Through the desert and with each other, the journey continues unabated.
I’m struggling a bit with the word “journey.” It’s one of those words that seems to have been slightly hijacked. You know, like “surfing” the internet. It would seem to have turned into more of a spiritual thing; “One man’s journey from rags to riches” or “a child’s journey of discovery,” you see what I mean? Its original definition is ‘The act of traveling from one place to another,” but it has another now: “A process or course likened to traveling.” I reckon if you looked hard enough you could probably find a Buddhist or Hindu word that matches the new definition or why not even make one up?
I’m ruminating (see what I did there) over this because my wife and I have recently completed a journey. It was an act of traveling from one place to another; we left the Southwest of England and arrived two years later on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. We did it, as much as possible, by car. The thing is that we also experienced a process or course that could be likened to traveling. A bloody journey.
It began late summer in a Thai restaurant in Taunton, England, shortly after we had been granted permanent resident visas for Australia. Our house was sold and we were winding up our businesses, we had nothing concrete planned for our arrival in Australia but knew from previous visits that we fancied the Sunny coast. I’d heard on the news that day a story about a company in London selling tickets for a bus to Sydney. It was to take three months and would carry 19 passengers. I told Kym about it and the discussion that followed resulted in two definites: We couldn’t travel with the same 19 people for three months, and why don’t we just do it ourselves.
We journeyed through 18 countries; we drove on the lowest road on Earth and the highest. We drove through deserts, crossed plateaus, breached mountain ranges and sweated in jungles while howler monkeys laughed at us. We crossed the equator, climbed volcanoes, followed in the footsteps of Richard the Lion Heart and his Knights of the Crusade. We explored Nabatean temples in Syria and whistled the theme to Raiders of the lost Ark as we walked into Petra. We sat on Lawrence of Arabia’s bar stool while drinking a cold beer in his favorite hotel. Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express in the same hotel. She was a surfer, true story.
We fought bureaucracy in India for days on end; we raised our hands above our head after driving into a military exercise in Syria… at night. A wheel fell off in Java; a lorry hit us in India. We had flat batteries in Mumbai and got a jump off a Tuk Tuk. We only had two punctures. We helped repair the outboard on the only ferry that could get our car across a river in Aceh. We span out from altitude sickness at 5,000 metres in the Himalayas. We trashed some banana trees getting stuck in the mud trying to find a wave. We never once paid bribes to further our cause. Seriously, not once. We got robbed by the mechanics in a Toyota garage in Hyderabad though. Really robbed, not just normal mechanic robbed. Jeans, sunglasses, an umbrella and a hatchet.
We called in to see a friend in the Alps and went snowboarding. We visited my Mum on her small Greek island. We spent three weeks traveling with a French family through the Middle East. Mum, Dad and three kids in a Land Rover with two roof tents on top. We popped in to Singapore to pick up a couple of boards from a friend where I’d left them on the way back from Indo sometime. Shared beers in a Muslim enclave with two Dutch cyclists who were following the old Silk Road. Rescued a lovesick French boy from the frustration and tedium of the Iranian consulate in Turkey and took him on a two day holiday. We stayed at Lena’s house in Southern Sumatra and she took us to see the elephant rescue center. We rented a house on Bali and all our European friends came and visited. Adi and Linda refused to let us pay for food at their sarong shop on Lombok after we’d promised that we’d be back two years before. The diminutive security guard at the abandoned resort on Sumbawa let us stay there and use the showers and toilet. An Italian girl, newly arrived on Bali was having an issue with a taxi driver, we helped her out. She worked for the UN and was currently based in Timor Leste. Of course we could stay!
I surfed. I surfed in Syria. Syria has 64.8 kilometers of coastline. India has a lot more and I surfed there as well. I surfed from Banda Aceh to Dili mostly alone, occasionally throwing sticks in to see how strong the sweep was or paddling from the middle of the bay out to the point to give myself a better feel for the setup. I got scared often, usually paddling across deep blue water but also by water so clear the bottom looked inches away. Sometimes just the isolation scared me. I surfed river mouths, beaches, points and reefs. I can’t tell you all their names, not because I don’t want to, well there is that too, but because I have no idea if most of them had a name. They are all little crosses on a map.
Occasionally waves led to altercations. One time it was because Kym doesn’t surf. That’s not what the argument was about, that was the cause. Through the binoculars I’d spotted a long left point. The closest I could get the car was about a kilometer away. I pulled up, grabbed my board and went to lock the doors. But hang on; a bag had to be prepared. Water, sunscreen, something to sit on, a towel, a book, maybe a snack. I lost it. But there was little to be gained from arguing so, in general, we didn’t. For the most part, we only had each other, and when you’re spending large chunks of time in areas where no one else speaks your language, it helps if the only person that does is still speaking to you.
The journey came to an end at our little slice of paradise here on the Sunny Coast. A small Queenslander in a beautiful paddock surrounded by rainforest. The journey continues unabated.
