I can be lazy, though I have a genuine reason for being close to six months behind in this blog.
I went to Europe in 2008 and it was one of the first times that my eyes were stretched wide open to the world and one of those defining epochs where you realise how truly huge the world is, that you are not at the center of it, that you have much to learn and many long roads to walk, that there is more to life than work, money, buy stuff, repeat until you immerse yourself in a series of walls and roofs and a huge load of material possessions to the point where you have blindly convinced yourself you have attained some form of happiness. I had been doing it all wrong… it was an amazing, life changing experience, it was also the catalyst for years of personal, existential struggle, denial, anger and depression, but that’s for another time. It was all part of a huge growth cycle.
Anyhow, I was stoned one day thinking about all the things in my life and looked back at that trip, I realised, without the photos, or without talking to my friends whom I had travelled with, it had all become a complete and total dream. I know where I went, some of the things I did, people I met and saw, but overall, the months I was away had become a far distant memory, something I did some time ago. Those vague kind of memories were so blurry, so far from the soul crushing reality that is 9-5 city living. I couldn’t recount as much of it as I liked and I knew with time and evidently age, more of the already hazy memories from the trip would fade, fade, fade.
It was similar for my trip to Japan in 2009, I loved it, I loved the country, the people, it was amazing, but again I did not keep a journal and apart from talking with my ex-girlfriend who I went there with, it was another blurred memory of an awesome time mostly forgotten amid the chaos of ‘reality’ back home, the place I always seem to end up back at, all my fondest travel memories slowly being eroded away by the mundane regularities of my life.
So, three years without travel, an incredible desire to get out of and smash up every single thing that had become normal in my life, and I went to South America. I promised myself, again, that I would keep a journal, only this time I did.
This is why the blog is almost six months behind, because I write obsessively in my travel journal almost everyday, where I was, what I did, who I was with and how we did what we were doing, where they were from, funny or beautiful things they said, things that inspired me, things that made me sad or want to cry, good things I have seen, horrible things I have seen, what I learnt, what I struggled with – whatever. Its all in there. I can look back at it all in a month or a year or a decade and laugh or cry or look at what I learned and how I grew, things I achieved, forgot about or wanted to do but didn’t. It’s incredible to go back and read it all, realising how much you already forgot, what someone said, a place you visited or something strange you saw, having these passages of text trigger a world of colourful nostalgia that makes your memories even more beautiful and vivid in a way that your mind would not have ordinarily permitted.
Slowly, in time, I will update this blog and one day it will be finished, probably at the end of the year (given I go back home). I share everything with everyone in here, there are no secrets, no lies, its all raw and straight from my heart, how it was, is. I ramble. I go on tangents, I spew reams of information in enormous detail; I have no education in writing, I can’t keep it short or be concise. May one day.
Either way I hope you enjoy reading all this stuff, I hope you can take something from whatever it is I put online here and its of use to other people in their own way. I just didn’t want to be back in Australia in five years time lying down stoned, staring up at the stars thinking about how awesome South America was, but only been able to recount it all in a very ‘top of the iceberg’ type of fashion.
Snail pace blogger. (:
A beautiful photo of some cumulonimbus clouds in Salento, Colombia, one of my favourite places in the world. This is something I would rarely have the time or even thought to bother looking at when I am in Australia cause I am always so tied up in that mental existence centered around work and money. It is amazing the things you notice when you are living life at your own pace and no someone or everyone else’s.
Capitalist Fallout 