There is a vast gulf of understanding between those who travel and those who do not. Those who undertake journeys often mistake a lack of wanderlust for a lack of interest in the world, and though sometimes true, this is more often than not a fallacy. Meanwhile, those who don't travel seldom fall outside two categories; the idealists, who assume that travel is a Holiday (it is not: see my Kazakhstan entry in this series for details); and pessimists, who believe that the world is a deeply menacing place that should be kept at some distance (of the two, I tend to agree more with the pessimists, though not with their conclusions).
Put simply, home does not agree with travel. Your family and friends have a limited attention span for stories of dirt-track strangeness and amazing encounters with dark-skinned wise women; acquaintances even shorter. Strangers often make no pretence of interest at all. The inevitable upshot of this dichotomy of personal excited experience versus exterior apathy is that they will go to opposite poles, and you will develop two sets of glasses with which to view the world. The first, that of Travel and the wide world will often be relegated to memory, what was once the case. The second is called Home, and involves blocking out a majority of the travel lens in order to deal with the sanitised reality of home. You can always tell those who let the lenses slide: they are the ones stripping uniform from their backs while shouting “you can shove your job, I'm off to Fiji / Belize / Mongolia”...
Within a week or so of being back I was condensing my entire overland journey into 3 words: “it was fun.”
A honeymoon period ensued where every meal was exactly what my mind had been missing, every encounter a golden reminiscence of times passed, every night in my bed as good as the first. I took strolls up our hill, a panoramic vista of patchwork countryside that looks like half the county, and caught myself thinking I was 'glad to be back'. For someone with an intrinsic hatred of small town life and being trapped in one place, these are deceptively genuine thoughts. The lure of the familiar is powerful, drawing you back into the comfort zones you once occupied for long periods of time and have been secretly craving in times of dark, road-weary hunger.
Reality, however, snaps like a turtle robbed of its meal; pretty soon you tire of comfort and feel the need for movement. The road is often described as calling, but it's really just the stronger player in an uneven tug-of-war, where one team pulls while the other pushes... for just as the road lures, home gives you a mental shove out the door. Before long novelties wore off, I lost my appreciation for the magical white box in the kitchen that gave me food without asking for money and started to dream of hotter climes.
The exact moment when my soul drifted back into the sphere of imminent travel came while thumbing through a guidebook to Latin America at the library. All at once, a rush of endorphins and possibilities overtook me and I knew I wouldn't be there much longer. The formation of this idea takes you by such surprise that for a time your Home lenses slip, and the world slides into place once more. Times like these need to be carefully controlled, emotionally speaking: if too much of this possibility is let in then the reality of continuing at home seems an impossibility; too little, and you lose the spark of movement.
Of course, given unlimited funds, home would seem a lot more palatable to the mind; but with travel debts past and future mounting, it becomes difficult to avoid employment of some kind. And here's the thing: while home may give your mind a gentle shove towards the door, work will hold a shotgun to your head and kick you out. Conforming to any sort of work regime after the freedom of travel is a stifling experience, for the sense of being bodily trapped in a space you did not choose compares extremely unfavourably with the road. And for anyone in the catering trade, a word of warning: the hell you left can get a great deal hotter.
But to take a step back from this is to confront a fundamental paradox, namely that the world is made up of intolerably small places that people spends their lives dreaming of escaping. The trick is to find one that isn't intolerable to you.
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