The Exquisite Loneliness of Travel
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Photo by Kip Wheeler
Hey y’all,
I gotta say, Kip and Angela have been my travel angels.
They’re leaving in a couple of days and that means I’ll be on my own. So pretty please, send me some love in the form of writing back.
A few people wrote me letters after my last email, and that made me feel really good and connected to my friends back home. But even a short hey-things-are-great-digging-your-updates (at least I hope you do) note does the trick.
The mistake a lot of people make about travel is only talking about travel as an adventure. Of course, that’s true. Travel is as exciting and stimulating and educational and mind-expanding as it’s made out to be.
But it’s also hard.
Travel by its very nature is unsettling and throws people off-balance.
It’s vulnerable to be in a country where I don’t know where I am, where I don’t speak the language, don’t know the customs, or how to find my way around. I need help immediately on arrival. I need help getting around and getting what I need – like food and shelter.
That can be frightening, especially because I take pride in my independence and self-reliance.
And dare I say it, I like to be in control.
I don’t consider myself a “control freak” as the saying goes. Yet that’s not to say that I don’t like having a measure of it – or at least the belief that I have that measure (which nobody really does). However, there is no control when I’m far from home. There’s not even room for the illusion of control.
Traveling can also be very lonely.
Photo by Kip Wheeler
Years ago, I kept an email journal when I was on the road for a year, selling a book of original fairy tales out of my Beast all over Alaska and the West Coast.
Although my friends enjoyed the emails, my biggest regret was that my email journal was incomplete. At the time, I was writing to entertain and thus, was showing off.
But I regretted not writing home about the long stretches of gray – the loneliness when I wasn’t meeting all kinds of people, and the isolation of being in constant motion.
After a point, the only people I could really connect with were others who were also transient.
If I had included those times, I would have kept a more honest record of that experience. This was really one of the greatest and most challenging adventures of my life – and I had that experience on home ground.
Enough of that. Back to my current travels…
I knew nothing about Laos when I got here on Saturday. Kip said Luang Prabang was really chill, really cool, and that we’d enjoy it.
When I got to Chiang Mai, I didn’t expect it to be such a crowded city. I expected it to be more like Luang Prabang.
Maybe it was the happy shake we drank on our first full day here, but I fell in love with Luang Prabang on arrival.
This town has a charm and ease, a beauty and grace that’s irresistible and very romantic. The French influence is very obvious in the architecture here, especially our first guesthouse.
But what really wins me over is the intense presence of spirituality. Luang Prabang is where the boys come if they want to be Buddhist monks.
Whether they stay in that life or not, it is a way for them to get a better education, and many of the novices come as children.
I saw this in Thailand and India as well, but spirituality is such an intrinsic part of daily life, I see it EVERYWHERE. The devotion and reverence to their system of faith – whether Buddhist or Hindu - is truly awe-inspiring and commands respect.
Maybe because nobody is trying to shove their beliefs down my throat?
There are temples and statues on every block it seems, definitely on every street. I think every home and every business has a small shrine on the premises, and many “spirit houses,” a place for the departed to live and hang out.
Our first night, we heard a small group of monks chanting in one of the temples as we went past.
“Let’s hang out a minute,” Kip suggested. “This is the real thing.”
Photo by Kip Wheeler
Angela and I went in and sat for a few minutes. Kip couldn’t join us because he was in shorts.
Remember the “Please dress politely” signs I saw in Thailand? They are even more strict about that here, and want shoulders and knees covered if you enter the temple gates.
Luang Prabang is an early town. Last call in the bars – there is a pretty lively nightlife scene here – is 11:30, and everybody is in bed by midnight because most people want to get up in wee hours of the morning to care for the monks.
Every morning before sunrise, the drums start beating around 5:30am, and not long after that, lines of monks dressed in their orange robes and baskets come through the streets of Luang Prabang to collect alms before going to the temples for their morning practice of meditation and chanting.
The locals sitting in rows with their baskets of rice, and possibly other food, are every bit as much of a sight to see as the orange-robed monks and novices streaming past in their bare feet and their baskets to collect their alms.
It was a few mornings before I got up early enough to see them. It was well worth the effort.
The first morning, I followed them along my street and around the corner to the main street, and watched the variety of locals and some tourists serving the monks.
One group of ladies brought the offering to their foreheads before putting it in their baskets.
The further along the main street we went, the more obnoxious the tourism became. When the monks disappeared down the street lined with tour vans, I turned back.
But this morning, I woke early and perched at my guesthouse.
That was so much easier, much more relaxed than chasing down the same group.
Photo by Kip Wheeler