Vietnam, A Second Act

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Traveling without traveling. Some of us are born with a crack in our souls. Itchy feet. Eyes that are unable to focus on anything other than the far flung. We were folded once, and then left like that for too long; there is a line inside us. I know it is there, because it speaks to another line, outside. They whisper at one another, gaze at one another. They will never rest until they are moving closer. There can be no doubt; the line outside beckons; this simple fold between land and sky. It is the answer to a complex equation, made trickier by topography, trees, the jumble of the city, and the relative density of air. It is a trick of the eye, brought about by the curvature of the Earth, muddled with atmospheric haze. I align the fold inside me to it, just as I point my deckchair to the sea. I have, at times, tried to ignore its call. But the horizon is demanding. Its desire to draw me ever closer gnaws at my dreams, crawls across those quiet moments where I should find contentment. It prises me open, like an oyster, and the fold becomes the crack that lets the world in. It ties strings to my insides, pulling on each one as it whispers its promises. I will pick you up, it sings, in my tumbling embrace. Rock you like flotsam on my waves. Throw you back on the volcanic sand where I found you, forever changed. It promises an undoing quite unlike any other, its fury matched only – perhaps – by the devastation of love. I stumble, squinting, bent out of shape, unable, quite, to find my way back in through doors that have grown narrower somehow, into rooms more careworn than I remember them. It unscrews the hinges on that word home.
I imagine that there was a time when people were content to live out short lives, circumscribed by the boundary of a muddy field and a scattering of low, smoky cottages, an inn, a tower. But I know that this crack in my soul is older than that. Written in my DNA is a story of migration: from hunger to plenty; from oppression to freedom; from poverty to promise.

Wanderers. Pilgrims. Varanasi, Bodh Gaya, Jerusalem, St James’s Way. The Grand Tour: the wealthiest of sons, the most insistent of gilded daughters. Comfort in a welter of trunks and bags. A chaperone, a tutor, a guide. A troop of servants in their wake. A boat to Le Havre, a trip along the Seine. Genteel mountaineering, Geneva, Lausanne. The Alps at Great St Bernard’s Pass, south to Turin, Florence, Padua, Venice and its canals. Antiquities in Rome, Naples, Herculaneum, Pompeii. Back north to Innsbruck, Vienna. Theology in Munich, palaces in Potsdam, old masters in Flanders before a boat back home. Take a step off the circuit to fall off the edge; Tangiers, Marrakech, Tunis, Istanbul, Damascus. Even when dictators and despots try to tie our bodies to the land, clip the feathers at our heels with stamps and permits, watchtowers, strip searches, our minds, unfettered.

The Next Chapter

1841; Thomas Cook fillsimages-contents-three-1 a train with temperance protesters, gives them lunch, and delivers them in Loughborough. 1850; train tracks crisscross Europe. 1917; seaplanes emblazoned with Chalk’s Ocean Airways ferry tourists from Fort Lauderdale to the Bahamas. 1919; Aircraft Transport and Travel flies regular services from Hounslow to Le Bourget in Airco DH16 four seater biplanes. 1927; Pan Am is born, America’s Airline to the World. 1945; the International Air Transport Association is formed in Havana; 57 airlines in 31 countries. The foot on the path is, however, only half the story. The road has its romance, as do the rocking waves that carry me to unknown shores. The thrill of waking somewhere new; the weight of a pack on my back; every thrill, every turn, every tedious moment of anticipation is matched, almost perfectly, by the joy of home. ‘Home,’ as Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote, ‘is the nicest word there is.’ This worn in, Sunday love for the place I know best – every nook, scuff, and wrinkle of it – is matched by the desire to leave it. Heimweh and Fernweh. There are days. I imagine that there was a time when people were content to live out short lives, circumscribed by the boundary of a muddy field and a scattering of low, smoky cottages, an inn, a tower. But I know that this crack in my soul is older than that. Written in my DNA is a story of migration: from hunger to plenty; from oppression to freedom; from poverty to promise.

Its desire to draw me ever closer gnaws at my dreams, crawls across those quiet moments where we should find contentment.

‘Now more than ever do I realise that I will never be content with a sedentary life,’ wrote Si Mahmoud Saadi. ‘I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun drenched elsewhere.’ Si Mahmoud followed the call of a horizon south across the Mediterranean; kif dens, marketplaces, the arms of lovers, to transformation inside and out. Impoverished, outcast, estranged, othered. Carried away by a flash flood in Aïn Séfra, just 27 years after being born as Isabelle Eberhardt in Geneva. US essayist Agnes Repplier died at 95 as she had lived, wreathed in tobacco smoke in her hometown of Philadelphia. Yet, still, she claimed: “The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.” Anaïs Nin; Cuban, French born, Californian, navigator of the heart: “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls.”

When I am on the road, the opposite desire wins out. I vote with feet and wallet for homely comfort. For moments of familiarity, for putting down my bags and sinking into something that feels not so far away after all. This world responds to my desire, shapes itself in my image. Just as home becomes a facsimile of every foreign shore, so every foreign shore, brick by brick, becomes a vision of home.

I arrive between billboards to a concrete concourse, self check in, then slumber across the face of the planet. I arrive in identikit, climb aboard the same bus and watch the same movie in a language I don’t understand to convince myself I am somewhere new. I sit in my room, surrounded by the comforts of home. I wander streets lined with coffee bars selling even better coffee. I turn back the label on a bolt of cloth, to find it was made in the same old elsewhere. I wind my tongue around a few test phrases, but the server with the smile comes from Melbourne. The crack inside me aches, and with every wave of it, the world grows smaller. Trees are felled to make way for it. Scaffolding rises on cliff tops to contain it. The streets are scrubbed clean of difference in preparation for its arrival. 1960s; the costas and the Spanish Economic Miracle, Afghanistan and the Hippie Trail. 1970s; Acapulco, St Tropez, Haiti, Burma, the Shah’s Iran. Just three people live on the Isla de Cancún.