Browsing tag: reflections

I’m not gonna lie. Sometimes T drives me around the bend, and vice versa.

Travelling with a partner is a double edged sword. Travelling alone means no compromising, but conversely, no one to share the experience with. Travelling with someone else flips that equation on its head – and sometimes that’s a real challenge.

Accept your different travel styles

Learn what they are and how to work with them. T always needs entertainment, especially on journeys. I zombie out, watch the scenery, and doze.

One of you will no doubt be the one who comments on everything that’s different from home, and who struggles to adapt. Try your best to shrug off that lens, accept the local customs, and understand how the culture might be shaped by historic, social, and economic forces.

Take turns being sick

Take turns tucking each other in, hogging the toilet, going out to pick up food or in search of Gatorade/Revive.

Cultivate normalcy

Take breaks from sightseeing. Find a routine of some sort. Sleep in. Watch the latest Game of Thrones or a cheesy old movie.

Be patient

Most of all, make allowances. When you’re sweaty, sleep-deprived and starving, be kind to one another. Learn when to bite your tongue and when to be accommodating.

Got any more to add to the list?

Saigon’s stunning old post office

Traveller vs tourist. It’s an age-old debate.

Tourists, obviously, are the ones who cling stubbornly to the beaten path, wear knee high socks (apparently) and walk around with their noses in guidebooks. Travellers are the ones with dreads, who’ll sleep anywhere, who eat strange foods and learn local phrases.

So the stereotypes go, and so the battle lines are drawn.

It’s difficult to write about this without seeming to come down on one side or the other. But I’m going to try to dive in, objectively.

See, I’ve been pondering the differences between a holiday (or vacation) and travel. Cambodia deeply affected me, and some of the comments on my post indicate that my reflections were somewhat off-putting from the other side.

The way they were phrased got me thinking. No, I wouldn’t say Cambodia is top of mind for most people when they think “holiday destinations”. But what constitutes a holiday?

To me, a holiday is all about hedonism. Sunbathing. Swimming. Eating. Sightseeing. Maybe a spot of shopping.

Cambodia is hot (though I wouldn’t sunbathe there). There’s swimming to be done, though not in the main cities. Eating, certainly, and sightseeing. But Cambodia, for me, was not about holidaying, but experiencing. Taking a step back in time at Angkor Wat. Sampling the local food, which is simple by necessity, but none the less delightful for it. And yes, that includes seeing what life on the ground is like, if only in tiny glimpses.

I knew that I would witness hardship and poverty in Asia. Life is not always polished to a brilliant shine. I can understand why people might not want to see that side of it, though. My mother only likes happy movies; on the other hand, while I find it difficult to watch films about (or that include) terrible things – war, genocide, rape, terminal illness – I also find them to be the most rewarding, when done well. Think The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, The Reader, Boys Don’t Cry.

Yet we all have to draw the line somewhere. For me, it was the Killing Fields. I couldn’t stomach the thought of laying eyes on human skulls. For T, it was the Cu Chi tunnels, with their decades of bad juju (and I must admit, I have my own deep issues with small spaces). These are must-see tourist sights for most, but as it turned out, not for us.

Getting off the beaten track is something most of us at least pay lip service to. For a moment, I gave serious thought to booking ourselves a river tour, culminating in an overnight stay with a “sweet Vietnamese family”, according to the booklet. Something about the idea felt a bit off, though. As appealing as a local homestay might sound, the forced authenticity made me uncomfortable. (Meeting up with local Couchsurfers proved a better way to connect.) And while it didn’t end up working out, we almost signed on for a three-day motorbike tour that promised sightings not just of the stunning Danang coast from the mountains, but swimming in waterfalls and sightings of local villagers going about their daily lives (hamstrung, sadly, by T coming down with his first serious stomach woes). We missed out on that, but in hooning around Hue and surrounds on a motorbike, we at least managed to see plenty of real houses and real families in passing.

Tourist or traveller? In trying to draw the lines for myself, I came across this gem of an idea from Jetlag Manifesto – that tourists travel to escape the world, while travellers travel to experience the world.

Maybe at its simplest, holidaying is easy, while travel is challenging.

Does that sound condescending? I hope not. I LOVE holidaying. Most of my trips to date have been pure, unadulterated holidays; sunning and funning rate very highly in my books. I genuinely do not see travellers as being inherently superior to tourists. Some prefer the structure and safety of guided tours. Some prefer to brave the local public transport. It’s all about different styles.

For what it’s worth, I think we straddle the line, but probably still come down more heavily on the tourist side. Let me give you an example – right now, we’re in southeast Asia. I’m happy to brave local buses for getting around a city but I’m going to opt for a taxi over lugging our packs for any real distance and more comfortable transport for long journeys, and I’d pay for a bed any day over camping outdoors.

Do travellers have a monopoly on fun? Maybe tourists will never have an ‘authentic’ experience, but does it matter if that’s not really what they desire? After all, in the words of Anthony Peregrine: “There’s no moral or qualitative hierarchy of holiday pleasures”. What matters, as Joel Runyon points out, is that you make your trip memorable. (Amen.)

Only you can decide how to best achieve that.

Cambodia broke my heart.

It’s where I learned to cross the street as soon as I saw child beggars approaching from the corner of my eye.

The adult beggars, much harder to shrug off in the calm of Siem Reap as opposed to amongst the noise, lights and debauchery of Khao San Rd.

Tucked into a temple corner, a wizened woman cradling the bloated form of a young boy, his proportions all wrong – balloon head, stick figure body.

A dead dog in a stagnant creek. The most emaciated cows and chickens I have ever laid eyes upon. Skeletal would be too kind a word.

Thick, low-hanging bunches of power lines marring the beautiful, vivid Spanish-style buildings.

