Travel is a surreal experience that at the time takes you so far beyond yourself that you tend to forget your-self entirely...it becomes this strange otherworldly series of events that someone resembling you experiences. After you return home and become reabsorbed into the everyday normality of your life it becomes increasingly difficult to believe it really happened at all. Fragments of experiences in faraway places recur in ones thoughts at random intervals; like walking the steep roads of new Delphi at night, and greeting an elderly man with 'kalimera' who replies with the correction 'kalinikta' and goes on to point out (in Greek) that the 3 greetings are 'kalimera, kalispera & kalinikta' (forgive my spelling). Or taking a taxi in Istanbul and offering the driver a tip (in order to get rid of useless Turkish cash) and he refusing to take more than his fare until you insist (without either understanding the others words). Every other taxi driver had completely ripped us off...
Travel is a mind boggling experience (and mind broadening too) when one travels to many & diverse cultures in one trip. We went from New Zealand to London via Bangkok (Thailand) and spent a couple of days there en route. My memories of Bangkok are of dirt & squalor; and constant pressure to buy all manner of unwanted products. We were hijacked by a tuktuk driver and went careening about the busy streets to some shops he had a deal with, and he wouldn't let us go till we convinced him we weren't buying anything! Shops by the million selling old stock unwanted by modern retailers in the west. River boats that take tourists like us through watery alleyways lined with ramshackle but quaint dwellings; markets selling hot food or raw fish crawling with flies... golden temples next to dwellings of utmost poverty; electric wiring strung like stale spaghetti flung haphazardly out the window... Bangkok was not my sort of place, but certainly interesting.
London felt like home away from home, on the other hand. I'd heard it was cold dirty & unfriendly, so wasn't expecting much; but it was none of those things. We found it pleasant charming and orderly. Much smaller (central London) than we had expected and we enjoyed walking the streets, or riding the buses. The weather was unseasonably hot, and Londoners were enjoying the sun in Hyde park, stripped to their underwear, sunbathing. We saw as many sights as we could cram into 2 days & then joined a Trafalgar Costsaver tour of Europe (London to Rome via France). This turned out to be more frantic than the tuktuk ride in Bangkok! We were either running through the Louvre in Paris at breakneck speed, and from there to the next sight, and so on; or sitting for hours at a time on a bus. My memories of the Louvre are of terror of being left behind in 14 kilometers of passageways, and of having to choose between looking at things or taking a photograph, because there wasn't time to do both. The place was so crowded we took most of our photos of the ceilings, as that was all we could see. As an artist, this was the most frustrating & disappointing of our sightseeing experiences.
Trafalgar Costsaver is correctly named, since Trafalgar are the ones saving costs; not their passengers. Their tour includes virtually no sightseeing (other than what you pass in the bus) and all their optional tours are really expensive. After our jam-packed full-on day in Paris, (all optional extras & hideously expensive) we decided from then on to do our own thing where possible. Then we started to have real experiences, and to find our way around new places with confidence, regardless of language barriers.
My memories of the TC tour are of grumpy hotel staff, terrible breakfasts, an excellent cabaret after a dreadful meal in Paris, rushing everywhere; no time to go get medicine when we caught the tour guides cold and got really sick; a different bed nearly every night, poorly laid out hotel rooms that meant you had to sit in the handbasin to close the bathroom door; and seeing (at breakneck speed) some truly amazing and wonderful sights! Venice was amazing... Burano had a quaint charm; & we enjoyed a wonderful lunch there. Florence is a blur, and Rome would have been too if we hadn't stayed on an extra couple of days after the tour. Tours have the advantage of seeing all the main sights in a short time, but the disadvantage of not enough time to do them justice.
We stayed in a hostel in Rome after the tour; it was great, and we had a large apartment virtually to ourselves for very little money. I remember sitting out on the rooftop patio eating a cheap meal & drinking cheap wine, and listening to birds chirp while eerie music played in the distance. Rome is amazing; most of the ancient buildings & ruins are in easy walking distance of each other, and we saw most of them. My fondest memories of Rome are of the driving & parking! The Italian driver needs to be confident and assertive; as do the pedestrians! Any space wider than a meter will have something parked in it... whether a motorbike or two, or a smart car...
In writing these thought the whole experience is becoming more real again, I guess it needed to be processed for my mind to come to grips with it all. Now I need a rest before beginning the next chapter...
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