Sitting on top of his small bed, in his minuscule room, legs crossed in a
yoga position, Leonardo reticently endured the torture inflicted upon him by
the afternoon heat. He was shirtless, so he could see how the numerous sweat spots
dwelled across all of his chest and stomach. He also could feel the sweat
sliding across his cheeks, neck and forehead, sometimes finding a resting place
in his big, humid eyelashes. This made him blink with a lot more frequency than
normal.
He spent many afternoons sitting in his bed, like he was sitting now,
accompanied only by the incessant afternoon heat. He looked out through the
window and saw for the umpteenth time the sight of a clash of civilizations:
tall, western like buildings, meshed into the Arab city, crushing it. Maybe
those buildings look modern once, standing as a symbol of progress and change,
but now they were old and decadent, they denounced the country’s poverty, the
inadequate route of change. Westernization didn’t bring progress or prosperity
it seems. Leonardo much preferred the old Arab city, the Medina, with its Arab
constructions and its Arab traditions.
Leonardo opened his notebook and decided to write yet another entry in
his Travel journey, which now occupied at least a fifth of the black moleskin.
Today, he would write about people like him: travellers.
Traveller’s Log. Entry fifteen:
Travellers.
Contrary to popular belief, not all
travellers are alike. In fact, it is quite simple to distinguish between a few
easily identifiable sub-groups.
Type
number one: the Novice Tourist. Picture
this: a white dude with a pot-belly steamrolling down the street, eyes wide,
pointing out various anomalies to his cronies (a.k.a. his family), speaking
loudly and never letting his camera take a breath. This is the guy who has never left his home
country in his entire life. You can see him coming from miles away. To the
novice tourist, everything is new, and every single thing is to be compared
with “how things work” in his home country.
“But in America, we put ice in our soda pop!” You will often find this
kind of tourist in big European cities like Rome or Paris, but you will be
hard-pressed to spot one of them lingering in an obscure Arab town like
Tangiers. This is because most
first-timers prefer to play it safe (heaven forbid they go to a place where
they can’t drink the tap water!), so they find it better to just follow the
flock, and the flock will never choose Tangiers over majestic,
first-world-country Rome. Some obscure
city like Tangiers (“Isn’t that in the Middle East somewhere?”) probably
wouldn’t be at the top of a first timer’s ‘Places to See’ list.
Type
number two: the Occasional Tourist. Unlike the novice tourist (an overconfident
first-timer), the occasional tourist has a few trips under his belt. In spite
of this, however, he never really leaves his own world when he visits foreign
lands. He is more concerned with taking pictures (to later post on some social
networking website that substitutes real, live human interaction), than with
enjoying the experience in situ. The Occasional Tourist is also the quintessential
tourist, since he is the most common type there is. Walk through the streets of
any major European or North American city and you’ll be sure to find plenty of
these specimens roaming around. But journey to Tangiers and one of these little
guys will be a rare sight, although an occasional pack of them will still be
there snapping endless pictures and talking at 50 decibels above the normal
level of conversation (especially if they’re “Americans”).[1]
Type
number three: the Recurrent Tourist. Here we’re reaching the equator in what
comes to be the continuum of traveller types.
At first sight, these people are not very different from occasional
tourists. Yet, if you pay attention to detail, you can see they talk at normal
decibel levels, they try to say a few words in the local language every once in
awhile and their expressions are more serene. They don’t look so much like
confused, bumbling Aliens on a distant planet, awkwardly finding their way
through the complex infrastructure with a tattered map in hand. They are also, as a general rule, much more
respectful towards different cultures (Phrases such as “EW! I am NOT eating
that!” and “What’s with all those women’s weird headdresses?” don’t exist in
their vernacular). That is what travelling can do for you: it shows you that no
matter how different we are from each other, at the end of the day we are all
humans and, as such, we’re all made of the same core materials. In a nutshell,
travelling often reveals a simple truth: we have more things in common than
things that set us apart. The trick is
being able to see those things in common.
Past the equator we find type number
four: the hardened traveller (or what may also be known as the “seasoned”
traveller, if you will). I’m sure you’ve
all seen one of these guys. They’re the
stinky, scruffy ones, unaware and indifferent to the fact that their shirts
might as well be used to clean a toilet and their shoes appear as if they have
battled with a food processor and lost miserably. All physical appearances aside, though, this
is an interesting dude who can tell you crazy stories about “that one time in
Thailand when I was arrested for being caught in a protest…” This is the traveller whose spirit is to be
found in the gaps between countries and not in one specific nation. He often
feels more at home travelling than when he is not. Although his physical
residence is in a stuffy flat in New York, a spacious apartment in Rome, a cozy
cottage in rural England, or in a Victorian house in Kensington, his soul is
far away, somewhere along the road. His mind can only focus on the next trip,
craving the next boat ride, or bus trip, or trans-ocean flight. Once the
travelling bugs gets you, you’ll never be left alone ever again.
And
at the end of the continuum we have the fifth type: the king of all travellers,
the master of voyages, the prime minister of journeys, sitting on his wooden
throne. Call him what you want, but I shall call him Nomad. His soul is often
tortured, his spirit stretched across many locations around the world. Some
nomads keep their original nationalities while others embrace new ones, and
still some prefer not to have a nationality at all. Citizens of the world,
Lords of the road. Eternal wanderers. They are the heirs to the Ronin of feudal
Japan, to the Portuguese Navegadores, to the Pirates of the Caribbean, to the
knights of medieval Europe and even to the Vikings, ancient scourge of the
Northern Sea. They often forsake safety in the name of liberty; they are
prisoners of their thirst for freedom and craving for adventure. Such men and
women have been born to travel and they can do nothing to change that no matter
how hard they may try.
End of Entry Fifteen, Travellers.
[1]“American”
is a term coined for people from the United States. It seems to be forgotten,
however, that the term “American” encompasses a whole slew of people from the
continent of America (North and South), not just those from the United States.
The Traveller is listening to:
Hit the Road, Jack (Ray Charles, 1961)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyVuYAHiZb8
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