A rare clear shot of a Siem Reap building

A lifetime of World Vision ads on TV leads you to believe you understand what’s out there, but do they really penetrate through the layers of scepticism, indifference, fatigue?

No. What does compute is a hippie-looking American, who checks into your lodge just after you do, to a familiar cry of surprise and joy from the owner.  Later, you sit at the table next to his, where he chats to a local about his fundraising efforts. Articulating his dream of clean drinking water and good solid meals every day for their children. Attempting to come up with a number for this undertaking. That’s what it takes.

Personified, I think Cambodia would be that tough-as-nails woman who’s withstood everything life could possibly sling her way – divorce, cancer, bankruptcy, recession, depression, the loss of loved ones – but is still soldiering on.

One thing that one of our last couchsurfing visitors remarked upon was the fact that the clouds in New Zealand looked different. You know what? It’s true. So far, the skies in Thailand have been a source of fascination for me. The endless hues of blue, the vast blankets of white, and most of all, the long, low, straight lines of cloud that you’d swear spelled out words and sentences if you squint just hard enough. This is especially striking at dusk when they’re a rich, flat navy blue against a rosy sunset.

Even the moon looks entirely different. I’d never before seen it resemble the Cheshire cat’s smile. At home, the crescents are always vertical.

Everybody smokes. I’m not just talking about the locals. I mean the visitors, too. Is this a traveller thing?

Portions here are small. When dining out in NZ, I already find meal sizes there to be tiny, so this is no joke. Fortunately, my appetite seems to have shrunk a lot while on the road. Can’t say the same for T, though.

Travelling here is chaotic and confusing. You might think you’re headed to the bus station, but get dropped off at what seems like a random travel agent, until you realise it bears the same name as that written on your ticket. You might get transferred a couple more times. You might have no idea when to get off. But the drivers are pretty good at getting you where you need to go and making sure you end up in the right place somehow.

Scooters are everywhere. The variation in cars is interesting, too. In Malaysia most of the cars on the roads were really old models. In Thailand, late model sedans and utes dominate.

You really can’t rely on Google Maps in some parts of the world.

Weirdly, we encountered zero mozzies in Malaysia (a family member commented to T that the mosquitoes seem to be disappearing altogether. I remember sleeping in mosquito nets as a kid). There were quite a few bugs in Thailand, though, and I quickly learned not to venture out sans spray. We also saw plenty of dogs, cats, lizards,toads, and more. Our second resort on Koh Lanta was somewhat jungle-y, set among trees and bush, and the squawks of frogs all around after the rain was really quite remarkable.

Metal scanners at the entries to malls (Thailand). That was a new one.

At Customs, my passport always takes longer to process. I can only chalk this down to the fact that I was born in Malaysia, because otherwise T and I are on the exact same kind of passport.

Got any other thoughts to share about travel in Asia?

Since I have less than a month left in Auckland, Amber’s post on loving where you live struck a chord with me the other week.

As a nearly lifelong resident in the city of sails, I am intimately familiar with all its downfalls. But it’s still a fine city, and one I fell a bit more in love with again over the summer, in the process of introducing it to a long line of couchsurfers. (I’ll revisit this post once we’re back and update with my more worldly, informed opinion at the end of the year.)

Let’s get the cons out of the way first:

The weather

When we say you get four seasons in a day, we mean it. Sometimes we’ll rotate through all four seasons two or three times, even. I could leave the house in the morning practically perspiring in the cloudless blazing heat, and get to worth 20 minutes later cursing the sudden downpour that caught me halfway. Speaking of downpours, it rains far too much here, and summers are horribly humid. But at least it’s fairly warm! Temperatures range from about 10-25 degrees, depending on the season.

The cost of living

Housing, petrol, food, and anything else you can think of is expensive. The “great Kiwi ripoff” resurfaces in magazine and newspaper features every couple of years or so. We all shake our heads – and fists – for a bit, then settle right back in resignedly. I also bemoan the lack of free and cheap entertainment here, though Silo Park is doing great things on that front.

The transport

I walk to work, so I haven’t had to regularly catch the bus in over a year, and it’s wonderful. I have a rule against reading the comments on news articles, but this one basically sums up the state of Auckland public transport: “More evidence that those who plan our public transport don’t actually believe in it.” It’s unreliable, expensive and on some routes, infrequent.

And now, to the pros…

It’s beautiful

Don’t get me wrong, we have some absolutely hideous eyesores of buildings around the place (a “nicer Rio” was how our last Couchsurfing guests described the CBD). But otherwise, we’re pretty darn good looking, with beaches, parks, volcanoes, creeks and more aplenty. Crossing the Harbour Bridge always offers a spectacular sight, and rounding the cliffside corner right where the vista of Piha’s coast opens up is enough to make the heart swell.

It’s multicultural

I’m sure we have nothing on bigger cities around the world (actually, I KNOW we don’t, having met so many well-travelled visitors through Couchsurfing), but on a national scale, we’re definitely ahead. Cheap and cheerful ethnic restaurants and supermarkets are all over the place, and every year Diwali and Chinese New Year celebrations take place in the CBD, shutting down parts of the streets.

It’s close to everything

Realistically, in New Zealand everything is just a few hours’ drive away. Skifields? Lakes? Forests? Bush? Beaches? Fill up the tank and go.

And of course, I’m thankful for the other things I enjoy as a New Zealand citizen. Free ER visits (though until I met T, I’d never been to the ER in my life), cheap medical care ($5 prescriptions, thank you very much), affordable education (student loans for all), four weeks of paid annual leave (plus a bunch of public holidays) and so on.

ETA: I’m also very proud that we’ve become the first Asia-Pacific nation and the 13th worldwide to legalise same-sex marriage. Ka pai!

What do you love/hate about your city?