Travel
” Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
Mark Twain.
My wife and I have always enjoyed travelling, but life sometimes gets in the way, the irritating requirement to earn a living and educate children are things that are hard to navigate away from.
In 1992, however all of those factors fortuitously came together when I got a job working for VSO in Papua New Guinea. My son was 9. Contrary to professional and family advice, which can be summarised as “ you must be mad” we decided to take the job and travel and move with him. The next three years, I believe, totally changed his outlook on; life, his self confidence and his aspirations. He was educated there and together, we learned one of the local languages, Papua New Guinean Tok Pisin. In his case taught in a school where 99% of the students were local he learned; faster, deeper and colloquially. We realised we should perhaps take more notice of his out of hours activities when cut up by an ex pat’s car he let fly with a barrage of invective in the local language that was interesting for a 10 year old. But acquaintance with an unusual language can have its advantages. We have been in Scotland around 20 years now. We have experienced the unintended exclusion of local dialect. If you live in the Borders, Hawick is impenetrable, Galloway Irish is challenging if you live in Dumfries and Galloway, but we have PNG Tok Pisin to fall back on when we don’t want to be understood. A conversation with a visiting English acquaintance on their first trip to Scotland (as we wondered why we had invited them in the first place) skilfully avoided commitment to something we did not want to do with them
“ Oh that is jolly interesting, what part of Scotland does that dialect that come from ?”
“ The extreme Southern part….”
PNG from the perspective of travel was fascinating, 870 tribes and languages some of the most spectacular landscapes you will ever see, a totally different culture but being there, being there together we also had the opportunity to visit the region and work took me a bit further. Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and numerous transits through Singapore.
Then for some reason, when we returned, the English education system required us to have our son educated so things slowed down for bit until he went to University. Our first trip was to Thailand, should have been Bali, but someone blew up our hotel the week before we went. That conversation with the tour company was interesting
“ Your hotel isn’t there any more …we have a nice safe trip to Thailand …” we went, we loved it and our Bank balance has suffered ever since.
I’ll illustrate some of our trips in that period further down the line if this takes off. Essentially we committed to saving like mad for one long distance trip per year. Work as the CEO of an international development Charity took me round Africa and India but that was a little frustrating too as often Alison my wife could not come with me. But occasionally she did.
Following me to a conference in Ethiopia is I think one of her life time “moments.” Not because the country is wonderful (it is) and the people incredibly friendly (they are ) but because she arrived after midnight in Addis carrying all of our spending money for the next two weeks and her driver got lost. She spent the next two hours in the dead of night being passed from place to place, at one point being accompanied in her car by a charming man carrying an AK47 assault rifle! She may have forgiven me for that but you’d need to ask her.
In 2023 things took a sudden turn and we accelerated our travelling. A loved one died, a reminder of our mortality and that this is not a practice run. The cruel part was that he was a traveller too and had just booked to travel after a frustrating period of COVID. We are now in our 70s and it was time to get on with it. An inheritance helped significantly and trips to; Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Turkey, Japan, Southern Africa, Thailand, Sicily and Laos followed, Ecuador and the Galapagos are booked. Having just moved house we are taking a little break until November. Predictably perhaps, we are very popular with our travel agents Trailfinders, who have been exceptionally supportive and Grace, our dedicated agent knows our needs and periodically drops ideas in our inbox, she has been a real find.
” Go round Japan on your own? ….Why not ? We can make that happen.” Four wonderful weeks at cherry blossom time, fantastic.
We like to share. So whenever we travel I do a “real time “ travel blog on my Facebook page, I must find a wider means of doing that but I’m lazy and not that tech aware. However we have our little band of followers. I have a relative in the States who unable to travel herself at the end of each trip says “where are we going to next ? ” To travel vicariously is better than no travel at all. This is helped by the fact that when I retired I decided to take a passion to the next level, this is photography and you can find all of my travel photography on my site – link below. I don’t sell my travel photos but I could I guess if people wanted them, I’m just conscious that some of my photos are of people and I know which are candid and which have implied consent. My photography passions are travel, street and portrait photography but ironically its the landscapes that sell most from my site.
So I’m going to try an experiment. After a chat with your esteemed editor I’m going to trial a travel column based on our trips. Starting with one of our most recent trips – Laos. We have travelled to Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia, this missing bit of South East Asia was an itch we had to scratch. It is a truly fabulous country. This will be in two parts. Part one will be the tourist experience and Part 2 will be some observations on the country itself, particularly the political and lived experience as seen through the eyes of our guides and people we met there.
Part one will follow shortly, part 2 about a week later.
The picture by the way is of an Ethiopian priest. He is giggling because I asked him for a photo and he posed very formally, but I tried to change lenses and really struggled to get the lens fitted. He laughed heartily.
The photo had two unexpected consequences. My wife has always pushed me to put my shots into competitions, but I felt a bit inadequate, this was the first I ever entered and it was to a portrait completion and it won first prize. The second consequence was that shortly after I took this there was a procession and it turned out to be the funeral of a very prominent nun. Dozens of priests one clearly much more important than the rest (when a priest drops to the floor prostrates himself and kisses the chap’s feet even as foreigners you kind of get the impression this fellow is quite important ? ) He then gestured to the group of about 5 people I was with. A priest whispered in my ear “ he is the Archbishop for the whole of the Ethiopian Christian Church.” Respectfully we approached him (but I didn’t kiss his feet ) he had broken English but passable “where are you from ?” I got in first
“ Scotland your rev…you gra…umm Sir “
“ Ah Scotland …” he beamed
He made the sign of the cross laid his hand on my head and said “ I bless you and Scotland .” My colleagues, all from England ….didn’t get a look in !
That’s travel for you .
Steve
Steve Sloan
FRGS LSWPP
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