First World Problems

Okay, developed world. Are you ready for a spray?

Auckland sucks. And it sucks in the same way that Sydney sucks. In the same way Vancouver sucks. Toronto. Seattle. London.

You all suck.

Okay, it's just 48 hours, between flights and layovers, since I've left Colombia that I arrive in Auckland, but all is fair game for what The Solonaut does—compare cultures.

I must still have the pulse of Spanish in me after a month in Latin America, as I seek out a tapas restaurant bedecked in bullfighting posters, Picasso's Don Quixote and pictures of Salvador Dalí's moustache. I keep instinctively thanking the kiwi staff gracias. They must think I'm a wanker. The ambient music alternates between flamenco and Latin rhythms, and two pints in I'm really enjoying myself. Then reality intrudes, jolting me back to New Zealand.

Two suits sit at the table next to mine for a social post-work pint. And what do they talk about? Music? Women? Family? The party last week? Conjecture on the concurrent World Cup? 

Nope. They talk shop. Seed funding for the project. Strategic investment. Cost projections and data corridors and team management and revenue. In fact, within five minutes of sitting down, one of them fields a ten-minute phone call from his team to whom he needs to give direction, leaving his disregarded table mate to resort to phone scrolling from boredom. This automatous race of beings are the dullest, most boring people in the world. They bore each other and themselves and everyone around them.

It puts me in mind of a Valentine's Day I once spent at a restaurant with my girlfriend. Specimen A dating a girl at the next table fields a phone call for which he leaves the table, going outside to laugh, guffaw and gesticulate, as observed through the big restaurant windows, for fifteen awkward, uncomfortable and humiliating minutes for his relegated date as he presumably effused over news of his mate's new PlayStation. It was hideous. I didn't know who to be embarrassed for.

But the team management phone call is only a brief respite: Robot 2 returns to the present with Robot 1 and resumes discussion of seed funding, strategic investment, cost projections and data corridors.

If this happened at all anywhere in earshot in Colombia I was spared by my ignorance of the language. But believe me—it didn't happen. From the life-embracing, war-emergent Medellinenses to the Costa Ricans' identification with la pura vida to the huge festivities in Mexico celebrating the dead who punctuate life, Latin America is too vibrant with the understanding of what it is to live to fall ill to that infection of fiscal thinking at a tableful of food and beer.

But this isn't the worst of the modern social dining experience. 

Now, I'm old and grumpy. Generation X, who saw in the Internet, are in their mid-lives now, and the cohort we share with Millennials saw in "Web 2.0" social media. But there's a Millennial-Zoomer phenomenon, egregiously shared by proud X parents and Boomers, that does my head in: TikTok on speakerphone. At least when Facebook appeared it shut the fuck up. People might show each other pics on their phones and blurbs in their feeds, but it was relatively silent, even if it did introduce the unsocial phone gaze. But now... honestly... is there any such thing anymore as a restaurant meal in peace?

Every bloody time I go to a restaurant, which has been frequent as I'm travelling—everywhere—there'll be at least one table where someone has the need to share their boyfriend's/best mate's/daughter's adventures/pranks/performance on TikTok. Headphones and Bluetooth are too protracted for sharing so it's always on disruptive speakerphone—tinny, jangling, attention-demanding, table-invading, distracting racket. In the hands of complete morons it's blasted at top volume. It is the perfect storm of social technology, corporatised default settings, and 21st-century autocentricity.

I don't know. People lose touch with how to socialise, how to behave, how to just be. We're all just another algorithm in the silicon economy. It sucks.

Just go away and let me eat in peace.

The Proust questionnaire

Marcel Proust once wrote a questionnaire which has since been put to interesting people in literary magazines. Maria Popova makes a nice introduction to it here. I do not profess to be interesting nor that my blog is literary but, since I have my audience captive, as an intermission to my travel notes and purely for indulgence I thought I'd answer it myself.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

I have a good mate who recently invited me to his house for a night of whiskey and jazz appreciation. He was sitting on the couch early on in proceedings when his four-year-old daughter climbed adoringly over his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek.

