One World Insight Blog | Douglas "Las" Wengell

Traveler: Become Childlike

Some musings today on the benefits of travel in foreign lands.  The only comparison to the experience is seeing the world through the eyes of a child, rediscovering the things that we forget to see as adults.

 

The mundane becomes magical. Take ordering food, catching a bus, crossing the street, using the toilet, exploring a food market, noting the music at the restaurant, inhaling new smells, washing cloths in a hostel sink, bargaining with a taxi driver. Like a child, you piece together the world to figure out how it works. Your whole existence becomes a series of guesses, impressions, and little lessons.

 

Its not always “fun.”  You’re vulnerable. When you’re tired and defenses down, you come face to face with your internal resources, or lack there of.

 

You may be excited, bored, cranky, confused, desperate and dazzled all within one day. Just like a baby.

 

The best part. None of this requires much money. It’s much more about taking the plunge and showing up.

Traveler: Traveler, Slow Down!

The best advise I have been given is to slow down. It’s tempting when in Asia, where things are inexpensive and there’s lots to see, to move about so quickly that you never get to really know a place.

 

The whirlwind tour has a place. It’s exciting and entertaining. You’ll have a zillion photos. It requires a lot of planning, and expect logical hassles.

   

Traveler: Chance Favors a Prepared Mind, Just a little

Be prepared for the 48 hours ahead, then lot go of expectations! My favorite is an overnight train, landing in a new place in the early morning, leaving your bags at a restaurant, scouting around, finding accommodation and resting your head. Travel books are helpful to a point. The best way to make a decision is to arrive at your destination and see for yourself. In Asia, except for the most popular holidays, in the most popular towns.

Traveler: Communicating in China 软卧，上下铺

This is a big challenge, more anything else. Taxi drivers can’t read your map because it’s in English. You can’t speak the word either. This is true asking directions.

 

The used itouch I picked up on ebay has proved surprisingly helpful. There are Mandarin apps with canned phrases. You can show the display or it will speak the phrase in Mandarin.

 

Think ahead for the day and e-mail yourself the Mandarin you need, using an online translator. For example, I words “ soft sleeper, upper bunk” are now in my itouch, ready to show a ticket agent:

 

软卧，上下铺

 

No matter how prepared you are, invariably communication is lost in translation. When all else fails: Smile, bow and be thankful!

Traveler: Threading

The travel strategy I am practicing is outlined in a cool book I discover, Vagabonding. Rather than have a firm itinerary, you act somewhat spontaneously, moving from place to place, town to village, as the spirit moves you. Zigzags rather than lines. Curves rather than edges. I am reveling in the radical openness and discovery not easily practiced back home, where we quickly acclimate to familiar routines.

Fellow Travelers and a Superwoman Solo Biker

Moving on the tourist circuit, it’s inevitable you encounter fellow travelers. I have more conversations than I can recount. Here's a few of recent.

A young Finish woman studying biology and ecology, pondering whether to become a nun.

Or a German woman traveling solo for six months, complaining that “people back home are cold and it’s hard to meet people like when you’re on the road.”

Or a young Polish couple, who cannot find suitable employment in Poland, despite his graduate degree in engineering and her specialization in tourist. They worked in a UK factory to save money to make this trip possible. They are resigned. “We love our country but there’s nothing there for us. Maybe, one day, our kids but not us.”

Or two Hong Kong Chinese biking there way through Indochina. “China has made life harder in Hong Kong. Too many emigrants. You can’t afford to live there. There are no good jobs for people like us.”

Then you come across the truly amazing. Like New Zealander Kylie, who I met in Laos and is biking, solo, a woman, across Europe and Asia, from London to Auckland, taking boats where necessary. Her stories biking through Pakistan and Iran defy belief. Go girl!www.bugbitten.com/kyles

Mekong River to Laos River Crossing

New year, new country. Heading to Vietnam by land, so will have the opportunity to see remote Laos for a week or so. It’s a seven hour bus ride from Chiang Mai, Thailand to the border of Laos, where a Swede couple and I cross the Mekong to Huay Xai, Laos and board a slow going boat for a two day journey down river to the once French occupied cultural pearl of Luang Prabang. Will sleep at Pakbeng on the river.

The World is (First Hand) Flat

From my hotel room, I Skype Berkeley, Singapore and Vienna; online banking; portal into my US-based PC; download music; and listen to live broadcasting of the BBC and NPR. One world. Amazing.

Mao's Heavenly Night on The Great Wall

So enthralled am I that I resolve to rest my head on history. Nearly every half km is what was a watchtower, with space aplenty and windows hollow to the wind. A few more weeks and it would certainly be too cold. Having passed only a handful of people all day, no authorities and brilliant weather, if not now when? As the sun draws into night, I arrive at the Simatai Wall exit, just pass a 100m pedestrian suspension bridge.

