I recently found an article I first wrote in 2003 for the Lakehead University student newspaper, The Argus, and then touched up again in 2007. It's a manifesto for why I travel so obsessively, and I think it still holds true. In these days when travel has become so difficult, it's important to think about why we miss something that is so important to so many people. Hope you enjoy it!
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| Contemplating eternity on the shores of Tso Moriri, Ladakh |
The
University of the Open Road
“Three kinds of men die poor. Those who divorce, those who incur debts and
those who move around too much.”
Senegalese proverb
“Not travelling is like living in the
Library of Congress but never taking out more than one or two books.”
Marilyn Vos Savant
I have led a fortunate existence
so far. Much of it has been spent
wandering the more remote corners of the globe with my backpack, or on an
overloaded touring bicycle, seeing for myself the human and natural diversity
of the world. When not travelling, I
have worked at a succession of meaningless jobs in various countries, saving
money for the next travel fix. There are people, my father among them, who
wonder what I get from such an itinerant, nomadic lifestyle, and why I spent so
much time obtaining science degrees which I seem destined never to use
professionally. I do occasionally think
about the question myself, and it occurs to me that I am pursuing higher
education at the University of the Open Road.
It is a liberal arts college, stressing breadth of learning across any
numbers of disciplines. The syllabus is
as follows.
History
Palmyra, Syria (in its pre-ISIS days)
For a history aficionado like
myself, travel has offered a plethora of pleasures. From the dawn of hominid history at Olduvai
Gorge, past the cave paintings of Lascaux to the rock art of the Central Asian
mountains, I have seen prehistory come and go.
I have camped amidst the gold-filled burial mounds of Scythian kings in
Kyrgyzstan and in the shadow of the tumulus of China's greatest emperor Han
Wu-di. I have picnicked on the Great
Wall of China and recited the words of Ozymandias amidst the melancholy rubble
of the Ramesseum. The endless sweep of
ruined cities in the Middle East—Petra's splendid facades, Baalbek's bombastic
scale, the perfectly preserved theatre of Bosra, Palmyra's vast extent set
alight by the sunset, the Roman cities around Aleppo which now house shepherd
families, the mountain fastness of Termessos—have taught me more about ancient
history than any course ever could. I have savoured sunrises and sunsets over
ruins from Macchu Picchu through melancholy Merv and marvellous Mandu to
sublime Angkor. Retracing the Silk Road
on bicycle has impressed on me the magnitude of the accomplishments of great
travellers and traders like Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and my hero Xuan Zang, the
intrepid seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk.
Despite my pacifist leanings,
battlefields have exerted a strange fascination on me, perhaps because, except
for the accident of being born when and where I was, my bones might now be
lying there among so many others.
Xanthos, where the men killed their women and children and burned their
city before marching out to certain death in battle not once but TWICE (against
the Persians and then the Romans) brought tears to my eyes for its fanatic,
futile heroism, as did Masada. The
Crusader and Assassin castles of the Levant, with their air of bygone bloodshed
and treachery, exuded sinister charm.
More modern battlefields, from Waterloo to Ypres, Verdun and Gallipoli,
along with the killing fields of Cambodia, Auschwitz and Dachau, filled me with
revulsion at the industrial killing machines that have benighted recent
history..
Geography
K2 at dawn, seen from the Concordia Glacier, Pakistan
All those childhood mornings staring
up at the world map on my bedroom wall, wondering what sort of places those
far-off romantic-sounding names—Bolivia, Patagonia, Tibet, Borneo,
Everest—denoted have been rewarded over the years. Our planet's incredible variety of landscapes
never fails to delight me. Mountains
have always had pride of place in my heart, the high ranges of the Himalayas
and Central Asia chief among them.
Panting breathless on lookout points below Everest, K2, Nanga Parbat and
Annapurna, admiring the superb vertical, glacially polished rock, is an
experience I can never get enough of.
Other, lower, peaks such as Aconcagua, Kilimanjaro, Mt. Kenya, Semeru
and Fuji have provided an opportunity to measure myself against them on foot.
Of course there is more to the world
than just mountains. Drifting down the
Nile in a felucca, crossing the gorges of the Yangtze and Mekong in Yunnan
province, following the infant Oxus through the Pamirs, swimming in the Indus
or cycling past castles along the Rhine, rivers have been another collectible
in my peregrinations. I have brought
rain to the driest deserts on earth—the Atacama, the Taklamakan, the Sahara,
the Australian—leading to speculation that I should hire myself out as a rain
god to drought-stricken areas in Africa.
Forests, from Japan to Chile to Nepal to Malaysia, all too often being
felled in unsustainable quantities to make way for farms and ranches, have
provided an glimpse into the endless struggle between competing species of
plants and animals. And glaciers, those
epic rivers of ice, have provided many a photogenic moment of deepest blue and
sheerest white from Argentina to Pakistan.
