When I think of all the places I have been and am yet to go, I sometimes find it greatly exciting to leave my front door. Bilbo Baggins once said wisely, ‘It’s a dangerous business, going out of your door. If you don’t keep your feet there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to." Sometimes I open the door and merely put the recycling outside. On other occasions I have left home and ended up in Anchorage, or Angkor, or Lalibela, or taken the long, long road to Luang Prabang. This is the very path, I think, as I leave the kitchen with the heavy bag of newspapers and tins in my hand, to Cape Point on the very tippest tip of Africa. And, I caution myself, as I check my pocket for my keys, because - if I accidentally lock myself out who knows where I might end up - the path to Singapore, where not far from Fort Canning Park on the south side of the river there is a food court in which works a beaming woman with electric blue eyebrows, with whom I connected deeply over a mango juice, twice, two years apart. I can trace the steps from our living room, along the Corridor of Dreams lined with all the fearful masks we have collected, to a vast, dark, cave in Phong Nha Ke Bang national park in the middle of Vietnam called Tu Lan, which is the darkest place I have even been, and which is so enormous that you can’t even see the ceiling in the gloom, and if you turn off the headtorch and stand very still, you can almost see your heart beating through the blood-pulse in your ears, because it is so dark that your brain strains desperately to see something, anything at all.
Today I walked the Path of Recycling and ended up in Kathmandu. You never know what might happen when you leave your front door.
The plane to Doha was mostly empty, and the kindly check-in man found an empty row for me. I have explained before how much I love long-haul flights, but I had been looking forward to this one more than most. A busy few months have meant I've hardly been able to stop and catch my tail. I have many thoughts in my head, and when I don’t have enough time to myself they all stack up and squash each other so that I can’t see them clearly. When I’m up above the clouds, away from the endless emails and social media and people who like to talk, I can examine each thought separately, and then release it carefully out of the window before I move on to the next one.
Some people are surprised when they hear of my solo travels. They think it is an adventurous, dangerous thing to go alone, or that it is odd that Gareth and I have a relationship that doesn’t encompass couple-bound activities year-round. I have travelled with friends and alone, and there is so much that you miss when you are with other people. Friends take up a large part of my brain, so that I don’t notice other important things, such as the smell of Ethiopia, or the beautiful invisible-visible swirl of gin within sunlit tonic, or the private rear entrance of Angkor Wat in the dry jungle, where I found my solitary and epiphanous escape from depression, or that mysterious red-orange-green lake I once spotted when flying over Slovenia which I never found on a map afterwards.
The baby girl sitting in the seat in front of me on the plane squealed with joy every time we jumped into the air with turbulence. She was travelling with her parents, but she had the inner mind workings of a solo traveller, and saw things. There is an elusive stillness inside my head which is very hard to find, except on a long flight when the sun is brighter than usual, or in the space between sleeping and waking. Hurtling through the sky at 1,000km per hour is the only time I can stop.
In Kathmandu, I hailed a taxi to my hostel in the chaotic area of Thamel, and on the way I had to ask the driver to stop the car while I demonstrated a safety briefing of his seat belts. They had been impossibly wrapped around the mechanism of the folding back seats. His old Suzuki Maruti smelled like the early 1990s and when I finally extracted both belts and drew one out, it exuded a pale cloud of dust to match the thickness of the brown air outside.
The traffic was so bad that eventually I stopped him again and got out to walk the rest of the way. I hadn’t washed for two days and it was starting to show, in the close confines of a hot car. I was desperate to be cleaned and beered. There is nothing quite like the first shower and the first cold beer of an adventure, particularly after having been so pungent at length.
On the street of my hostel I found myself keeping pace with a seller on a bicycle with something in his panniers. “Ay cabaret! Ay cabaret!” he was crying to the shop keepers. “Ay cabaret?” I asked him. “What are you selling?” “Char”, he said, and smiled at me. He must mean charcoal, I thought. We walked together, surrounded by a choir of dusty yellow dogs singing the songs of Kathmandu.
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Or see more posts here: Get in the tuktuk, no time to explain
More on Nepal:The dusty dogs of Kathmandu - on my arrival into Nepal
The endless quest for a birthday beverage - I try to order a drink in Lahan, with mixed success
The tiger who took a taxi - on my first day in Kathmandu
Political unrest and an exciting trip to the airport - my journey to a regional airport amidst civil unrest
The road to Bandipur - is not as straightforward as it seems
Boiled alive in Bandipur - I visit a silkworm farm and discover the violent origins of the Silk Road
My elephant friends - I meet some unpleasant humans and some very important elephants
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