I'm with Anatole

It's good to collect things, but it's better to go on walks.

-Anatole France












out for a walk, Prats de Mollo

The urge to be some place

Prats de Mollo, France

"When I was very young and the urge to be some place was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.

When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.

In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job.

Nothing has worked. . . In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable."

- John Steinbeck

To Travel

Guerson over at Our Big European Adventure posted excerpts from Javier Reverte's Vagabundo en Africa in a post titled To Travel.

I can't help but post a quick translation of a few lines. Here's Javier Reverte, on travel:

Travelling extends your life, fills it with faces and scenery..... When you travel, your convictions fall as easily as eyeglasses; it's just that it's harder to put them back in their place.

Wait, it gets even better:

And travelling is also a way of creating, because you retain all that you see and all that you hear, in the memory and in the retina, in order to later try to interpret it, as if you were an artist, a painter facing the palette, facing the faces and the shapes, a musician open to sound, to voices and rhythms, and perhaps in the end, a poet. Travel converts us into free beings; allows us to see ourselves paused in time while the world runs along beside us.

Makes you want to walk through your own house as though you were "travelling", doesn't he?

I've yet to read an entire book by Reverte, although El Río de la Desolación is sitting right beside me as I type this post, patiently waiting its turn in the reading line. Javier Reverte is one of few writers that makes language-loving me see languages as a barrier for just a moment -- as I wistfully regret not being able to share him with friends I know would be swept away in just a few paragraphs.

So you'll excuse the amateur translation.

If you've yet to discover guerson, she was born and raised in Brazil, is married to a Canadian, and is working on her PhD at the University of Toronto. She's in Barcelona doing a year's research right now (nice work if you can get it, huh?) and writes up her adventures on her blog.

A Taste for Adventure

This is, in fact, a post blatantly stolen from that upstart wanderer in Belgium.

But she found this book, and then she posted this quote.....and oh! oh! if she hasn't stumbled onto the wandering woman manifesto. I found the book on Amazon UK and eagerly await its arrival. Here's Anik See, from A Taste of Adventure - I'll never look at a plane flying overhead the same way:

Right now I'm sitting on a dock on the Rideau Canal in eastern Canada. I'm looking up, and in the sky there is the shiny glint of a jet airplane caught in the sun's grasp, pushing silently east; I'm thinking, there are four hundred people going somewhere else.

I'm hoping most of them realise the freedom of being 38,000 feet up and headed somewhere new. I want everyone on that plane to be on their way to a place they have always wanted to go - maps already perused and worn in the folds from curious fingers following streets, emergency cab fare handy in a coat pocket - but intending to walk everywhere, to soak everything in.

I want everyone to have already envisioned the park bench or alleyway or restaurant where they will sit or walk or close their eyes and taste something they have never tasted before and realize that they are finally here, that they have been waiting for so long and they are finally here.

The prospect of others experiencing a culture new to them, no matter how shiny or raw, makes me dreamy. Wouldn't that be something? A planeload of people going somewhere they've always wanted to go, doing something they've always wanted to do.

Jumping.



Anik See
A Taste For Adventure

Thank you, w-w!!!

The art of travel - Javier Reverte

Today's El País Sunday magazine(EPS) includes a terrific article by Spanish writer Javier Reverte, titled Un Adicto a Los Viajes.

His last two paragraphs, quickly translated below, resonated with me this morning, 2 days back from a wonderful, mind-stretching journey with a companion traveling outside North America for the first time in her 37 years:

The art of travel, in any case, supposes an act of permanent humility, because you discover that you are wrong more than you could have thought. Your prejudices disappear one by one and your principles become fewer, although they become stronger in quality. A good journey is the one that changes something inside you, and that teaches you, through the eyes of others, something about yourself.

And more than anything, travel requires a good dose of humor. You have to learn to laugh, particularly at yourself. Because if you learn the value of making fun of yourself, you'll have something to laugh at for the rest of your life.

Two travelers speak of home

I was lead back to a favorite essay recently, an open letter from one wanderer and traveler to another.