He also said to me, "This period doesn't last."

What is your greatest fear?

Going down in a plane. It might seem odd, as I travel a great deal, that I am never entirely comfortable flying; I hyper-analyse every sound and bump during take-off and landing. I need to force myself consciously to relax.

I'm not a big fan of cancer, either.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Disloyalty. More specifically, failing a test of friendship.

What is your greatest extravagance?

Avoiding paid work.

What is your favourite journey?

When I was 26 and living in Vancouver, I got a sudden phone call from a friend and bandmate.

"Do you want to go to California?" he asked.

"What, now?"

"Yeah."

Pause.

"All right."

His mother had left that morning for a week-long cruise to Alaska and said he could use the car, a convertible Mazda MX-5, but fatefully told him "not for anything crazy like driving to California."

We had to be back before she was. We hit San Francisco that night and clubbed after hours to an awesome female DJ and impromptu drum circle at The End Up. We spent the next day in Sacramento at a bar discussing jazz with a pianist actually named Omar Sharif who, in the sixties, was associated with the Black Panthers (I still have his signed CD). We entered the relic-strewn Mojave Desert through Reno after the sun set, raced its rise into Vegas, and tried without success to sleep in the oxygen-saturated air of the Luxor casino toilets. In LA we hunted for Tom Waits haunts and venerated Charles Bukowski's grave. Then we sped non-stop along the Oregon coast to get back for a gig we were booked to play in Vancouver.

It was my first real road trip. In six days we covered 6,000 kilometres, driving in shifts, and slept a total 18 hours. I was hallucinating at the wheel from lack of sleep, and now that I think about it, I'm not sure that my mate had a licence.


What do you dislike most about your appearance?

Male pattern baldness. I have only one recurring dream: that I never actually cut the elbow-length hair of my youth.

What or who is the greatest love of your life?

This is close to the bone, so I will answer "what": writing.

And with that answer, I fail my audience completely.

When and where were you happiest?

In the arms of she previously not answered.

Second place is maybe picnicking on green grass under a blue sky on a warm yellow day in springtime Lucerne, evoking memories of childhood. Or that's third, I suppose; the childhood memories themselves must be second.

What talent would you most like to have?

Stubborn perseverance.

What is your current state of mind?

Tipsy, aiming for drunk.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

All my life I have made steady efforts to isolate and destroy my dissatisfactions with myself. To change things. In my twenties it was emotional dependence on others. In my thirties, to re-orient my life to a track from which I felt I'd become derailed. Currently it's my lifelong struggle with procrastination. I don't know that I ever truly succeeded at any of it, but I think, paradoxically, that such an outlook is both a healthy way to grow in one's life—in the vein of Socrates' aphorism, "Be as you wish to seem"—and an anxiety-inducing recipe for unhappiness.

There really is only one correct answer to this question: accept yourself. I defer all further comment to the Dalai Lama.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

The question is cruelly presumptuous. 

Prince Philip's answer resonates with me. When asked on his ninetieth birthday if he was proud of his achievements, the Duke of Edinburgh looked puzzled. "No, that’s asking too much," he said. What about his successes? "Who cares what I think about it. That’s ridiculous."

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Poverty, schizophrenia and genocide are beyond my personal experience, so I'll go with love, rejection and depression.

What is your favorite occupation?

Travelling alone and self-sufficient to unseen places with everything I own in a backpack, and writing about it. And having readers read it. Thank you.

What is your most marked characteristic?

Compassion. No, hubris.

What do you most value in your friends?

When I am down, broken, broke and desperate, homeless, hungry and lost, I have friends who would take me in, and have. This is the greatest measure of friendship.

Who are your favourite writers?

Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Bill Bryson.

Who is your favourite hero of fiction?

Augusto Perez, from Miguel de Unamuno's Niebla

Who are your heroes in real life?

Vasili Arkhipov, Daniel Ellsberg, Gillian Triggs.

What is it that you most dislike?

