Walking through the streets of Cebu under a sun magnitudes warmer than the life-giving star with which I grew up; or the streets dripping with fashion, superb makeup and dirt-cheap soju in the youth district of Hongdae, Seoul; or the streets lined with endless Banh Mi shops and surging with thousands of motorbikes at any given moment in Hanoi; the streets are different everywhere, have a different feel, energy, smell, god forbid, taste, but it is here that I am most aware of the intensity inherent in traveling, and its source is most clear. People are different from me. Some more than others. It’s all so foreign! But I’m the foreigner and they know it. I know it. It’s a sometimes overwhelming feeling to be an outsider, incapable of truly fitting in, incapable of speaking the local lingo or donning the diverse duds. To be exposed to this every day, slowly acclimate and feel capable of moving efficiently and without much notice through a culture, only to pack up and start the process again is intense. It takes a lot of energy.
Recently I’ve encountered more Americans traveling than I’m used to and we’ve had many discussions at the demand usually of Europeans and Australians to explain those Americans — and almost certainly those people of other cultural and national origins — who are entirely satisfied never traveling, never leaving their country or perhaps even their town for any reason besides necessity. “They don’t like the discomfort” one suggested, before continuing “but the discomfort is the point of traveling.” To some degree I think he’s right and it is the discomfort that makes traveling worth it. If I were comfortable in a new country, I couldn’t be experiencing anything terribly new or challenging, so why would I pay so much money to be there? Better to have one of those “staycations” sycophants keep twittering on about in their buzzword echo chambers.
That discomfort comes from somewhere though, many places, in fact. Anyone who says anything about our world can be traced to a singular thing is one thing is probably selling a secondary thing. I’m not selling anything. Is that why my money keeps dwindling?
Island life
It’s hot in the Philippines. So hot. Fortunately, only a handle of islands are large enough that you may be cursed with a multiple hour journey to the nearest beach. White sands, black sands, coral reefs sparkling with all the colors of the proudest surface gardener’s floral display, sharks of minuscule and baleen proportions alike, waves that even the least balanced of would-be surfers can ride, and sunsets unlike anywhere on earth characterize this place.
So too do water shortages, black outs, an absurd dependence on mototaxis and tricycles (called tuktuks elsewhere), and certain insect-borne diseases. I stayed in a hostel where I had found many quick friends, and where I could never trust a sink, shower head, or toilet to work. My first time clubbing, the power went out three times before they gave up for the evening and stopped selling alcohol in the hope that we’d go home. Such little faith they had in us.
Hello
When traveling for any significant length of time, or in any high-exposure conditions such as workstays or hostels, you meet people. Locals and foreigners alike. Often a nice mix. If you can keep your rigid tourist schedule and stay only a few days in a place, using only the bed because the sun is for walking under, then you can often avoid getting close to such people. But sometimes it’s just too easy: oh yeah I’m going to check that out tomorrow too, let’s go together.
Oh no. It begins.
The train leads to the museum but vacation time blindness demands lunch before the museum and then then you have mutual errands after the hostel and return to the hostel as everyone’s cracking open their drinks, stumbling off to a late dinner and eventually you’re at a club, double fisting a pitcher of jack and coke on a stripper pole with eight strangers from all over the world whom you would kill for even though you’re not totally sure what his name is and you’re kinda sure she’s not even at your hostel but joined your crew after someone bummed a smoke from her outside the 7-11. There’s a certain kind of person who, in free fall, grasps any around and creates a spinning mass of accumulating emotional energy that spreads outward, electric in feel and magnetic in draw, like snow in its ephemerality.
The calendar says I had known him only for a few months but there exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time, independent of rotating, malicious music.
— Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
I’ve found myself forming up with a handful of these groups recently. Once in the Philippines, and again in Seoul. It’s often a matter of coincidence. Several people arrive at once and their particular energy for meeting people, for learning about the hostel/city/country acts as a catalyst for ganging up to take on the world together. But just as often it centers around a figure: not always a beacon of charisma, but rather someone who managed to say something at the right time, to the right person.
