Recently in Travel Category

"Not entirely trusting this page to remain attached, I shall write nothing of consequence on it."

Trawling through eight months and six continents worth of notebook. Words written on the top of Austrian mountains; in Quebec hotel rooms where founding members of Godspeed offer clean towels while New York free jazz troupes rehearse outside my door; in Tangier where a cafe owner tells me of his previous life as a tenor saxophonist touring the provinces of Britain, and young hustlers train their kid brothers in the art of the graft. There are directions to the flat in Buenos Aires of two marvellous people in love, no longer together. Take the blue line to Plaza de Miserere. There are shopping lists for beans, cat food, soy milk and Jesse Ball's new book (eventually found in a Shakespeare & Co in Vienna, where I was actually looking for a guidebook for Venice but the only one they had was Venice: A City for Lovers, which did not seem appropriate for my mood). There are notes for a play. That'll happen. Somebody's paying me. It's about war.

There's a note that I want to buy the replica FIFA 1954 World Cup referee's jumper from the shop in Singapore Airport (it wasn't there on the return flight). Directions to barbecue pits in Texas. Notes frantically scribbled at a David Mamet lecture at UT and further lines from Ricky Jay's minor character in The Unit ("you're alive." / "a fault I share with all but the dead").

The words "DMX ('penis be out')", which can only mean in some hotel I'd been watching MTV news (though this story seems to be from much earlier in 2008, earlier than I'd even owned this notebook, perhaps DMX was just on my mind). Then there is a fragment of a conversation from a Canadian uncle, "the strange thing is that he likes the ocean". Followed by notes on fisheries strikes, my grandfather's fingers, and the legacy of Joey Smallwood. In a cafe, somewhere in Canada by the page number, a dreadlocked guy at the next table frantically searching for information about David Icke as the scion of John D Rockefeller Jr.

Thoughts on illness. On hospitals. On love and the ways it breaks. On freezing hands at the edge of the Mall in DC on January 20, "I was there" moments caught mostly in sound bouncing back off the buildings. I will tell my grandchildren, when they ask, about looking up the speech on the internet later, and agreeing that it was quite something.

Notes from the Venice Biennale, futile attempts to try to capture thoughts on so much art in so little time. Ends up just being the names of artists. Maybe I can google Pavel Pepperstein later and re-feel whatever that thing is that strikes you the first time around.

Addresses for gigs. For bars. For friends. For bands. Hotels and train times to get me from one pocket of not-home to another. Other than the odd photograph, the only evidence of what the hell I've been doing.

I thought I'd lost my notebook the other day. I'd left it on the floor of a client's half-height office after writing down a wireless key.

Realised I'd better start writing some stuff down. Now that I'm home.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.

-- Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales

My mother has wrapped her shrubbery carefully in hessian sacks. Snow coats everything. This is home, here at the end of the earth. This is where I slow down. The power is out, I'm writing on my remaining battery with assistance only of the light of a log fire. How very rustic. A sliver of iceberg melts into my single malt, Scottish coastal fire mixing with Canadian coastal ice. I romanticise a little, of course -- the plasma TV was on not half an hour ago, I'm still playing games on my iPhone. But let's just pretend for a moment we're rugged and slightly insane Irish fisherfolk, stubbornly refusing to be defeated by something so paltry as Atlantic Canadian winter. "Is this all you've got?" we'd shout to the wind, scooping up our abundant nets of winter cod with a defiant glee. We'd build our houses on the sides of cliffs, sail into twelve foot waves on our rickety wooden boats, throw down the nets we'd woven by hand with our whalebone needles. We'd laugh at it all. We'd be the masters of the ocean. The whales would be elsewhere, ever the more sensible species, somewhere down in Bermuda awaiting return on the warm currents of spring with a calm and sanity we ourselves would never possess.

Or we could be the masters of the strip mall, the jumbo-sized tin of processed sausage or frozen juice, the great Canadian diet of sugar and preservative. We'd spend our liminal summers watching wrestling on stolen cable, lines run down from the poles by uncles with usefully tall ladders. Salt fish in buckets, salt beef in buckets, salt in buckets. Cod tongues in oil on the stove. Always the smell of drying animal flesh, picked over by flies, stretched out in the sun. Tobacco, rolled into cigarettes by the hundreds, in the hands of everyone, always. Collections of Molson Canadian bottles from the back sheds of drunken neighbours, exchanged for deposit, exchanged for sugar and rented Nintendo. And then later, exchanged for Canadian Club, cigarettes snuck under bridges from older cousins, retreats deep into the woods far from the roving eyes of adult supervision. The rules that governed you at home would not apply here in your other space, with these other people. Your blood people. These ones wouldn't see the awkward little nerd with the bottle-base glasses and shaky hands so much as just a boy from somewhere strange, full of different ideas and different experience. A wholly exotic little Scottish other. Your time here would be something else. Eventually, we would have to go home. But not yet, not yet.

Now I watch the ocean do its thing, dare the water to tell me something I don't know; to speak something new with those waves that I haven't learned in all these years of coming here. Daring the Atlantic to tell you anything is almost always folly, but occasionally she'll give something up if you phrase your question just right. Get it wrong, she'll let you know soon enough.