Noise. I'm really sensitive to loud distant voices, megaphones and leaf blowers.

And computers that don't do what I tell them to. I broke my hand punching a computer once.

How would you like to die?

Late.

What is your motto?

"To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom." — Bertrand Russell

Searching

I've long been fascinated with railways. Not trains, but railways. They're things that can spirit you away from where you are to places where you could be. 

Abandoned railways take you to times where you can't be. They are corridors back into history, connecting the present to places once relevant but since forgotten. To disappear down one of these isolated rights of way is to vanish into obscurity.

In my youth, when I backpacked around southern British Columbia and trekked the abandoned Kettle Valley Railway, hitch-hiking was my default mode of transport. On one trip I was picked up by a lady of about forty in a rented car. She was leaving her life behind, resiling from an interminable and rancorous custody battle for her 9-year-old daughter. Her character had been irremediably maligned in court, and she had lost her last appeal. I was shocked to think of what it must take to make a mother leave her child behind. She was philosophical but clearly broken by it.

I was just 23 and coming off the collapse of my own marriage. We were young and it was my first real relationship. We were together four years.

"So what are you looking for?" the mother asked. She was calm and kind. "Why are you out here on the road?"

I liked her. She was sincere and kind. I considered her question seriously but all I could come up with was a flimsy, "I really don't know." I was a bit unsettled, by both the impotence of my answer and at not having contemplated an answer at all. What unseen motive is moving me?

"I've come across a number of young men your age doing the same thing," she said. "Journeying, searching. And they're never really sure what they're searching for. It makes me wonder what it is." She paused reflectively. "I think maybe it becomes clear only later, after it's done." 

Now beyond her age then, I wonder if she was looking for her own answers. Looking back, had I been able to at the time I'd have answered her this: We have no idea what our lives mean. We just tell our stories and the meaning emerges, ethereally like consciousness emerging from our cerebral sweetbreads. That's why we tell our stories: we are compelled to find the meaning in our lives. 

I'm reminded of this conversation as I return to the abandoned Kettle Valley Railway, twenty years later, after the end of another significant relationship in my life. What am I doing? Am I looking for something? As young adults we are still weaving our tales; as old adults do we review them? Is this a manifestation of mid-life crisis? In our forties do we regress to our twenties to see where we went wrong?

Swindlers and the universal formula

I am a jaded traveller.

I have been approached by more touts, swindlers and con artists in countries around the world than I can recollect, sometimes avoiding treachery, sometimes being taken in, and I have learned to recognise them. They will try to steer the conversation, but if you pre-empt the answers they want then you control the encounter. After some practise, you can even have fun with it.

There is a formula.

1: They approach you.

You're always a target, as there's no avoiding looking like a tourist.

In Beijing, I needed to get to the Canon service centre to fix a jammed zoom lens. The building happened to be located in a touristy area with numerous high-rise hotels. A tubby Pekingese man standing on the side of the footpath like a bird plucking insects around a light addressed me as I walked past him: "Hello!"

2: They engage you.

A typical opening involves complementing or commenting on something you're wearing.

For me, it is always my distinctive hat. In Mérida, Mexico, one guy immediately recognised it as Aussie. "Hey," he called, arresting himself mid-stride from crossing the street. "You are from Australia, sí? Sydney? Melbourne?"

I took off my hat in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. One merchant pointed at my hiking runners, which are hopelessly stained from years of wilderness trekking, and called out in sudden eye-bulging admiration, "Nice shoes!"

My Pekingese friend's opening was: "You look like a cowboy."

3: They always ask you where you are from.

And be it Australia, Brazil or Singapore, the good ones will find something common to talk about.

Once, three months after a certain unpopular Australian prime minister was ousted by party machinations, an Ethiopian taxi driver asked me: "Is Julia still in power?" I laughed so loud at his adroit grasp of foreign domestic politics that I didn't mind him charging me double the usual rate.

The stupid and unimaginative ones, like my new Chinese friend, will say: "Ah, Australia! Kangaroos! Koalas!" attempting to conjure a camaraderie of trust by reciting a charm of the bleeding familiar.

