inner journey

Travel Tales #10
Inner Journey

This is the last story in this series. Which tale to tell?

Picnics in Tuscan olive groves. Rome by night on the back of a motorino. Sipping coffee in Sicily watching life go by...

Or Scotland, beautiful Scotland! Working as a gardener with an entire (haunted) manor house to live in. Looking out to Loch Ness through the kitchen window.

Walking in Darwin’s footsteps in the Galápagos Islands. Stepping over iguanas and blue footed boobies on land and playing with curious sea lions and shy penguins in the sea.

The fun of haggling for trinkets in markets in Ecuador, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

Searching for Rafflesia (the world's biggest flowers) in Thailand.

Or of cycling through ancient Buddhist ruins in Cambodia.

The irony of travel is that wherever we go, we encounter the same person when we get there, and it has nothing to do with the scenery.

I’ve travelled to beautiful places and felt unhappy, and terrible places and felt content.

Take that picture of me for example… Maybe I was reflecting on Buddha's wise words, or visualising the ancient culture that thrived hundreds of years earlier.

It's much more likely I was thinking about lunch, some stupid thing I wished I hadn’t said, or the next destination.

So why travel at all?

Years ago I took a different kind of trip - an LSD trip. I was staying with a friend in a seedy house in St Kilda (Melbourne) and we each swallowed a little pill and caught a tram into the CBD... In the middle of the day, in the middle of the week.

Why the hell we thought that would be a good idea I'll never know. The city was crawling with shoppers and suits.

Being on acid is like having the dial on all your senses turned up to 1000 and everything you thought you knew about the world and yourself dissolved, leaving you floating through a timeless now with no coordinates.

At one point we were sitting on a park bench in the middle of office buildings, when a businessman came up to ask if we were okay.

I imagine we must have looked up at him with hugely dilated pupils, looking far from okay.

I remember thinking it was very weird that he was wearing a flesh suit.

On the return tram a homeless woman struck up a conversation with me. It felt more like I was watching than participating. She was clearly a bit crazy, but in that moment I had far less grasp on reality than her, and I could tell she was relating to me as though I was crazy.

It showed me what a thin line sanity is.

I recently read (the extremely well written) Boy on Fire – The Young Nick Cave by Mark Mordue. It was fascinating to read about the post-punk Melbourne music scene 10 years before I got there, and get a glimpse into the wild beginnings of a rock icon and that same narrow line.

What's really interesting is the effect time has had on Nick. I hope he won't be offended when I say he seemed like a bit of an arrogant arsehole in his younger years. In his own words he says, (I had a) "shameless and pathological belief in my own awesomeness".

These days he's writing the most insightful, compassionate and tender answers to questions he receives on The Red Hand Files.

He says, "We should not attempt to return to a past that no longer exists, or seize upon a future that is forever beyond our reach, but should instead travel along our own inner axes to a more meaningful part of our present selves."

Even when we can’t leave the country, the state or even our house, we can explore our inner world and hopefully all become less selfish and more insightful, compassionate and tender too.

Happy travels!

Leonie x