Stars
January 20, 2009
I exhale gently and look at the stars.
I see so few now, before the sky was full of them.
That’s what I miss, the stars.
Kashmir, Baluchistan, anywhere where there wasn’t enough artificial light I could see them all.
People tell me the Milky Way in the norther hemisphere pales in comparison to what you can see in the southern hemisphere; it’s a shame I didn’t get to see it.
Identity is a fickle thing, drawn from what you do, but they say it’s who you are.
But, unless you keep doing the same thing you have to draw your identity from something within, otherwise your identity will keep changing.
A cliche, to travel to ‘find yourself’.
While you’re travelling you are a traveller, you talk to other travellers and often identify with them, but if you’re not someone who’s going to travel for the rest of their lives you’re just in a state of change.
Hopefully you come out of that state with some epiphany about who you are, what you want to do; from seeing so many different people gain some insight into yourself.
But I imagine that more often than not you’re simply left with more questions than you started with, completely failing to find the answers and fulfilment you were looking for.
Suddenly you’re thrown back into normality, it feels all the more unreal for it, what was once familiar seems alien, even exhilarating but at the same time frightening.
What do you do next?
The same choices you escaped from were waiting in the wings, they ask you the same questions for you to answer with even less conviction than before.
Of all the things I learned and experienced, the most important, the most like the epiphany I was seeking was that people are far more important than I believed.
I haven’t turned into a philanthropist all of a sudden.
Even though when I gave a small Pakistani girl a pen only for it to be snatched away by her father, ‘She has no need for a pen’, shocked me, it’s not my calling.
Most people you meet are inconsequential, but a few are very important.
They’re not even the people you might expect, many friends are like hobbies, a way to pass the time but ultimately meaningless.
Identifying the people that are important and dedicating them the consciousness they deserve is even more so.
Expecting your important people to present themselves to you is foolishness.
Though I am blessed enough to have met a few of my important people, most of them I couldn’t hang on to and a search for more is my next project.
What I find strange is how little effort is put into the people we meet, how much of a role serendipity plays in such an important part of our lives.
We choose what books with read with great care as to read a dull book would be a waste of time.
But we don’t take anywhere near as much care or put nearly as much thought into the people we spend our time with.
I’m sorry this post doesn’t make much sense if you’ve had no source of contact with me other than this blog, but if there’s one thing I’ve learnt in writing this blog it’s to write what I want to write about, rather than what’s most appropriate.
Lahore
February 6, 2009
I arrived at the Regale Inn still fuming from being ripped off by the tuk tuk I paid to navigate me through the crowded and smoggy streets of Lahore and loudly enquired “Do you have any beds?”. The proprietor led me in to a clean enough dorm room and explained the cost was 190 rupees.
“Surely not? I’ve had private rooms for 200!”
“Sorry sir, this is the price”
I haggled briefly, convinced it was ‘pull one over on the tourist’ time until a French chap piped up from behind his lonely planet “That’s what he charged me as well” which didn’t convince me that it wasn’t a tourist price but at least made me feel better about paying it.
Me and the Frenchman (whose name I sadly forget) assaulted the nearest, cheapeast, cleanest resataurant, or so we told ourselves, such a combination is in reality, unlikely. Over a cup of chai and the 800th plate of Daal (or so it felt) I’d had in Pakistan we asked the same barrage of questions every traveller asks every other traveller in a hostel. Where are you from, where are you going, how long are you staying.
As it turned out this particular chap was staying only the one day which left me with no-one to talk to tomorrow and reminded me that I should email the Dutchmen I met cycling down the KKH from China and tell them the address of the hostel like I’d promised.
It’s amazing how much more interesting the internet seems when it’s slower than cold mollasses going at 99.99% of C, I must have wasted an hour on it while acheiving not much more than checking my emails and signing on to MSN briefly, which was, admittedly far more than I was generally able to do at Pakistani internet cafés…
I flopped on my bed and pulled my lonely planet out of my handy-bag(tm) in one fluid movement. Pakistan was one of only two countries I had lonely planets for and although I’d originally turned up my nose at the concept as ‘akin to package holidays’ I found it rather useful.
Looking up the listing for where I was staying I noticed that the editor placed great emphasis on the rooftop. ‘What rooftop?’ I wondered to myself, I’d seen only the pokey reception-cum-internet-café and the dorm room, so I decided to go exploring up the unlabelled staircase, which after a tale from a traveller I’d met previously about exploring top-floors and finding drug-labs held an air of forboding about it.
I leapt up the top step and leapt into the bright sunshine of my Shangri-La.
Lahore? Nope, not been there, I stayed a week in the confines of the Regale though! City sightseeing has never been a favourite of mine and with the crowd at the Regale I felt no need to leave that rooftop except for food and (shh!) booze!
When I arrived it felt like everyone there was an overlanding cyclist, there must have been 5-6 of the buggers there all talking bicycle-shop and figuratively if not literally looking down their noses at bicycles with petrol engines.
I spent the better part of 10 days at the Regale just sitting on the roof top reading trashy novels from the library while overhearing other peoples conversations and interjecting with pithy, poignant and insightful remarks.
It’s a wonderful thing (from my perspective at least) that the common language of travellers is almost invariably as English, the Dutch, the Chinese, the Korean all yammering away in my mother-tongue, bliss!
While I was there there was a English chap of Indian-Punjab descent who was hanging around for a few months learning Urdu so he could do volunteer work in Afghanistan (as I recall); which was a testament to his will to do what he wanted as he’d already been to Uni for three masters before realising he didn’t want to be an academic. Another chap from England was driving every-which-way-but-home in a Toyota Hilux, and as a group we would draw a discussion out of the rest of the crowd on the roof top and before anyone knew it there was a debate going on as to whether you could objectively judge morals or whether travelling in a country really gave you a less biased opinion of it than reading a tabloid.
All told, even though I didn’t actually see much of Lahore, it’s one of my fondest memories of my trip due to the people I met and the time I had just… talking to people with a brain…
This is the only photo I have from Lahore for some reason, even though it was the most beautiful city I saw in Pakistan, this bookshop window struck me the most…