"Earthworms! Ants!" I said to him.

He looked perplexed.

4: They are inordinately friendly.

Anybody might be friendly, but swindlers will offer help when you haven't asked for it.

A gypsy man standing near the entrance to the alcázar, the Moorish palace in Seville, approached me when I was loitering, looking for camera angles. To him I looked uncertain, which, to a swindler, is like blood in the water to a shark.

"That is the alcázar," he said, gesturing with a sweeping hand. "This is the entrance. Come, I will tell you a bit about it." It's a common ploy; they give you some generic history as they walk with you and then ask to be paid for their services as a tour guide.

In Beijing I had a piece of paper with the address of the Canon repair building written on it in Chinese by the hotel receptionist. He told me to ask someone on the street which building it is. I showed it to my new Pekingese friend. "Why, it's this one right here!" he said, pointing to the next building. "But why? There's nothing in there." I told him I needed to repair my camera. He almost jumped with glee. "I will come with you and help you!"

5: They will try to latch onto you.

In Istanbul, the carpet sellers always ask: "What are you looking for?" with an immediately ready response of: "Oh, I will take you there! Come on!" and stepping away quickly so you are instinctively compelled to keep up with them. The Turks are particularly good at this business and are hard to repel without some eventual element of arsehole-ness coming into it, either on your part or theirs.

I told the tubby Pekingese that it wasn't necessary for him to accompany me.

"But they don't speak English!" he protested (an untruth, but he was desperate not to lose a fish he thought he had caught).

"Maybe not, but they understand a broken camera."

6: They reveal their agenda.

If, like Bruce Lee fighting back Han's men, you manage to deflect all of these advances, you are ready for the reveal.

In Istanbul: "In Turkey it is our tradition to offer a cup of tea. I have a shop just over here, very close. I invite you for some tea." (It is a carpet shop. Prepare for some pressure selling trapped in the spider's lair.)

In Havana: "I know the best place to eat! I take you there!" (Havana has an extraordinary number of "best" places. These guys get a kickback for soliciting customers. On arrival they'll often ask you, if you'll buy them a drink for taking you there: "One mojito for me?")

In Beijing: "I am an art student. We have an exhibition at a gallery over here, and today is the last day. Come have a look. Just a few minutes."

I was blunt with my tubby Pekingese friend. "I'm not interested in art. I am here to get my camera fixed. Thanks for your help."

I was later approached by two art students in the same area who delivered all of the same lines. The following day in the Forbidden City I was helped by yet another art student. I subsequently saw a notice at a hostel that the "art student" scam is a common one, with warnings not to buy into it.

The heavy heart of the traveller

In Mexico, I catch an intercity bus to León from Tula en route to Guanajuato. It's not a direct connection, and we stop several times to pick up more passengers. At one stop, I watch through the window as two stragglers dawdle—a man and a woman. The man is wearing a day-pack and pulling a trolley-bag, which he loads under the bus. It becomes apparent why they are delaying boarding: it is a goodbye. They touch each other longingly and smile and hold each other in long hugs. The woman, dressed simply in a pink fleece top and Lycra pants, seems at one point to gently lecture the man, tapping his chest with splayed fingers as he looks at his feet and fidgets. Perhaps she is telling him to behave while he is away. She smiles and hugs him again; he returns her embrace, looking sombre. It is touching. I feel sad for her. Then the driver approaches the bus and it is time to go. She appears to wipe a tear from his face with her thumb, they kiss, and then... oh! It is she who is travelling! She boards the bus and he remains slumped against a post with his hands in his pockets as she takes her seat and the bus pulls away.

Madame de Staël said: "Travelling is one of the saddest pleasures of life." These are the moments of which travel is made.

Superhuman

There is a kind of pleasant, dreamy delirium to vaulting across timezones and wandering through airports. 

