A Place called Ginny

20th nov.
I watched Into the Wild yesterday. The true story of Christopher McCandless, a middle class graduate who wrote his college fund away to charity and set off across North America to live free and to live in the wilderness in Alaska. Although I was nowhere near as adventurous as he was, I did experience some of the things he did as a lone traveller. As the film nears it’s end he finds meaning in his travels. He writes in his book:

Happiness is only real when shared.



12 Nov.
On a solo trip 13 years ago, I Inter railed in Southern Europe for 30 days visiting 14 different places. It was the first time I ‘travelled’ and on my own. I was 19. Seeing Barcelona, O Porto, Venice, Prague, Fussen and other places for the first time with fresh eyes was liberating and awe inspiring. It was my first experience of a type of freedom I had never had before that. I came back a different person. I can’t remember a lot of where I lived and went but I can remember key experiences, though I won’t be recounting any here.

Since then I have been across North America (including NYC, San Fran, Washington, Las Vegas, Utah, Grand Canyon, South Dakota, Seattle, Louisiana), Tokyo, Schenzhen, Beijing, India (Rajasthan dessert, Agra, Delhi, Musoorie, Vancouver, Romania (Bucharest, Cernavoda, Constanta) Jerusalem, The West Bank.

Experiencing the historical architectural grandier of renaissance Europe and most of all Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, was enriching. The fields of Southern Spain and the hills in Tuscany but the beauty struck in Bavaria. With all the beauty that I saw, it was the experience of being scared and of loneliness that confounded me. The absence of sharing the beauty of things almost negates the existence of such a thing. I saw so many amazing things. The sunset from a train as we passed through a valley with a lake; the sun coming up in Lisbon when I arrived; in Bavaria the lake was so still it mirrored exactly the town across the water. You want to share with your family and friends and say nothing with the meaning, ‘just look at that…’. But there wasn’t anyone there.

I lived in Vancouver for a year. Having personal problems and losing identification with oneself in a foreign country was scary. I would say I lost so much that I had a second life after I got back.

In India I lived in the dessert on a ‘imperial’ campsite. It had a generator producing electricity and we even had our own toilet. I also stayed at grand house with stone floors and gardeners pruning trees. I lived on the top floor of a mountain on a mountain. We were above the clouds. I saw whole families living on a wheeled cart and 10 year old children, carrying babies barefoot running after our rickshaw for money. Abject poverty is not the same as poverty in modern western society. And the gulf of wealth is enormous. I went right outside of the mansion to see people begging.

Taxi drivers pushed against their vehicles for no reason, parents separated from their children, and the 8 metre high concrete wall that is seemingly everywhere; the checkpoints in the West Bank. I did not truly realize what freedom of movement meant until I was witness to people who had a lack of so much. I saw a massive bombed out building, perhaps a factory or the local electricity plant in Nablus. I saw a baby’s heart rate drop so much they performed surgery on the spot.

Coming back to Florence and Venice, places I adore for their architecture I am also at the same time less wide eyed. I see the general closeness of people and the lack of friendliness. The modern preoccupation for ‘fashion’. Large stretched out sunglasses, black and gold attire. I have to admit, Italian women do make the effort and can look pretty smart.

I guess I see more. Not just the Architecture or what kind of food is common but what society is like. As a tourist we barely get to grips with the geography let alone how the society operates and how the civilian lifestyle is. So we are there for the surface of things. We are there at most, for a postcard we once saw. We want to live in the postcard. We want to enjoy the local cuisine or the way mamma cooks it. Though when it arrives, it’s actually much more basic and less fussy than the import dishes we get back in the UK. I’ve see tourists take photos first and look with their own eyes after- if at all. We take a picture, we move on to the next statue. We look, but do we really see? Do we really care about Michaelangelo’s David or just insofar that we are to told to believe it was the best sculpture of it’s time in the west?

I am drifting. I think what I am trying to ay is that, although coming back here, seeing the churches and the buildings I have adored since I set eyes on them 13 years ago, I cannot give myself over to aesthetics. I am still governed by places where abject poverty lives and where children are shot at. Not where the point of sunglasses are for one to look good.

My point is a broad one. It encompasses the need to be in a place of comfort and where our priorities lye and the discourse of freedom and loneliness that, by being away from those two physical and mental places, can bring. Sometimes, these places live not far away from us, but inside us. To quote a scene from the film, Forrest Gump, he recounts to Ginny (the love of his life) the beautiful sky in Vietnam when the rain stops, the sun down on the Bayou, the stars in the water and the sun going down at mountain lake.

“I wish I could have been there with you” She says.

“You were” , he replies.

- J