not several. Which means the traveler needs to know a week in advance where he is going. CouchSurfing is an amazing project, but it restrains the sheer freedom of travelers, especially those, like me, who are always on the move, always on the road, and only following the wind.
This is what I realized, the night before I reached Sydney, after a phone call to Kevin, a CouchSurfer that I thought would be able to host me when I would arrive there. In the silence of Newcastle’s train station, the fact that CouchSurfing was, after all, also a social act, implying social rules and roles, became all but too obvious to me.
After all, one of the reasons why I am traveling is to escape the constant demands of the society.
Maybe such a thing is impossible.
Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia
Yeah, Newcastle, but not the one in England. Several places bear the same name as others back in the United Kingdom, as if the founders of the towns had absolutely no inspiration at that moment, or maybe too much nostalgia for their homeland.
Because Australia, as some of you already know, was colonized (some would say stolen, conquered from the Aboriginals) by Captain James Cook, the first European explorer to reach the East Coast of Australia. It quickly became a jail, England sending entire ships of convicts there, on the other side of the world, for them to stay and live the rest of their lives in exile.
But the convicts flourished and thrived, on this land strangely harsh and full of resources at the same time – some would say resources stolen from the Aboriginals. And, in the end, they got their independence.
Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia
“You did Byron Bay, Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie, Newcastle?”
“Errr… Yeah – how did you guess?”
“That’s what everyone does.”
And so I recently learned from Stephan, Dutch architect now living in New Zealand, that my itinerary on the Australian East Coast was kind of classical. I only looked at the map and decided to hit the biggest points along the way, though, but I guess that on a coast, you have not much of a choice when you follow that sort of thought process.
So I followed the touristic road, named the Pacific Highway, towards the south while the summer was giving life to thousands of tourists, so-called backpackers (I will come back later to these ones), and travelers.
Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia
“Aaaaaahhhh… Now THIS is what I came for.”
(James, traveler from London, England, as we discovered Byron Bay’s beach on the first sunny day of our stay)
Because, yes, to be honest, I did not really come to Australia in summer to see floods. Especially on the East Coast, goddammit. It was supposed to be an endless stretch of white sand, bathed by a generous sun, covered with people with so much sunscreen that they would shine while humongous waves would crash with an incredible strength on the coast, sometimes with blond surfers on top of them.
And, finally, that was it.
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
My last post about Malaysia was silent. I thought silence was a good way to express my grief about the hundreds of people dieing a few kilometers from me, trapped in the rubble of the Christchurch earthquake.
And then I thought I could do that as well for the next posts to save me the trouble and time of writing and laying out the page. I found myself choosing pictures.
And I told myself I had so much to say about them, about my travel, that pictures cannot express alone.
Words cannot either, but they help.
Hong Kong, China (香港,中國)
I remember how every single traveler I talked with was so eager to pronounce the word ‘family’ as soon as Christmas entered in the conversation. I am going home for Christmas! I am gonna see my girlfriend for Christmas! I will be so happy to be with my family for Christmas! Where will you be for Christmas? Oh, first Christmas away from home?
Seriously, what the hell. Is the first Christmas away from home a big celebration, a big step in life, like the first laundry your mum does not do for you, like the first lion you kill, like the first time you get caught by the police? Or is it something like a blasphemy, something forbidden by the gods themselves – or by the conventions, normality rules of the Western society?
Christmas is a day in the calendar, a day like all others, only this day, a few thousands years ago, someone special for the Christians was born – and now, alright, nowadays it has become a world-wide pretext to express love with your family, to gather, to celebrate together. Fair enough. That’s cool. Not a bad idea, after all.
But, for the love of all the gods from all the pantheons, stop acting like being away from home during Christmas is the saddest thing that can happen to a human. It might seem strange to you, but I am happy wherever this planet is in its revolutions around the Sun, I am happy at any possible place on Earth, and I am happy to see my family at any time of the year, even if it is not a celebration in a specific calendar. Oh, and I do not need an excuse from the calendar to offer gifts to people that I care about.
Because Christmas is just a day. Because my family does not magically change during a precise day. Nor does my relationship with them. And I am proud of it – and of them. I am proud that they are honest and constant, contrary to what the Western conventions seem to think about the society. About us.
And because of the fact that actually, the whole world is my home.
Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India
“Are you gonna take a bath in the Ganges river?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, yeah.”
“You’re not actually really thinking about doing it, right?” asks his girlfriend.
“Well, it’s a once in a lifetime experience. Ahhh… I have a few cuts though.”
I did not do it. I had a few cuts.
Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India
Everyone told me ‘You have to go to the Taj Mahal – it is the most beautiful building on Earth… It is perfection. You won’t believe it. You have to go.’ But I was like, you know, okay, I’ll give it a look while I’m in India.
And then I saw it… Like you saw it! And I couldn’t believe how beautiful it is. I still cannot believe it. It is perfection.
(Saskia, traveler)
I had seen pictures of the Taj Mahal too. I knew what it looked like. I knew it was a major monument of India. But nothing, no, nothing in this world could have prepared me to what I felt in front of it. No description, no picture, no poem or prose, no story can replace the direct, brutal and intense experience of seeing the Taj Mahal with your own eyes.
That was the third time my mind was blown away in India. When I saw the Taj Mahal. Every time I saw it, actually. Every time I found a new spot, a new point of view, a new angle, a new detail, outside, from a field, on the other side of the Yamuna river, from a rooftop restaurant, from the Agra Fort, or, even more, inside the Taj grounds, a few dozens of meters away or close enough to touch its milky-white marble walls.
And the monument in the first picture is not the Taj Mahal, no – actually it is just here to decorate and give balance to the Taj Mahal complex, even though it would be a major monument if it were standing alone in another city – but do not worry, you will have plenty of it in the following, to saturation. Even though no photograph will ever give you the same, powerful and timeless feeling that grasps anyone who sees it for real. No one will take your breath away every single time you look at it, as it does in reality. No one will make you fall on your knees, overwhelmed by the intensity of the emotions pulsing from the tomb.
Udaipur, Rajasthan, India
General laugh in the bus. I turn to Sajjad (Qatar) and stare at him inquiringly. He calms down, catches his breath and finally translates.
She just said: ‘You’re young, why are you wearing shoes?’
Er well… I come from a country where kids wear shoes. Parents buy small shoes to their children – and they need new ones after every few months, obviously – so that their feet are always protected from the clean floor of the developed countries, and that they never are wounded, never feel the ground, never learn to get stronger. So that when they become adults, they still are unable to walk without that piece of equipment, even only on a flat ground, because they still have babies’ feet and soft skins.
Yeah, well, I have no idea why either, Isu.