As the world operates around me I drift through it, outside of time, liberated from the tyranny of temporal physics imposed on other mortals. When tired clerks shutter shops and cafe staff mop midnight floors I am piercingly lucid. Between punctuated catnaps and confined three-hour sleeps my invisible body, released from the demands of time's agenda, orbits through spinning clouds of passengers, yawning zombie-like. 

It is the transiting circuit through the living of ghosts and mythical beings.

Ethiopia time

Ethiopia operates on the Julian calendar, not the Gregorian used by the majority of the world. It has 12 months of 30 days, followed by a short 13th month of five days (six in leap years). The year begins in Gregorian September. It is presently 2006.

The day begins at sunrise: our clock starts in the twelve o'clock position at midnight; theirs starts in this position at our 6am. So a clock running Ethiopia time always appears six hours fast. Or slow. Though initially confusing, this actually seems sensible – why begin the day in the middle of the night?

This could all be horribly confusing if the Ethiopians were not entirely prepared to use Western time with tourists. They essentially run two systems.

I think it's a shame the world didn't settle on the International Fixed Calendar: it has 13 months of 28 days, which operates much more closely to the 28½-day lunar month on which the entire concept of a month is based in the first place. Each month has exactly four weeks of seven days, meaning that the dates of each month fall on the same day of the week as the next month – the first always falls on a Monday, the second on a Tuesday, and the twelfth on a Friday. This accounts for 364 days in the solar year, leaving one monthless day (or two in leap years) as global holidays – Year Day and Leap Year Day.

The idea never got much traction. Religious groups objected that these extra days interfered with the pattern of the seventh day of rest. Strangely, the only institution that ever adopted it was not a country but a business. Kodak. The film company. It was their official calendar until 1989.

Murder in the airport lounge

I can put up with a lot travelling. Stinking bodies packed into a minibus. Questionable food and stomach cramps. Roiling potholed roads for hours on end.

But there are people in this world whom I shall throttle if I am only permitted a moment alone with them in a closed room: those people who discover a song they like and play it over and over. When it finishes they start it again. They like it so much. Isn't this a great song? Let's play it again. Oh, it's over so soon. I'll start it again. I could listen to this all day. Let's do that.

I have nearly twelve hours to kill in Kigali International Airport, Rwanda. There is one cafe, I am in it, and they are driving me out of it with this same bloody song. Here we go again, for the... thirteenth time? Fourteenth?

Have we met?

Writing a blog is a kind of baring of the soul.  We all are chameleons of a kind: we show different sides of our personalities to different people, and we do it selectively and in a controlled way.  Not so when writing a blog.  My audience is everyone and anyone, and I reveal myself haphazardly.  It is a freeing but forcible liberation.  Perhaps that’s how it has to be.

How not to panic

Backpacking is at times controlled panic.  Sometimes you’re running to catch a train on time or worried you’ve missed the right bus stop, but most commonly it’s the small and frequent moments when you open your pack and can’t find your mobile phone or your journal of meticulous notes.  Before rifling through your pack with adrenaline surging you have to take a deep breath and trust that you just put your passport in the wrong pocket or your wallet has sunk to the bottom.  Nine times out of ten it’s there.

On the tenth time, panic.

40 years old today

Hm.

Alright, I’m going!

Observations from the Sydney airport…

I’ve been a little wistful lately about leaving, but when I tried to dawdle through the Sydney airport I was abused with bad adult contemporary saxophone à la Kenny G from the loudspeakers as if the city was driving me out.  I am going on record to say it is my most hated genre of music.  How is it that saxophone can be simultaneously so John-Coltrane-good and so Kenny-G-bad?

Noise pollution

When you get an electrician out to fix your faulty kitchen light, he doesn't provide a commentary on the gauge of wire he is using or what size amp fuse he'll break the circuit with. You trust that you hired a qualified technician and he knows what he's doing, and he shuts up and gets on with it.

So why do aircraft pilots insist on giving us updates on the altitude and cruising speed and temperature and head wind and tail wind? Yes? We're in the air, right? You can tell me when we get there, and I'll probably already have a good idea of that anyway.