Places Past

I just got home from five months out in the world. I rolled in at around midnight on a cold Toronto night and I stood at the same back door that I stood at five months earlier, and the old, profound thought went through my head: “Well, that was a long trip.”

I always liked Jimmy Buffett’s deal: “I took off for a weekend last month just to try and recall the whole year.”

I can relate. When you’re on road and sea every day for months at a time it is easy to fall into Jimmy’s next line: “All of the places, all of the faces, wondering where they all disappeared.”

Yes, I have a thing for the song Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes. There’s another line in that song that goes, “Reading departure signs in some big airport reminds me of the places I’ve been. Visions of good times that brought so much pleasure makes me want to go back again.”

Maybe. If you’ve had a really good time you shouldn’t want to go back because it means the police have a warrant out for your arrest. But I get Jimmy’s drift, and every time I’m at an airport, I look at the departures sign and count the places I’ve been to. By now, though, it has gotten easier to count the places I haven’t. There aren’t a lot left. That isn’t to say that I’ve been everywhere, it just means I’ve been everywhere that has an airport.

It’s easy to get blasé about it. Have you heard that Johnny Cash song, I’ve Been Everywhere? It made a comeback on some commercial or other. It’s a foot-tapping tune, and Johnny goes on an on in machinegun style, reeling off all the places he’s been. It sounds like a lot, and it sounds pretty cool, but me and my friends laugh ourselves silly listening to that song.

You’ve been everywhere, have you, Johnny? Oooo! Texas and California. Calgary. Washington? Wow!

Gimme a break. The Man in Black may have been everywhere, but only everywhere that a tour bus can go. After that, nada. And that’s not everywhere.

The sea has always had the mystique of travel about it, and it still does to some degree. Business travellers might think they’ve been everywhere, but catching the redeye to London so you can have a 9AM meeting and be back on the plane after lunch doesn’t mean jack. Me and a girlfriend once took an 11 tour into the Andes. It was a long ass trip to the top of a mountain and the bus was crammed with tourists. At the top of the mountain, we had lunch and the tourists took a few pictures. After an hour of that, we drove 5 hours back down that damn mountain. So basically it was an 11 hour lunch break. I wouldn’t call that an “Andes Adventure” anymore than I would call the redeye flight to London an “English Excursion.”

In the spirit of Johnny Cash, I will now go machinegun-style through the places that I’ve been to in the past five months. I probably should have blogged about them ad nauseum, but the truth is this: I forgot, or I was hungover, or I was working, or I forgot. See, if you’re having a good time someplace, you don’t think about blogging, you think about having the next good time. People that write too much about what they’re doing every day worry me as much as the people in a group picture that say cheese, then ask to look at the LCD screen. It just happened. Move on. The point of photographs is not, “So that’s what I look like at this very moment.” Their point is, “So that’s how bad my hair was five years ago.” With writing, same thing. You need to digest an experience before blathering on about it.

Anyway, an homage to Johnny:

I’ve been to Tokyo, Hiroshima, Dalian, Tianjin, Great Wall, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Hanoi (Hong Gai for the Commies), Hue (same), Saigon (Ho Chi Minh is a sonofabitch), Laem Chabang, Singapore, Bali, Komoldo Island, Darwin, Cairns, Hamilton (Australia; not steeltown Canada), Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania (no devils, they killed them all a long time ago), Dunedin, Christchurch, Picton, Wellington, Napier, Tauranga, Auckland, Bay of Islands, Rarotonga, Bora Bora, Moorea, Papeete, Rangiroa, Nuku Hiva, Los Angeles, San Diego, Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan, Puerto Vallarta, Ft. Lauderdale, Princess Cays, San Juan, Dominica, Barbados, Devil’s Island, Alter do Chao, Parintins, Manaus, Boca de Valeria, Santarem, Fortaleza, Salvador de Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Punta del Este, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Cape Horn, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, Valparaiso, Fuerte Amador, Lima, Panama Canal, Key West.

And back to Canada. Right about now someone is calling me an asshole, which is why I don’t talk about vacations with people. When I go to a party, I have to be extremely careful not to yawn when some couple tells me that they’re taking a honeymoon to Hawaii or Tahiti. To me and my friends, that is no different than saying, “I’m stepping out for some milk.”

I often have to remind myself that I am lucky. Most men will never see the Great Wall of China, and not many women will take photographs of where the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy. Before I started travelling, Australia seemed like the moon. Now it doesn’t. The more you travel, the smaller the world gets.

That isn’t to say that I really know all of the places I’ve been to. I mean know them in my bones. You need to live in a place for a while to truly know it. I’ve done that in several places, but most of the others have been a sampling, a taste. But it was a damn good lick, I can tell you that.

