Travel

Picture Yourself on a Boat or in Rio

#adventure, #Brazil, Latin America, South America, Travel, Travel Photography, travelogue

I suppose all travellers feel the homecoming differently. Some crash to earth while others drift down all light and feathery. It all depends on a number of factors: how intense the trip has been, and how far you ventured to make that trip happen in the first place. For a reliable measure of to what degree you feel the fallout of coming home, look no further than this equation: divide the value of where have i just been with the value of where the hell I think I am going now. Unless the sum comes out as a negative number, you might just have experienced a homecoming crash.

With the world numbering about 200 sovereign nations, there are tens of thousands of combinations in theory you can make on any end-to-end journey. You can go from Java to Japan, Venezuela to Vanuatu, or the Faroes Isles to France. You can make these point to point destinations alliterate with a classic short back vowel sound, like the UK to the US. Or go large with a nice voiced consonant, like Gabon to Ghana. If you’re willing to speak the lingo of long-haul, how about the rarely confused but uncannily similar-sounding Austria to Australia? Or for practicality’s sake you can dump literary pretensions, and just stretch the alphabet by going Azerbaijan to Zanzibar and back to Abyssinia – except, Ah! Sugar! Abyssinia is now known as Ethiopia, so ditch that. Be judicious when combining vowel sounds on your long end-to-end destination list, as they can culminate in an act of war, as the Ethiopians and Eritreans discovered to their detriment. Russia and Ukraine are neighbours in the alphabet, but far apart in other ways. Nor are either viable travel destinations right now.

In my case, I stuck to the early stages of the alphabet: I went from England to Brazil, albeit via France’s exquisite Charles de Gaulle airport. As E can never be B, so it follows, England can never be Brazil. Not that E would ever truly want to be…uh…B. The world has quite enough to contend with having one Brazil in it far less two. Another Brazil on the fringes of Northwest Europe, and the planet would spin out of orbit (all that rain and vegetation on all that landmass is a weighty proposition). On second thoughts, forget it! An E=B duplicate Brazil this far north just wouldn’t be Brazil. It would be a bloody big England, and more of a headache for Europe.

Before I go in sinuous, unplanned narrative directions, I think it behooves me to say, Brazil is a truly amazing country. Okay. Wind that back. Correction: Brazil is a continent within a continent. So, therefore, Brazil is an amazing country-continent. By definition, it doesn’t rely on any place else. If all others withered, it would keep sprouting new shoots. It grows its own food, drink and living materials in abundance, making it self-sufficient in all but the imported luxuries, which frankly no one needs for happiness because they are by definition luxuries and exist only to make dreary winter days in Europe feel meaningful to dissolute rich people. But Brazil is far from myopically narcissistic. She’ll take you in alright. And she’ll make you feel bloody good about being accepted. Particularly, I must add, if you’re white, European and male. Speaking the global lingua-franca helps, too. But white British privilege aside, even undervalued black Brazilians and pardo/as (name given to mixed race Brazilians of uncertain origin) hardly gripe about their country, for all its historical betrayal of them. Being a continent within a continent, and the sole Portuguese-speaking one, at that, it’s all they’ve seen. And by and large, what they see more often than not pleases the eye, whether that eye be blue, green or brown.

I want to talk about the immediate aftermath of what it feels like living a whole season in Brazil. I want to drift in an out of feeling into thinking and back into feeling. I want to talk stats, sights, sounds and smells, but after three months of sensory overload, i am clueless of where to begin. Being a journey with a beating heart, maybe the writing style should mirror the pulsations of the human corazão. Like a healthy heart, the retelling should contract into a tight ball of fleeting moments – observational vignettes set on location in some of the meanest, greenest backcountry I have seen (i shit you not) in 30 years of darting all over this planet. Then, filled with blood that still boils with the heat of the Brazilian summer, the heart of the travelogue should expand to draw in the immensity of facts and physical features that fill the eyes with sights incomprehensible to those whose gaze has yet to be blessed to fall upon such places.

This is the challenge of the ‘travelong travelogger’. This might smack of bombast, but such is the burden we carry, all too often alone.