It's by Danusha Goska, who ......well, I'll let you discover her for yourself.

From "The Illusion of Protection: Two Travelers Speak of Home":

You mourn "always being on the outside, forever looking in." Are not your nation, your compatriots, and your home, then, those who are also? Outside isn't just an address; it isn't just the line you stood in to get your Canadian visa. It starts with the dictionary function, with definition. Too many grant acceptance only to others who are predictable representatives of a type, and can fit a prebored slot. People can become frightened, angry, and alien when they discover that I have an enthusiasm not part of the expected repertoire of a Polak from New Jersey. They suspect legerdemain, false advertising; they want to call the Chamber of Commerce.

The liberal who's pro-death penalty, the pro-choice Catholic, the African from Poland: all these definition transgressors risk home with their very identity. Find them. And find gay men, working class intellectuals, wheelchair athletes, women who are neither wives nor mothers, lone teen boys whose eyes light up when you say something true about the paperback peeking out of their pocket. Next, you must cherish them. Conventional etiquette will not referee here. You must heed your heart and honor invented holidays to build this home.

Wait, I can't stop there....a few more lines:

You ask: "Do we travel because we can't find a real home?"

I don't know. But I don't think travelers can ever again have a single home, except within themselves, if they allow travel to do what it can.

Oh, yes. And I'll leave you with this:

Travel draws out of us a person who couldn't exist in any other environment. When we leave, we say farewell with no guarantee we'll ever meet again.

You can read the entire essay, called "The Illusion of Protection: Two Travelers Speak of Home" here.
And find more of Danusha's writing on her web page.

Questions of Travel

What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

Elizabeth Bishop, from Questions of Travel

I've spent the last week making, changing and rechanging travel plans. For good or for evil, I seem to want to dream my travel dreams and have them, too. They call that
wanderlust, don't they?

I'll spend Semana Santa here hiking with a club from Salamanca. The following weekend my intrepid Salmantina travel companions and I take on Lisbon. In June, I join my brother on his first trip to Ireland, which we hope will include a visit to the Aran Islands, a glimpse of Grace O´Malley's castle and a quick peek at Leitrum, the county from which Timothy, the first American Corcoran, sailed against his will as a conscripted British sailor. July will find me sailing the rivers of Galicia, I hope, and in August, it's Oxford, for a week's writing course and maybe a chance to throw the odd pot. (Why am I certain any pot I throw will be odd?)

And you? Hurry now, que la vida son dos días y uno llueve.

Like minded travellers

A nomad I was even when I was very small, and would stare at the spellbinding white road headed straight for the unknown, and I shall stay a nomad all my life, in love with changing horizons and unexplored far away places, for any voyage, even to the most crowded and well travelled places, or the most familiar, is an exploration.

Isabelle Eberhardt
The Nomad

It's been a good week for finding like minded travellers..........

George from e-margaux.com posted my poem (gulp) and womanwandering's brilliant blog title in the Meandering Margaux blog (speaking of great titles), and declared us both "e-margonauts"! His comment also brought me a great find: e-marginalia, a travel e-zine that in its own words

"is fast becoming the proverbial campfire where adventurous, curious travelers collect to share the artifacts of their voyages."

Thank you, George, you made my day! I suspect you'll be running into me round that campfire. Lots of good reading to catch up on.

My walk through e-marginalia led me to Nana Chen, the personal site of one of e-marginalia's editors. I haven't made it through her writing, yet, or her paintings, but, oh! her photograpy: hypnotic stills and travel photos of Cambodia, India, Taiwan and Argentina.

And I stumbled across viatgeaddictes while wondering where to wander in Lisbon. (My Thoor Ballylee compañeras and I are headed to Lisbon for a long weekend in April. Tips? My first visit...) The site's only available in catalan and castellano now, unfortunately, ingleses.

At viatgeaddictes, I stumbled across the Isabelle Eberhardt quote above, which lead me to buy an e-book copy of the diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt, which will lead me to......