Home is a state you can take with you
Traveling without a sense of temporariness is to live in a journey. Every city visited becomes your home, and in your consciousness, a strange belief settles, if only briefly, or perhaps forever: here I am one of my own. Our lonely planet and its people are my blood brothers and sisters. We are all made of the same life – just four letters of the genetic code – a formula. Maybe that’s why, wherever I find myself, I never feel completely foreign. With that feeling, I wander the world.
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I wander because at any moment I can change my trajectory. Nothing is temporary for me, because only I decide how long the impression, the city, the room, the love for the place, or the very settling in it will last.
Perhaps while traveling, a person should first learn not to take more, but to leave more.
Here is my backpack with seven kilograms of belongings. It contains everything I need if I leave for half a year, a year, or even forever. And every time at the airport, looking at huge suitcases, I ask myself: what are we so stubbornly carrying with us? The world does not disappear anywhere. Clothes can be bought in any city, cosmetics on almost every street, and cybernetics as much as the heart desires.
Perhaps while traveling, a person should first learn not to take more, but to leave more. Leave things behind. Leave the habit of being just a guest everywhere. Leave that quiet belief that somewhere there is a “real home,” and everything else is just temporary. Because maybe the real journey begins when you realize that home is not a place to return to. Home is a state you can take with you.
Africa again
At first, I chose Vietnam–Thailand. After a year of wandering in Rwanda and Kenya, I decided – enough Africa, I need to travel in the latitudes of a more comfortable civilization. The first month in Southeast Asia passed calmly and comfortably. I ate well in Hanoi. Most of the world’s backpackers – free solo backpackers – start their food tour from this moderate climate metropolis.
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However, I also experienced a small misunderstanding here. In one local eatery, I asked for food to go – I had caught the habit of sitting on the hotel rooftop terrace in the evening to enjoy snacks and beer. Probably non-alcoholic, but it’s not always possible to see the fine print…
Well, so what? The beer, like rice malt, was good and light, but the food – those dark green, almost black fingers had a strange smell.
Hurriedly stuffing those fingers into my mouth so I wouldn’t change my mind, I hoped to calmly enjoy the colorful city views. But the smell seemed to intensify and, as if, filled the whole space. I went down to the room, washed my hands, brushed my teeth – nothing helped.
The next evening, I returned to the same eatery and, using a phone translator, asked what they had put in my food yesterday? Instead of an answer, a round smiling woman gently replied with pursed lips: vau vau… almost in a puppy’s voice. That’s how I joined the dog meat (one-time) club.
I bought a flight to my favorite city in East Africa – Nairobi.
I didn’t stay long in Vietnam, I sailed around Halong Bay near fish farms. After flying to Saigon, I enjoyed the hustle and bustle of my favorite city on Bui Vien street and… I ran out of feeling.
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