The experts say ‘write what you know’. I prefer to invert the maxim to ‘know what I write’. And right now, I’m in that 72hr critical period when where I’ve landed still feels like a diorama, capturing all that’s still-life about these dying days of England’s winter. Small-town English life with all its bauble hats and padded overcoats is going on outside my boat on the other bank of the river, but – Brazil fresh in my mind and radiating in a tropical afterglow out from my skin – there’s a yellow and blue filter between these eyes that cast an outward stare on that monochrome movie out there. I’m trying to see both sides of the world for what they are, but every time I try take each on their own merit, i end up trying to colour match the two. This contrast is stretching me a bit.

The subjectivity aspect of how your perceptions both change and adapt to seeing a familiar place as if for the first time, having been somewhere so qualitatively different for so long, kind of hastens you to want to reach for the encyclopaedia. Having travelled long days by road from São Paulo, only to make the slightest of incisions into the neighbouring states of Rio and Minas Gerais – such is the scale of a land half the size of the South American continent it occupies – there’s little doubt Brazil is rich in details, mostly, but by no means exclusively, natural.

Scenes set context. Even though my impression is that I saw a lot on my expeditionary outings in Brazil, I saw but a fraction. And here’s why. Let’s go holistic before getting to the nub.

Broadly-speaking, there are a handful of ecosystems that constitute the eight million square km landmass of South America’s dancing, oversized child. Imagine for a moment a litter of mongrel pups, Brazil’s natural habitats are varied as they are conjoined. You’ve got flat pampa in the Gaucho grassland country of the far south; you’ve got Pantanal – floodplain swamp country in the Mato Grosso, rich in plant and animal life; inland you’ve got cerrado (pronounced say-hado) in Minas Gerais and Goianas – yellow savannah and rocky extrusions, not unlike parts of Australia; between the cerrado and the sea you’ve got caatinga (pronouned kah-chinga) in Minas Gerais and Bahia – hot, dry, hilly scrubland of tight, gnarly vegetation, deep canyons and red oxide earth; you’ve got Amazonia – lowland river basin of pure, tropical rainforest with its prodigious feet in the world’s largest drainage system. Between the hot highlands of the vast interior and 4,000km of sometimes sultry, botanical coastline, there’s lush, semi-deciduous forest featuring immigrants like towering eucalypts and golden oldies like Permian pines in the form of Araucaria. Then there’s the other, less celebrated but far more felled brethren – the Mata Atlantica. There might only be 7% of the original Atlantic rainforest left, but it don’t let that fool you. It continues to cloak innumerable hillsides, and brings rain in multitudes between Brazil’s two most recognisable urban centres: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, it brings organic reproduction in ways hard to fathom when you live the four seasons.

It is this habitat, the Mata Atlantica, reaching all the way from the mountains near Minas Gerais to the magnificent beaches along the litoral norte of São Paulo and the Rio coast, that I was witness to. It’s formidable as it is stupendous. Though it wants to bite you at every opportunity. When the sun blazes, it burns. And when it rains, boy does it rain.

Now seems like a good moment to end this instalment. Let anticipation hum for a while before following up with an op-ed piece on why magical encounters – from Minas to São Paulo, and best of all Rio State – are best shared with posterity, as well as maybe a few accidental readers. Why stash these experiences selfishly away in a memory capsule? The 72hr window will only pass, and the new reality will shove and jostle the previous one until it’s all but banished to a darkening past.

Oh, The Places You’ll Go.

#adventure, Life, Lifestyle, love, lyrics, mountains, nature, poetry, rhyme, Travel, verse

Picture a Place beyond your front door,

Where the world awaits you, when you are locked down no more.

Where Coronavirus is a Mexican beer-drinking game,

And social isolation a choice not a chore. Things will never be the same.

I’ve heard that one before. The plain fact is, lifetimes well lived never were,

But that little reminder is neither here nor there.

Is it high tide, or glen, or Thai bride, or fen

You seek? Petersburg or Pelion? Russian or Greek?

Then, is it painting a mural on a West Bank wall?

Or lying in wet sand doing not much at all?

Do you see yourself gladly on a deck chair in Spain?

Or puffing away on the Darjeeling train?

A bit of imagination and the possibilities seem endless. And they are.

I can testify to that. Because I’ve kept near and I’ve ventured far.

There’s really nowhere you’ll feel friendless. Whether you’re watching red cardinals from a bench in Central Park.

Or itching your head in the flea markets of Muscat.

There’s nowhere you won’t make your mark.

I myself have had visions on high,

Of following mountains way up to the sky.

