Traveling is lovely. Builds character. Of course, you have to travel the right way. You gotta have money, food, transportation, and proper amounts of luggage. I had a lot of trouble with luggage, especially. I mean, you have to plan what to wear and how you wear them, and you have to separate your fluids from everything else to avoid trouble with the airports, and you have to pack shoes and plastic bags and sunblock and a toothbrush and so on and so forth and these important things are precisely the kinds of things that you tend to forget when you're packing!
Anyway, for me, to travel the right way is to do it with as little luxury as possible.
I guess you need a little luxury. Two luxuries, to be more specific: time and food. Time, because if you rush through your vacations, you're not gonna get anything worth remembering. And food, because food is such a nice reflection of a people's culture, and you really have to eat as much local food as you can to absorb that culture and to put it inside of you.
Yeah, vacations are cool. I like it when I have to suffer a little bit, like when I have to go climb a mountain or get the bottom of my trousers wet because I wore the wrong pair for spelunking. (I guess I'm a nature freak at heart.) Also, riding jeepneys along undeveloped roads and small bangkas on not-so-calm seas and even questionable-looking vehicles with so many people on it that you think it's going to give when you put your heavy urban ass on it!
Yeah, this country is full of caves and mountains and beaches and endangered wildlife, and I realised that I have to see 'em all before I die, because they're so beautiful! Sometimes you just have to wonder whether those wonders were really products of plate shifts and other such random events. I don't believe it; all of it seems contrived somehow...
In other words, such wonders of nature make me believe in a God. Does it sound funny or extreme? Ah, maybe so, but you have to experience it to know what it's like. A sunrise on the stretch of highway, or the sunset on top of the mountain or from the sea, or rainfall in the middle of the forest. They're not quite the same when you're in the city. When you're 'one with nature' so to speak, it's all different. It's something that able urban humans have to appreciate before they die.
Even if you're not in the middle of a natural setting, I guess it's still cool. A city that's a stranger to you is just as amazing. Hotel rooms are lies! You have to go out to where the middle and lower classes reside. That's where the majority is, and therefore where the heart of hearts are! Ah, the aromas, no matter how disgusting, are things you have to smell! Frying things on the sidewalk! Smoke from cigarettes and questionable vehicles! Blasts of airconditioners from the open doors of stores! Statues and churches and decorative plants! And so on and so forth.
The details I remember are pretty weird, yes. But I want to go there again, where the heart of hearts are. I feel different when I go to different cities. It's not an escape, per se, but a costume that I wish to wear over and over again.
Man, I wanna go traveling again. Sigh.
