the ageing traveller

*(Author's note: I thought this to be a fitting installment as it's my birthday today.)

I think I’m getting old. It’s something I never thought would happen.

There comes a time in every traveler’s life, the decision to take that leap of faith into the great beyond to find out what’s out there. This experience is different for everyone and regardless of the circumstances leading up to it, is a life changing experience.

I think my turning point was the day I stood on the front lawn of my house in suburbia, admiring with gleaming pride, the fabulous job I’d done at not only having neatly mown it, but having beveled the edges with my weed whacker. It was truly a lush, green, manicured sight to behold and envied by my neighbours. It was but a moment later, that the realization of how completely fucked up that was, hit me like a freight train. It was at that same moment I came to understand that Martha Stewart is the devil incarnate. As I stood there, trying to digest this epiphany, my ex (fiancé at the time) came out: “Nice job. It’s the nicest in the neighbourhood!” I suddenly had a vision – right there on my front lawn. I saw myself, 40 years into the future and I knew exactly how the rest of my life was to be played out. I saw it plain as day, as well as everyday leading up to it. Suffice it to say, my bags were packed and I was headed east, on a one-way ticket to Bangkok shortly thereafter.

After I had decided that living vicariously through the Discovery channel was not the path to self-fulfillment, I did what most people do when they make a life change. I made a toast to new beginnings, I welcomed the unknown and decided that age was just a state of mind. This was of particular relevance to me as I got a late start on my new beginning. I justified my agelessness by way of considering the 7 ½ years I spent with the ex, a stunted growth period. Besides, you’re only as old as you feel and, as I was to embark upon a journey of discovery not knowing what awaited me, I was just a babe in the woods.

With agelessness, comes a sense of immortality, of invincibility, and justifiably so. When you realize that you can, and you have decided to be the master of your own destiny, it’s a high one cannot put into words. THIS is what life is supposed to be about! Of course, at the time you have no idea what ‘this’ is, but that’s what you plan on finding out. It’s a great notion with its only fallacy being of Mother Nature not having been taken into account.

When I first got out there, the travel experience was a complete sensory overload. Everything was different; the tastes, the smells, the people, the culture, and even me. I was just along for the ride, trying to take everything in, trying to experience everything. The realization that a society can function on a completely different set of ideals and methods from which I was brought up to believe as absolutes, I found to be a fascinating, mind-opening experience. I found that I was able to tolerate, even welcome things I never would have tried nor tolerated in the past, in the name of life experience. 

Now I’ve done my fair share of traveling and shall continue to do so whenever I am able. The difference is that I don’t travel the same way as I used to. They say, with age comes wisdom. That’s how I console myself now that I’ve had to accept that I’m getting older. Things are not as they used to be. Actually, I’m not as I used to be. Mother Nature has a peculiar way of sneaking up on you, both mentally and biologically.

Gone are the days of sitting on overturned milk crates in alleyways, partaking in the local company and the local brew and drinking everyone else under the table. Well, at least the drinking, anyway. Nowadays, I’m already feeling it after a beer. Of course then again, gone are the days I decide to forgo a meal the next day for the sake of one more beer the night before at the local bar to keep the buzz going. Though it could be looked at as a definite sign of getting older, and thus your waning invincibility, but with age also comes maturity and wisdom and therefore my electing to embrace my new found status of cheap drunk.

Regardless of who you are or where you go, your idiosyncrasies have a way of magnifying themselves as you get older. You become less tolerant and not so willing to accept illogic and chalk everything up to cultural differences. I always used the saying ‘when in Rome…’ as my mantra as a means of trying to gain a better understanding and to reserve judgment. It’s got to the point where I cannot turn a blind eye to someone sneezing, wiping their hand on a dirty rag and then using that same hand to put the food on my plate. And why should I? I know I have let that same scenario, and others similar to it, go in the past and it hasn’t killed me yet, but things tend to gross me out a bit more nowadays.

I also no longer feel the need to prove myself worthy in the eyes of the travel gods by having to have endured some sort of travel hardship. When you’ve traveled as much as I have, you eventually get to the point where you recognize that just because you’ve opted for the 3-hour public bus ride for the equivalent of 50 cents to get to the next village and not hitched a ride with the 6 other people and four goats in the back of the pick up truck that took you 14 hours to make the same journey just because it was free, doesn’t make you any less of a legitimate traveler; that wearing the same shirt for 14 days in a row doesn’t earn you any merit badges; and that Nike sport sandals don’t necessarily cut it for every occasion.

I’ve mellowed, I’ve become less tolerant, and dare I say, I see my mother in me. Yes – I am getting older. I’ve come out of the closet to say that it’s OK and that although your approach to traveling may change, it doesn’t diminish in any way, the pure joy of the travel experience.