And then looking down on all I survey,

A thought. A plot. I’ll come back here one day.

Or not go away,

at all.

I know. I’ll stay rooted to the spot, and dream not of what I’m missing,

but of what I’ve got.

Which is really the whole world when what’s all around

Are mountains beyond mountains. What is this I have found?

Head in the jet stream, heart on my sleeve,

Life’s best in the thrill of the chase, i believe.

Or better still, I found contentment. That’s what i meant.

There is so much to see, so far to go,

So many ways: fly, cycle, row. Hitch a ride, crawl on all fours,

It doesn’t matter how. Providing you do it outdoors.

Depart at a snail’s pace. Arrive in an instant.

Whoever said dreams had to be distant?

By saying ‘I can’t’, you never will. A mountain?

You’ll be lucky to get up a hill.

So don’t forget to recall, it’s all in the mind. If you fall,

Only you can leave yourself behind.

If you like, walk on your hands to Timbuktu,

And when you get there you’ll know what to do.

Keep on keeping on, this time on your feet,

and smile aloud at the people you meet. Everywhere along the way.

Your presence there will make someone’s day, no doubt. Maybe everyone’s.

Depends where you are, where it’s about. Greeks are not Egyptians.

Cambodians not Colombians. Angolans not Australians. Same but different,

Different but the same, a million broken pictures within a single frame.

A mosaic, you might say. A tapestry, a dot painting, a thing on a wall,

Hungarian, Haitian, Hurdy Gurdy Man, or Han. People are people. Wherever you find them. That’s all.

Wherever you roam, roam with a smile.

And if strangers invite you in for a while,

Don’t turn them down.

Turn them up, let them speak, of what they did today and what they did last week.

Who cares if you can’t follow, if it’s all mumbo-jumbo.

You’ve given them yourself, not some hollow

Man! They can see your spirit is willing, your eyes are smiling, your voice is trilling

Out birdsong, some foreign tongue, delighted to have you here among

Strangers.

No one is a stranger, not when you travel.

Except yourself maybe. Let that twist of fate unravel.

So, next time you find yourself in some forgotten land.

Soon, I trust. On an island in a warm sea scratching the sand,

Or if needs must, holidaying local. Even if that means dressing up as a yokel.

Original thinking is the key. Another experience in the bag. The making of me.

Give yourself a big pat on the back for re-learning the art of life. Such a drag, after a year stuck at home

On the edge of a blunt knife.

All things exist, but only life is for living. Tell me something I don’t know.

But have you thought of the future, of the places you’ll go?

(Inspired by Dr Suess, Oh, The Places You’ll Go)





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The Five Corners of Love

					#adventure, America, China, Hong Kong, Life, love, Meaning, San Francisco, thoughts, Travel
		
			


					

			






Part VI





The Going





Travelling the better part of 7,000 miles only to fall in love is not something that happens everyday. Where X marks the spot right where the heart is, when you find treasure you’re supposed to keep it. That’s the whole point, right? Trouble was, I was booked on a flight to KaiTak Airport, Hong Kong, the day of the ’94 World Cup Final, which by my reckoning was two weeks away. So, it begged the question, how does a guy pack twenty-one years of holding back that lovin’ feeling into two weeks of consolidated passion’? More’s the point, how does a lovestruck Romeo duck out of his promise to board that plane with his best friend? After all, that was always the plan. We stopped short of a blood handshake, but nevertheless a mate’s word is his bond. It was an irrevocable decision that only a selfish, lovelorn bastard would go back on. We boys were betrothed in the sense that we vowed to go to Hong Kong together come what may. Batman can’t take on Gotham without his sidekick, Robin. But who was who and which was which? Was I his sidekick, or he mine? 





We would hit the ground running in the continental United States before jetting west 6,000 miles across the Pacific to integrate into the Sinitic world of strange vocal tones and even stranger aromas. Still a British colony, we’d flounce through Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport like colonial masters of old, waving that black post-imperial passport whilst speaking the queen’s own. Immediately thereafter we’d walk into a well-paid position by virtue of the power vested in each of us as crown subjects, beneficiaries of masterful British naval blockades of the Opium Wars against a decrepit Qing Dynasty, circa 1840. We’d save our easily-earned Hong Kong dollars before moving on to the sweat-spangled delights of Indonesia. 





Except, she walked into my life in a down-at-heel bar in San Francisco. That wasn’t part of the bargain.  