Recently I asked someone on a surf beach in the Philippines if they wanted to jam, and it turned out they were a recording musician, and they invited me to record with them. I think the tracks I laid down will yet fall further to the cutting room floor — I just don’t think the Mandolin really works with the song though I was grateful for the opportunity — but nevertheless, those simple words, at that time, to that person, and I spent the next ten hours of my life with a group of people, most of whom I learned had found their way into that studio that day by similar circumstances. Right words, right time. If I hadn’t been leaving in a day, well, I would have been sucked up into further social plans with them. It’s a shame in a way. I missed out, I think. But a hello must inevitably, someday, be paired.
Goodbye
It’s a puerile refrain, common to all love-scarred teens, but I love the chorus of The Gaslight Anthem’s “Great Expectations”:
I saw taillights last night in a dream about my old life.
Everybody leaves, so why, why wouldn’t you?
But on the road you see taillights nightly. I spoke in a previous entry about how my heart was fragmented and cast about the entire globe, that I could probably never be happy living in one spot my entire life because people and places that have earned my affection for any number of reasons are scattered across this planet. That I knew I was going to make it worse. It’s so much worse now. Some of the goodbyes I’ve said on this trip haunt me, some of them I’ve tried to undo, no matter how futile the effort. Please just bring those days back to me! I’d do anything to feel that way again, to forget our parting words, and to continue life the way I’m sure it’s always been — always.
It’s like a hangover. For days following the dissolution of such a group I’m stuck in bed. Watching old movies on my phone or trying to pay attention to a book. Or trying to escape other travelers entirely by plunging deep into the countryside of the nation, where backpackers rarely venture. I need to recover. To heal. After a few days of quiet and tobacco reliance, I’m usually sufficiently sick of my own company that I must return to the big cities and tourist spots and begin the cycle again.
Korea
Something about Seoul makes me uncomfortable. It’s not the great public transit service. It’s not the incredible food. It’s not the back-to-back, seven nights a week swing dancing. It’s not that many of the clubs are open until 8am, or that some of them ban foreigners or, if I may feel still more attacked, anyone over thirty years of age. Ah, wait a second there. Over thirty years of age. Could it be the superficiality? The strong emphasis on makeup and plastic surgery? The city is a beacon of youth culture and beauty, but stepping foot outside of Seoul reveals sometime sinister, a black hole developing in the heart of the nation.
Still I can only speak negatively of it because I am so fond of it. The mountains here are incredible. They’re not the sharp rising peaks I’m used to in Cascadia, more like the rolling foothills thereof, green and mystical, and not mountains at all, a Nepalese man recently asserted to me in the bus station. They define the landscape: I’ve yet to go anywhere outside of Seoul that wasn’t lined with small mountains, thoroughly beloved by the residents and actively visited all year long. Even Seoul’s city boundaries contain or neighbor significant mounds and national parks. And the country seems to make it easy, seems to encourage visiting these places.
The cultural assets of Korea, especially on display in Seoul, are numerous and fantastic. The country is tiny. Not even half the land mass of my home state but its cultural history goes back much further without break. I have to admit I’ve visited very little: missed this museum and that palace, etc, but I made sure to hit up my personal interests, places a lot of people will have overlooked: the traditional liquor museum and the Hangeul museum. Someday I’ll find someone who just wants to hang out with me to drink and design new alphabets. Someday.
The end is near
I’ve mentioned before that I’m quite tired. This kind of journey takes a lot out of you. Loved ones will grow and even pass in your absence, as they would have were you living apart from them under any other circumstance, but without any quotidian banality for comfort, without regular sleep schedules, surrounded by people you have developed rapid, undying loyalty to whose favorite book or musician you’ve unlikely ever been told and to whom you can hardly profess the sorrow of losing a relative let alone anything more severe. After all how can you cry about your dead grandparent in the arms of someone whose favorite color you don’t even know? The intensity inherent to forming and reforming these relationships is so taxing. Were it not the limits of my bank account, the limits of my heart and my psychic health would likely force me to return soon enough as it is.
Nevertheless, I’ve but one or two months left. Despite my exhaustion, my long term sentiment echoes what my daily one often does: I’m tired but I’m still ready to dance, to drink, to sing, to fall in love and maybe even get in a fight tonight. I won’t be sleepwalking back to the states, enervated and defeated, I’ll be shimmying with an open heart and bright if bloodshot eyes across the world there, ready for all the life along my way.