Physical
Education
Cycling into China from Pakistan, 1998
I came back from my first long
backpacking trip unhappy at how soft and sedentary I had become in eight
months. It was then I vowed to
incorporate exercise into my wanderings, and haven't looked back since. Long bicycle tours have become my favourite
means of seeing the world, and I have logged over 35,000 kilometres over the
years on three continents. When I'm not
in the saddle, I like nothing better than taking to my heels in the hills,
hiking my way through remote mountainous areas.
European cities are another perfect venue for walking, searching for
architectural gems and scenic backstreets.
Even when I'm travelling by public transport, just lugging my bulging
backpack in search of a hotel provides a full-body workout.
Architecture
Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, Isfahan, Iran
Seeing great buildings in flesh is
the only way to appreciate them fully.
Europe provides some of the great cityscapes of the world: the Gothic spires of Prague, the Renaissance
elegance of Siena and San Gemignano, the gingerbread facades of old
Amsterdam. Chefchaouen, Morocco is a
cubist vision of dazzling blue- and white-washed adobe. Arequipa, Peru boasts some of the most
distinctive Spanish colonial buildings in the New World, stately edifices cut
from the local gleaming white sillar stone. India contributes the elegance of Rajasthani haveli
mansions, the exuberance of Khajuraho's erotic Hindu temples and the austere
Mughal grandeur of the peerless Taj Mahal.
Perhaps my favourite, though, are the blue-tiled Central Asian Islamic
masterpieces of Samarkand and Bukhara, the legacy of beauty created under the
patronage of the bloodthirsty destroyer Timur.
Linguistics
Syriac script, southeastern Turkey
Nothing quite matches the thrill of
communicating successfully in a new language.
The first purchase in a shop, the first directions to the train station,
the first telephone call, are all significant milestones. I can say “hello”,
“thank you”, “where is”, “how much does this cost?” and “that's too expensive!”
in any number of languages from Thai to Farsi.
Travelling has also allowed me to use the languages I did study in high
school and university, French and Russian, to work in real-life situations. Having wine-fueled ethical debates in French
during the Burgundy grape harvest or discussing in Russian the intricacies of
Kyrgyz corruption in a warm yurt in the Tien Shan mountains added another
dimension to my superficial tourist's impression of those countries. Learning to decipher new scripts, from the
elegant calligraphy of Arabic to the rounded runes of Thai, the modernistic
angles of Korean and the maddening pictographs of Japanese, gives the
satisfying feeling of being another Champollion, unlocking the hieroglyphic
secrets of a long-lost writing system.
The triumph of puzzling out my first bus destination in Arabic in
Morocco remains vivid in my memory.
Biology
Young leopard in the Khwai River Conservancy, Botswana
I never had much time for biology
when I was a student. It all seemed too
vague and imprecise compared to math and physics. However, visiting the Serengeti Plains and
seeing a million wildebeest and zebras migrating past, I regretted not having
chosen zoology as my university major.
Coming face to face with mountain gorillas in Congo, wild chimpanzees in
Uganda or orangutans in Indonesia makes you keenly aware of how little
biological difference there is between all of us primates. Exploring the kaleidoscopic seascape of coral
reefs is possibly the most breathtaking experience available to earth-bound
humans. Hiking through a tropical
rainforest is eerie, hearing a universe of birds, animals and insects but
rarely being able to see them through the perpetual liana-enshrouded
gloom. Even birdwatching, an esoteric
pursuit whose appeal I never could see when I was young, has forced itself on
me after seeing so many colourful, exotic birds crossing my path while cycling
and hiking. A pocket bird guide and
small binoculars are now a permanent fixture in my luggage.
Anthropology
Kalash children in the Birir Valley, Pakistan
I am no Margaret Mead, but no-one can
spend time far from home without indulging in doubtlessly simplistic
observations of the people and cultures around them. The strict code of hospitality in Central
Asia, from Kazakhstan to Iran, made me feel ashamed of my own culture's relatively unwelcoming air to strangers. I was constantly invited into houses, yurts
and shacks for meals or to stay the night, with the poorest people often being
the most welcoming. Mountain peoples
such as Tibetans, Ladakhis, Aymaras, Kyrgyz, Sherpas and Berbers impressed me
by the sheer physical toughness required to survive in such harsh
environments. India seemed chaos
incarnate, and yet somehow the country worked:
trains ran, tea was prepared, shops did a roaring trade. Living in South America, the essential cheerfulness
of the culture brightened my spirits on even the gloomiest days. And I knew it was time to leave Japan when
one of my students explained that he didn't use most of his vacation days
because “I wouldn't know what to do with all that free time!”
