It is now fifteen months, to the day, since I left home to start this trip and eleven months since I flew off to Peru from Madrid on my round the world odyssey which is pretty much coming to an end now.
I have been particularly bad over the last couple of months to keep this site updated and have still to write, at least a little, of my time in Cambodia, Vietnam and the Baltic countries, where I am now. But I did not want to wait before updating all of that, which will happen eventually, to give some idea of what my plans for the future five months are, given that this particular phase of the trip (the traveling around the world with a backpack) is now coming to a close. I am still not expecting to get back home before the end of October, so there is still a bit of time to go, but I will not be spending it as I have up to now.
In truth, during the last few weeks I have started to suffer a little of what is generally termed "travel" fatigue, which is in my case a kind of over-loading of the senses and capability of absorbing new experiences to an extent to which one becomes just a little jaded with exposure to new things. It was evident in Vietnam, which I crossed in a mere 12 days, something I would have never done at the beginning of the trip and with my arrival in Helsinki on the 20th of May and subsequent descent through the Baltic countries down to the capital of Lithuania – Vilnius – from which I write now has not really gone away.
Although it is a little sad not to be making the very best of these places, and I am conscious of it, I do take it as a positive sign that my backpacking days have come to a natural terminus and it is lucky that it has pretty much coincided with my planned ending of this part of the trip in any case. Tomorrow I will fly out to London and visit friends and family there and move on to Spain to do the same there. My arrival in Europe less than 2 weeks ago was a bit of a shock to the system but I am pretty much getting used to it now. I am certainly very much forward to seeing all of my family after such a lengthy time away from them all. It will also be the first time when I start sitting back and looking at the things I have been doing over the last fifteen months in a retrospective manner and as a whole. I suppose there will be some initial interest in how I have lived these experiences and just having to put these into words (which I have not necessarily done that much up to now) will force me to look back at the whole period as one in many respects.
I am aware that, although it might sometime seem difficult to leave everything behind and take off for more than a year, for many who take off the return and readjustment it requires can be just as difficult. When I set out on the last day of February last year my initial plan was actually to be back in Brussels by now – end of May in fact. As time progressed and my plans changed I have moved that return date to the end of October, but I never intended to keep on traveling and moving as I have done until then. As time went on, and the memory of my "previous life" - to put some term to it! - receded I realized that I would not cope very well with jumping immediately back into the roles I had left behind.
The more I wrote, particularly my personal diary but also what I would get round to putting on the Blog, the more I thought about sitting down at the end of it all and somehow bringing it together in a text which, by its very nature, would be different to that which I had written during the travels. It would serve also, hopefully, as a way of wrapping the experience up and moving on to other things rather than allow myself to hark back to what sometimes may have seemed a an idyllic life. The idea was also to establish myself, at least for a few weeks, in a place which was sufficiently similar to (my experience of) Europe, making a return that much less of a shock, but with sufficient particular characteristics of its own to retain a distinctiveness and novelty which would still allow me to feel not quite in Europe yet. A kind of half way transition point, like the decompression vaults used to make it possible for divers not to suffer the consequences of coming up to the surface too quickly.
After thinking about a variety of places I decided that Argentina, and in particular one of its major cities such as Buenos Aires or Cordoba, fitted the bill as closely as I could probably find. A very European – or rather Spanish/Italian cultural background – making it sufficiently familiar in its way but with a unavoidable South American streak and of course location, which still made it foreign. So I decided to head out there for a few weeks to work on this text – which is as yet quite undefined – but also improve my tango, which has fallen into disuse over all these months – and get a shot of cultural life which is vibrant and plentiful, particularly in Buenos Aires, and which has been one of the things I have sorely missed on the trip. So I am heading off to the southern hemisphere once again in July and will be back in September in time to join the celebrations of (one of) my sister’s wedding.
After this event, the return proper will only be a few weeks away. I have yet to make my mind up fully on how to carry this out but of one thing I am sure, it will not be on an airplane arriving in Zaventem airport as if this were the conclusion of just another trip. Having set off on foot, I have a strong predilection for returning the same way and, in so far as I can, retracing the steps I took when I began. At present my idea is to walk back at least from Reims, perhaps a bit before, across the fields of Champagne, which in early October will be covered with vineyards in their full glory (unlike in March when it was all pretty barren), across the Ardennes and into Brussels by mid-late October. There is something about going back slowly and along the same paths I took coming out, all those months ago, that is especially attractive and even rewarding. I’ll see how possible it is.
For now, there will be a bit of a break on the blog site perhaps. I will definitely update the text to bring it up to today (last day in the Baltics) and the photos will be coming on line steadily during the next few days, thanks to the indefatigable sir Victor who has kindly been uploading them from the CDs I manage to send to him once in a blue moon.
Otherwise, I will continue to write on the site, but it will not be in quite the same vein as up to now I suspect. I do not want to use this entry as a closure in any way – there will be time for that in October – but did feel it might be of some interest to those of you who have followed along during this time.
