In my last post "Oh the Places You'll Go" I talked about all the reasons getting older, and embracing change, has been a great experience for me. The one thing I have struggled to hang onto, is the ability to travel. Travel, more than any other thing in my life, has shaped who I am today. There is something about having to squat over a hole in the ground to pee that makes you fee like you can do anything. But as I acquire more of the things that make up my life today (house, dog, two cats, etc), it gets harder and harder to do that kind of traveling. To tell the truth, my husband and I have been spoiled - for us traveling isn't a week on a beach somewhere (although that is awesome in its own way too), it's dedicating a chunk of time to immersing yourself in a foreign culture.
The year after I finished University I found myself floundering. The thought of trying to find a "career" scared the life out of me. So I found the perfect hiding place - I moved to Japan for a year to teach English. While I thought I was playing hide and seek with my future, it turned out I was actually being introduced to the first incarnation of my adult self. All by myself, on the other side of the world, I fell in love with being afraid. Does that sound strange? It's the kind of fear some people get bungee jumping or whitewater rafting - the kind of fear you feel when you are pushing yourself to your limits. Sometimes it is nice to settle in and feel comfortable, but if there is one thing I know for sure about myself it's that I will never be happy in a life that doesn't scare me a little bit.
At the end of a year I decided to come home to Winnipeg. People often asked me, if I loved Japan so much, why did I come home. There are so many reasons, and honestly I probably still don't understand all of them - I had a job I loved, my own apartment, a great boyfriend and some really good friends. In a way, I was running again - my boyfriend was talking about marriage, which I wasn't at all ready for. I was also starting to realize that I could spend my whole life in Japan, become fluent in the language, know the culture as well as the one I grew up in, and they would still always see me as a Canadian living in Japan. Or maybe, it was that I would always see myself as a Canadian living in Japan - either way, I wasn't ready to commit for life.
Ironically, within a six months of coming home I met the man I did eventually marry (Many years later). He had just spent 3 months traveling Europe by himself and also loved to travel. We shortly began planning, what will probably always be, the trip of my life. In the summer of 2007 we spent 4 months traveling India and South East Asia.
We landed in Delhi in early May and it was already 30 degrees at 6 in the morning. Just the heat was overwhelming, never mind the crowds, the smell, the cows, the stares. Even Indian people want to know, why India? I've said it many times, but India is a place of extreme contradictions. Yes, there are some extreme negatives that you will experience in India - but even those will push you to consider who you are when faced with the worst of life. On the other hand you will meet the most amazing people, eat the most amazing food, see the most amazing sites. I stood no more than 10 feet from the Dalai Lama, saw the Taj Mahal, and Mount Everest, went fishing in the Ganges, hiked in the foothills of the Himalayas, took a row boat at dawn down the Ganges in Varanasi - so I guess I would ask, why not India? Even the seemingly negative experiences, for the most part, I wouldn't trade for anything. We rode a bus with vinyl seats and no air conditioning for 12 hours, through the desert; my husband had to have minor surgery in a hospital that looked like something out of a World War One movie; and yes, I stepped in cow poo - many times. India was exhausting - because whether it's amazing or awful, it always takes all of your energy to truly experience life in India. The picture above, taken in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), tells the whole story - I am exhausted, but also happier than I can put into words.
After two months in India we were ready for some relaxation - so the whirlwind trip to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam that we had originally planned, turned into a month and a half in Thailand (most of which was spent reading in various hammocks by the ocean) and a couple weeks in Cambodia. Even that had it's ups and downs - we had to walk across the border into Cambodia, and in doing so were threatened by the Cambodian mafia (yup, that's right, Cambodian mafia). A bomb went off a block from our hotel in Phnom Penh - and one of the hotel staff members laughingly told us the crime had been perpetrated by Pol Pot, the former Cambodian leader who committed mass genocide against his own people. We saw Angkor Wat and the Killing Fields - so I guess you could say Cambodia is just as contradictory as India. Then we went back to Thailand, where we got engaged one night on a beach in Koh Lanta - and spent even more time reading in hammocks.
Traveling, more than anything else I've experienced in life, has taught me that sometimes you have to suck it up and take the good with the bad. Because if you let every frightening or upsetting experience get you down, you'd miss out on all the amazing things that are out there waiting for you.
It's been 6 years, and we are finally planning our next adventure - this July Sean and I will spend 3 weeks in Italy and France. I find the closer we get, the more I'm starting to get that feeling I fell in love with so long ago in Japan - that feeling of fear and excitement, at the possibilities that are opened up by the unknown. Aside from the food, the thing I am most looking forward to is the possibility that anything could happen, and whether it is ugly or beautiful it will be one more amazing travel story to add to the collection.
For more pictures from India, click here