Economics
Moneychanger, Hargeisa, Somaliland
Earning money in countries like
Canada, Switzerland and Japan, I can travel well, cheaply and at great length
in much of Asia and Africa. The abstract
principles governing exchange rates dictate that the prices of food, transport
and lodging, expressed in dollars, differ wildly, from the hideously expensive
(Tokyo, London, Switzerland, Germany) to the laughably cheap (India, Nepal,
China, Egypt), with all shades inbetween.
A month in Tajikistan cost me less than $100, and much of that occurred
on one night of expensive hotel and food.
In fact, I would have gladly paid more, if there had been more to eat in
the poverty-blighted pockets along the Afghan border. Comparing salaries and prices between much of
the developing world and the first world, one of the most common topics of
conversation with local people, shows the obvious economic incentives driving
so much migration to the rich West.
There seems little justice or logic in a teacher earning a hundred times
as much in Japan as in Uzbekistan, far more than the difference in purchasing
power can account for. It's easy to see
what fuels the pervasive petty corruption that merely annoys the tourist but
oppresses the local villager in the Indian subcontinent, Africa and the
ex-Soviet Union.
Law
Being arrested in a foreign country
focuses one's attention on the arbitrary nature of laws. In China and Tibet travel restrictions, often
obscure and unpublished, beset the individual traveller, and falling afoul of
them can result in fines and being sent back to one's starting point, or, an
even worse fate, being confined overnight in a grubby hotel room with five
chain-smoking Tibetan cobblers addicted to loud television. Ex-Soviet states offer a taste of venality,
with policemen, border guards and customs officials inventing regulations and
law on the spot. A request for $20
parking fine for my bicycle in Dushanbe left me giddy with laughter as I rode
off at high speed. A two-hour attempted
shakedown by a drunken off-duty border guard in southern Tajikistan ended in
victory for my patient obstructionism against his aggressive bluster.
Sometimes I have found myself the
victim of crime rather than the supposed perpetrator. Pickpockets in Nice, Istanbul and Indonesia
could have lived well for a few weeks off their takings from me. An Aussie con artist laughed his way south to
Sydney in my old Holden car which he had taken for a test drive, leaving me
with a walletful of worthless collateral.
However, when a professor of mine asked me after a slide show whether I
ever felt afraid of crime in remote corners of the world, I could truthfully
answer that I worried more about it in North America, a point borne out when
two audience members emerged to find their bicycles had been stolen.
Religious
Studies
Tibetan pilgrims near Mt. Kailash (photo credit: Serge Pfister)
I will never forget standing on a
rooftop in Skardu, Pakistan, watching the culmination of the Shi'ite festival
of Moharram. Thousands of men marched
into town from outlying villages, thumping their chests in thunderous bass
unison, bewailing the death of Imam Hussein.
A handful of young men then flayed their backs with a flail tipped with
razor-sharp blades, spraying blood as they flagellated themselves into a frenzy
of devotion. Equally blood-soaked was the
Filipino Easter parade I saw near Angeles City, with penitents marching with
crosses on their backs, wearing crosses of thorns; some would go on to have
themselves crucified. I much preferred
the Tibetan pilgrims at Mount Kailash, barreling cheerfully around the sacred
mountain to expiate their sins. The
handful of prostrator-pilgrims I came across in Tibet impressed me enormously
with their tenacity; measuring their length on the ground at each step, they
inchwormed their way either around a single temple in a long day, or across the
breadth of the country in a journey that could take years. The Kalash of northern Pakistan, whose
ancestors entertained Alexander the Great's troops, offered the sad spectacle
of a milennia-old polytheism being swept away by the twin tsunamis of tourism
and Islam. Japan's Shinto, on the other
hand, a practical and business-like polytheistic nature worship, thrives on the
sale of good luck charms, mostly for school examinations.
Philosophy
Meditating on eternity on the shores of Lake Pangong, Ladakh
Many an evening on the road is spent
swapping tall travel tales and waxing philosophical over what we've seen. I won't claim that Wittgenstein or Nietzsche
would have been impressed by any of the insights I've come up with, but the
words of an American tourist whom I met in Corfu have stuck in my mind. Before he set off on his 14-month odyssey
around the world, his parents mortified him by telling all their friends that
he was going to Europe “to find himself.” His reply was indignant: “I'm not going travelling to find myself! I know who I am; I'm going travelling to
enjoy myself!” When asked how he could
afford to spend so much time travelling after graduating from college, he came
up with perhaps the best response possible:
“At this age, how can I afford not to travel?” His answer holds true at any age, and
deserves to be the motto of my University of the Open Road.
