Notes from the Lonely Traveller

The world is a strange place.

It's full of a mass of anomalies, oddities and absurdities that it uses to keep us on our toes. We're never ever going to be sure what tomorrow brings, and even then, today might end with us understanding even less than when we got up that morning. For instance, Peru, unlike all the other nations it shares the continent with, doesn't generally have central bus terminals, with a couple of exceptions, Cusco being one of them. Another being that, in the city of Copacabana, Bolivia, there is an incredible concentration of Toblerone being sold in the markets and stores. Things like that, while bringing forth perhaps less-than-positive emotions about efficiency and neo-liberal globalisation, are what make stepping out the front door of one's home worth all the risks of harm or, heaven forbid, long-lasting change. They begin to teach you the roots of truth, of how things really are, rather than simply support the facts and statistics you find in books and media. They begin to enlighten you to different sides of things that you can't see on the one face of the TV. It also begins to teach truths about yourself, sometimes with painful clarity, shattering, not so much preconceptions of the world, but preconceptions you've made about yourself, which in turn adjust your viewpoint of everything around you. It is for that, that causes the greater amount of grief, ecstasy, confusion and profundity of travelling, the things that will last long after you settle back into our otherwise sedentary existence. Things will affect you, bash you over the head, that you will never have prepared for, that will sit with you long after the pleasure of a beautiful vista or a wild party have faded. It is for that reason that perhaps, makes packaged tourism one of the strangest things of all. Where one goes out the front door, with someone hold their hand the whole while, taking them out to see the things they think they want to see, protecting them from the possibility that something might happen that hadn't already been mathematically synchronized with the fantasy of the tourist. Like some idea of a corporate sex life: nothing but pleasure, in which your partner gets their orgasm from your credit card and neither of you got anything fulfilling about it because you only got between the sheets of the itinerary and the legal disclaimer. And maybe that's all some people want. It should be a relief to everyone else though, that foreplay can still be great without a schedule or guide, finding things out for ourselves, and never assuming that things are only as interesting as what you read in the brochure. Yes, the world is a strange place, and will continue to be so, providing us with truth, that, if we are lucky, will lead us all to exciting, interesting and fulfilling lives.