We encounter a man at the exit, a small hotel owner who indicates that his place is just up the way, in the park. Some hot noodles and Shanshui, Tsingtao beer later, I borrow a blanket from the proprietor, while my companion more smartly takes a room. I hike past the Simatai exit, dark, steep, silent and exhilarating. The small headlamp illuminates my next step.

I greet Chinese photographers capturing the night sky, and ascent onward, past the exit I left a few hours ago, past tower after tower, and determine to reach the next mountain top I spotted on decent into the Simatai region. 10 pm. The top and end of this section. I locate a spot within a watch tower sheltered from the northerly wind. Candles from India illuminate my humble home this fortnight. I fall in and out of sleep, the Wall’s history at my back. Images and thoughts pass.

Far from the Vermont campsite where I began, I am still home. The strength to navigate between worlds, between walls, is a path less traveled. Boundaries sometimes must be respected but how seriously people take their positions, only to find themselves later in life on the other. Why not walk the distance between, and hedge your bet! No matter, courage is a prerequisite, at whichever watchtower you live, so long as you want to keep discovering new peeks. Experience is richer than worldly goods. The best things in life do not take VISA. This is the prevailing opinion of the backpackers I have along the way. That none – not one – has been a fellow American helps explain our alienated lives, comfortable in our own prison and threatened by bridges. 

I am in a land of authority and rules, yet I am defying them. Ironically, this is what China needs to take the next leap forward: creativity, risk taking, questions to the status quo. Herein lies one of the greatest questions. Can they make the transition when that’s not the paradigm here?

Asia. China. Empire. Great Wall. A soft howl, gentle breeze fills the void. I am riding a ball around an axis. If I don’t make it to tomorrow I will have lived today. Everyone’s journey is that of a hero. There are no short cuts. Courage is a verb. Clichés, the skeptic in me retorts. To the reader, perhaps. The question is, are you experienced?

Can you live the questions, and ride the uneasy answers? Reward comes the old-fashion way: hard work, fortitude and being brave in the face of adversity, whatever your circumstance. What we carry up the ladder of life we ride on the way down. Our most valuable assets compound with age, intangible annuities if we are so blessed: education, knowledge, discernment, wisdom. Honed by experience, they can provide us with the ability to reach toward a clarity of being, less susceptible to the capricious ways of this world. There’s a rub: no one can do it for you. No one can compensate for your fears. No one can move you an inch from where you stand.

At some point, like Ivan Illich on the edge of his mortality, we face our limitations and failures and misdeeds alone. Don’t wait; seize the world before it seizes you. The master game will be played with or without your participation, because no one can buy immortality. It’s not where you compare relative to others, ultimately, but how far you travel compared to where you start.

5:00 a.m. - Crescent Moon.

5:45 a.m. - Dawn

6:15 a.m. – Sunrise

I awaken high above the world, laughing that the Wall is beneath my back. It’s at least two hours before visitors might arrive.

The descent is slow, the eastern rising sun illuminating yesterday’s pass. Bach’s Cello Suites are commensurate with the magic of dawn. As I approach the exit, I encounter a pack of bustling tourists, smile and head down the stone steps to ground level. Shoe landing on the earth, one behind, between worlds, a moment in time, whispering good-bye to a symbol grand and audacious, bewildered and awe struck.

Seeking Americans Abroad

A business executive sent me this amusing World Citizen Guide, a primer to contrast the “ugly-American.”  If taken as a national metaphor, it’s instructive how America is viewed in the world. As I navigate my way through the Muslim parts of India, just showing up and being curious melts boundaries.

 

 Download World Citizen Guide 1

Traveler: Tourist vs. Pilgrim

In the high mountains of the Himalayans I meet older men who walk from temple village to temple village. They themselves say they are on a pilgrimage. “I complete my worldly duties,” said an erudite father-turned-yogi. “Now I seek.” The Aborigine call it a “walkabout,” where there isn’t a destination per say. You are said to keep walking until you are whole again. Muslims and Indians call it a pilgrimage, and they are everyone, sometimes in colorful packs along train platforms, heading to a sacred location that symbolizes spiritual wholeness. 

Pilgrimage usually calls for a journey to a holy site associated with gods, saints, or heroes, or to a natural setting imbued with spiritual power, or to a revered temple to seek counsel. To people the world over, pilgrimage is a spiritual exercise, an act of devotion to find a source of healing, a journey of risk and renewal, crossing boundaries literal and metaphoric, touching the land and feeling the earth beneath your feet. It’s process of regeneration and purification. The journey is almost always difficult, or it wouldn’t be.

Westerns have to create these metaphors for themselves. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going,” I’ve heard. Contradictions. You have to lose yourself in order to find it; solitude refines love; the road is the destination; yield to receive; be open to what comes your way.