Besides, it isn’t really about the places. Let’s say some guy comes up with a project for me that involves the geography of Alaska. Now let’s say that all of my Alaska footage has gone down the toilet or been lost by the idiots at Air France. No problem. I’ll pull out my stock footage from Chile, or Norway, or New Zealand, cut it together with some dumb classical music, and give it to you as an Alaskan souvenir. And you’d never know the difference.

Need a picture of northern Ontario? I’m here to help. I’ll give you some shots of the Canadian wilderness, beaver dams and all. You’ll show your friends, you’ll be happy, and you’ll have not the slightest idea that all of those pictures were taken at a national park in Argentina.

Do you want to go to New Zealand? It’s easy. Take a half hour drive up the coast from Vancouver. Pitch a tent. Stay there for a week and take a bunch of pictures. When you get home, enlarge the prints, put them on your wall, and label them ‘New Zealand.’ Anyone from Auckland that sees the photos will say, “Isn’t my home the most beautiful place?”

The world is funny that way. I mean the way it mirrors itself, not the way everyone thinks their home is the most beautiful place (that’s another thing about travelling; you get pretty tired of hearing ‘this is the most beautiful country in the world.’)

For the Earth, north is south and south is north. The geography is a mirror image, like when you were a kid and stood to the side of mirror. Lift your left leg and ta-da, the right leg goes up too, making it appear as if you’re floating.

Tahiti is Hawaii, Southern Chile is Canada, Norway is New Zealand, the Andes are the Rockies….oops.

No they’re not. Say whatever you want about the Andes, they don’t hold a candle to the Rocky Mountains. On that I can assure you. The Alps might. I’ve never seen them, so I can’t say. However, the Alps are crawling with Germans, Italians, and Swiss, so who the hell would want to find out?

See, it’s about the people. People are what make travelling interesting. A photo of Hawaii might look like a photo of Tahiti, and you’d get away with that charade for a while. But then I’d ask you about the transvestites, and your eyes would go blank. Because in Tahiti, being a transvestite is no big deal. There’s tons of them there. I once asked a Papeete local how to tell which women were actually men. He said, “The good looking ones.”

He was right. Tahiti has a load of good looking women. All of them are the height of runway models. They have amazing cheekbones, great tits, and legs to die for. Problem is, the lazy ones also have a patch of dark hair on the small of their back.

I have often said that it is not where you are, it is who you are with. I stand by that. If I am with my buddies Dave and Pete in some craphole, I will have a great time. If I am at the best nightclub in Berlin with some loser who complains all the time, I will hate life. This is why I despise going out with a group of people that cannot make up their minds on where they want to go. You’d figure they’d have learned it by now: if you’re truly friends, then it truly doesn’t matter. If the location matters so much, I have bad news for you: you aren’t friends.

This ties in with another Coyote Law. If someone tells me, “Ah, that town sucks. Nothing to do,” then I know I am in for the night of my life. This happens at least 9 times out of 10. No different than the people that say, “It’s a Tuesday [or Wednedsay, or Monday, or Sunday] and there’s nothing going on.”

Bullshit. Pure, unadulterated bullshit. The words, “This place sucks,” or “There’s nothing going on,” are reserved for the losers of society. These statements are tailor-made for the guys that think backyards and BBQs are the meaning of life, or for the broads that don’t want their boyfriends to drink too much at a wedding reception.

If travelling is about people, then travelling has taught me that people are the same the world over. There’s a segment of every society that wants to have fun, and there’s a segment of every society that doesn’t know how.

Case in point: Lima, Peru last month. Sunday night. I was working, so I couldn’t hit the city until close to midnight. Before heading out, all of the people I knew told me, “Nothing’s going on, this place sucks.” I’m instantly looking forward to a blow out. One of the locals told me, “It’s a Sunday, so nothing’s happening.” Now I’m licking my chops with delight. And guess what? It was a blast.

In life, in the world, there is always something going on. In every city with a population over a few thousand, there’s always a few dozen people that want to do something. It is up to you to go out and find them.

It’s nice to be back in Canada. This is the time where I hang up my shoes and barely see the light of day. Doing nothing for a couple of weeks is a great form of therapy. Call it decompression, like coming up from a dive before you get the bends.

Problem is, I can’t get it out of my head: all of the faces, all of the places, wondering when they’ll all appear. Not the old faces, but the new ones. The old ones I miss, and I pine for, but that is my private affair. But the new ones belong to all of us. The ones I haven’t met yet. The people that make my life (and yours, should you bump into them) more interesting.