The more time I spent with her, the more I had to borrow from from elsewhere to keep spending on her. I was free-falling into a love that knew no ground. I was helpless and powerless and as I divested that ego-protecting power away from me and into her, I reckoned I had never been so upwardly mobile as then. 





It was the little things that stayed with me. The minutiae that had me swooning over her every move. She invited my friend and I to her shared house on Webster St, off Haight Ashbury. An old Victorian clapboard house, an American icon, she rented the front room. We sat down in there on an old mattress lain over a stained redwood floor. She played a cassette of Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. As the opening bars of In the Light came on, she passed me a joint made with Humboldt County kind bud. Two puffs and I was floored. Pretending there was nothing amiss, I picked up one of her art pens and clumsily proceeded to snap the nib, letting black ink soak into the desk on which was laid out the makings of an impressive illustration that depicted the fantasy world of the Shire. If the sketch was supposed to be England, it was like no England i had ever seen. On her bureau, an illustrated book of H.R. Giger. He was the creator of xenomorphs, hideous hybrids – part man, part praying mantis – that would go on to inspire Ridley Scott to make the Alien look, well, more alien. Xeno, i knew, meant foreign in Greek. And morph meaning shape/form. In a roomful of outsiders all cast together, who was the real xenomorph among us now? 





Next thing I was coming around from a brief bout of unconsciousness. So wipeout strong was the joint, she had fallen into the arms of Morpheus, too, her head at my feet, my head at hers. Topping and tailing, we could have been coochy-coo twins. I noticed the fit was right. No superfluous limbs splayed over the mattress edge. Some things interlock while other things, try as we might, just don’t fit right. Geometry had sealed our fate and no amount of cramped bed space was going to stop us from – excuse the cliche – fusing together as one. I watched her sleep for a moment. I studied her perfect black eyebrows until seeing her eyes open i tried wrenching my gaze away. But it was no use. Her dark eyes were fixed on me. And that as they say, was that. 





How was I going elude my obligations and cancel that onward flight? California was beginning to grow on me and i don’t mean like a callus. I was falling in love not just with her, but with the final frontier of the great American trek, too. There is light throughout the world, unevenly distributed. But this was the first time I bathed in a daylight so pure. No, in that moment, sharing an old crumpled mattress under a bay window on the first floor of an old Victorian house off Haight Ashbury, I resolved to give this infatuation time to deepen. I had to find an excuse not to go without alienating my best friend in the process. I tried to empathise, to put myself in his shoes. What if it were him welching on a deal and not me? Would i resent the love that had found him? Would I have boarded that onward flight to Taipei, then HK without him, flush with the confidence that at the tender age of 22 years and 40 days I could face the enormity of falling on my feet in such an expanse of plain weirdness that was the Chinese hemisphere? Doubtful. With that sense of obligation that solidifies where friendships are at stake, I knew i had to make that 16hr flight west across the impossibly wide Pacific with him, my friend, and not stay with her, my lover to be. 





Question remained: how would i find her again now i had resolved to lose her? Remember, this was the age of airmail letters, postcards and the telephone locutorio/cabin. Leaving meant leaving, unlike today where we never really go anywhere other than into a virtual world contained on the screen of a small electronic device that fits snugly into the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Airmail letters signified something deeply profound and deeply, deeply thoughtful; more of a complex whale song than a simple tweet. Anyone who can cast their minds back to that antediluvian world of cursive calligraphy , exotic forwarding addresses, and that personal signature of saliva on the back of the affixed stamp will understand how so. Trouble was, she had no forwarding address and nor did I. Not even a dedicated carrier pigeon with a sixth sense would do. For all intents and purposes, boarding that one-way flight across the Pacific I might as well have been boarding the Mars Express on a never-to-return voyage.





The plane lifting into the endless blue, ahead nothing but deep, black ocean. A moat as wide as any. As i turned to look through the aircraft porthole at the crimped, golden hillsides of California beneath me recede, I turned to my friend for something, support maybe. But his head was reclined backwards and his eyes were closed in quiet contemplation. I saw in him that he was already at his destination, whereas me I had not left my place of departure, and nor would i for months to come. Unwilling as I am to declare it: I really did leave my heart in San Francisco. In the words of Paul Simon, I walked off to look for America. And what did I find at the end of the rainbow? For the first time in life, a true romance cut tragically short.