All Good Things
A day typically lasts twenty-four hours. Almost always, in fact. However when you travel internationally from Australia, across numerous timezones and you lose all sense of where and when you are, a day can feel and actually last longer than twenty-four hours. My first day on this trip lasted twenty-four or twenty-six or thirty-two or forty hours, depending on how you count it.
Travelling on a budget airline for twenty-eight hours is remarkably life-affirming. The fear that the plane could go down at any minute with the anxiety that you may have not purchased the life jacket and mask add-on provides a different perspective on life. You start thinking about the important things and are less-concerned by the myriad cries of babies behind you and the gloopy mess advertised as food planted on the tray table in front of you. Sure, the black pepper beef had about three thumbnail-sized chunks of beef in the entire $17 meal, as if the airline is attempting to share the meat off of a single cow with the entire fleet, but why worry too much? Only twenty-three more hours to go.
By the time I arrived in Athens it had been thirty-six hours since I got out of bed. That’s not to say I hadn’t slept in the interim. In a small lounge chair, over a couch sectioned-off to avoid sleepers, against a wall, on the floor, standing up, Singapore airport had been my progressive dormitory. But now it was time for sleep in a real bed. Only six more hours till I could access my room.
I wrote this passage in the middle of March this year, only a few days into this trip. I chose not to publish it because it was unfinished and, I felt at the time, uninspired. I wrote it back when I wasn’t sure if my prolix pontifications would be worth writing, let alone reading. Sure, I wanted to collect and document some memories on the trip but would I really have enough to fill a blog post about every single place I visited?
Looking back now, seventy-seven posts later, I can say unequivocally and without ambivalence that I have absolutely no idea if it's been worth it. The blog, that is, the trip has probably been worth it. The utility of my ramblings continues to befuddle me but, at the same time, they have been a source of inspiration. Knowing that I had to write something about everywhere I visited forced me to try new foods, immerse myself in different cultures and spend a night with a drunken man in a karaoke room near the North Korean border.
Travel is a paradoxical form of escapism. We seek to escape the mundanity of home and the everyday by engaging in another person's version of the everyday. I’ve travelled long distances to try someone else’s daily breakfast or take a rush hour train or see the sun setting. I’ve met people from all four corners of the world, but mostly the Netherlands, and have engaged in countless unusual experiences, on one occasion bowing over a hundred times to a deity that I didn’t believe in. In the past seven and half months there have been many changes in the very same world which I have travelled through. The most notable being that I am now being charged $24 to have the exact same black pepper beef on my flight back to Sydney.
Whether I have changed or grown, I am not sure. But this trip was not supposed to be about growth or progression, nor something with a beginning or an end. Everything goes in cycles. In the first few days of the trip I was in Greece and in the last few days I was in a city whose name, in Greek, is a swear word. In Germany I was convinced no one would talk to me because I had bad breath and in Taiwan I was convinced no one would talk to me because my deodorant wasn't working. In Slovakia a man told me of his shaky relationship with the police force and in Malaysia a taxi driver confessed to me his love of Pablo Escobar.
I tried as many foods as I could and managed to escape food poisoning time after time. I stuffed myself too many times to remember and moved away from standard mealtimes and towards a daily, progressive buffet as time went on. I ate the sweetest artichokes in Sicily, the best grilled mackerel in Busan and the most bitter tea in Taipei.
I transited in Singapore for eight hours after leaving Sydney in March. Immediately after getting off the plane, I scoffed down a plate of Hainanese chicken rice in terminal three of Changi airport–the very first meal of this trip. And, as I sit once again in terminal three thirty-three weeks later, I'm filled with a sense of joy and sadness as I scoop the last spoonful of rice and boiled chicken into my mouth before boarding my flight to Sydney.