Drain half bottle of scotch with friend returning from Mumbai gunfire. Leave Australia in midst of night. Arrive Frankfurt, sleeper train, Leipzig, leg of pig, bratwurst, beer, so much beer, autobahns, angry friends, high speed, blurring vision, snow-filled country roads and villages that should exist only in absurd postcards and quaint Disney musicals. Perfect children skip across the street with sleds. I try not to kill them with my car slipping down the ice. Pump brakes. Köln. Dinner with my father. Wolf Parade in basement club. Guns and Roses covers. No sleep. Autobahn again, blurring worse. I travel in the slipstream of trucks, hoping nobody will notice me in my American rental beast, surely the last Dodge on European roads. We could not find Chinese Democracy on sale in petrol stations so instead we listen to bad German radio and occasionally tinny laptop speakers until the battery gives in. I am accused of quoting from Adbusters. This makes me sad. Middle of the night. Obstinate GPS. In 900 metres, keep left. Recalculating. 86'ing, sadly. Frankfurt. Blink. No sleep. Buenos Aires. Excellent friends at airport, a smile that will keep me going for hours, a missed smile these past several months. A child juggles at traffic lights, a more impressive request for pesos than the old-fashioned window wash. Shower. Steak. My friend's band is playing, Diego says. They're on early. 2am. Okay sure. Heineken in Palermo bars, still unsure when the last solid sleep was. The band are not great; apparently the singer used to model for his paintings. Hostel rooms, quietly stumbling onto top bunk, the Chilean below felling forests all night long. 4 hours sleep. No coffee in this place. Stumble into San Telmo, gather up some pesos, become convinced the cash machine has only offered to loan me the money and is asking when I will pay it back. Wish I had learned a little more Spanish. No gracias! Walking, much walking, drinking mate in parks and then too much beer again in grungy cafes not so very different to ones from home, find a Melbourne friend's short story on display in the lobby of the national library, a science-fiction building apparently landed like brutalist spaceship in garden surrounds, wander drunkenly through shopping malls and forget about eating, pass out in a blur somewhere before midnight, skipping plans for dinner. The Chilean's at it again. I wake up and pick flecks of mate from my teeth.

The backpacking life is not for me, never particularly was -- surrounded by Australians and Germans asking where you've been, where you're going next. Skipping along the top of the world, a smooth rock on a flat pond, never sinking down with any satisfaction. I'm going where my friends are, where my family is, recharging, reshaping and shifting perspective. Thinking about not going to Brazil, where there will be a week more of this backpackerly bullshit, but after these 10 days with excellent friends in Argentina, fleeing back to Canadian family perhaps earlier than intended. My carbon footprint is monstrous, perhaps to be unearthed by palaeontologists exploring far-flung parts of Patagonia, postulated to be a travelling beast the likes of which the planet has not seen for millennia, and should not see for millennia more. Finding myself thinking about people I had not planned to be thinking about, cursing myself for that, for being unable to leave with the blank slate intended. Plates shifting beneath feet, as they always are, but a strong feeling that, upon return, configurations of friendships and life will be very different -- the past no longer a foreign country, but the past as Gondwanaland. The pieces the same, but you wouldn't recognise it without expert training. 2008 was snuck away from before it was fully done with -- actually, no, not snuck away from at all. I thumbed my nose and ran, hopped on a jet and brought myself here. 2009 will not begin until I return. This is the dead space of travel, a gap year for the soul.

More notes to follow. Vaya con dios.

so goodbye lovely train tracks,
and goodbye broken trees.
the devil poured his concrete,
across all our empty fields.
from shadows across our sunrise,
and sailed beneath our wheels.

so goodbye lovely warehouse,
and goodbye sleeping wheel.
your duty was a shining thing,
that fell away from me.

everybody gets a little lost sometimes...

The Silver Mt Zion Orchestra (feat. Tra La La Band with Choir) -- Goodbye, Desolate Railyard

In which is discussed - desolate railyards, my lack of french skills, new york from the sky, smoked meat, poutine, the reptile rulers of the world, the second coming in bluegrass, draft dodgers, frostbite, pants, stop signs, hockey, ice-walking, snowstorms, andy warhol's most annoying cinema experiment, breakdancing injuries

Leaving New Jersey, with an aerial view of the turnpike and the most absurd system of freeways and industry, the plane flies out over New York, giving you a view of the city you would otherwise pay thousands for on some touristy helicopter ride (or i guess you could become a SWAT guy and do it all the time, for nothing except having to shoot bad guys) - from Staten Island and Liberty's hypocritical welcome up through the city, over a sleepy Harlem and into the Bronx, my little Air Canada propellor-jet shows me the ground i've been tirelessly treading for the last two and a bit days. And then through upstate New York, over Vermont and Maine, winter glory and big nature.

You could tell when we'd crossed into Canada as the trees started speaking French. These were the trees and the forests of the Quebecois, a mysterious folk who never fly a maple leaf, are all effortlessly beautiful, nay, goddamn sexy, even in layers of winter gear, and who sniff at your paltry attempts to order a coffee without slipping into english.

It starts trying to get the shuttle bus. The voucher from the travel agent says Montreal Youth Hostel on Mackay St. Okay, I get that it should be Rue Mackay, but it takes me a good five minutes to figure out to ask for Auberge de Jeunesse. And I've already reached the limits of my French. So angry looks from frustrated locals are the order of the week.

The bus pulls me into the city through darkened warehouses and railyards that hum with post-rock gloom and apocalypse. goodbye, desolate railyard, and all of that. a city so strangely beautiful, coated in a gloom-soaked optimism. from that gloom grows real energy. there's snow down - the first real snow i've seen in years.

Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream. The irregular houses were like the broken exteriors of cliffs lining deep gulches and winding streams. Some were mountainous; some lay in long, monotonous rows like, the basalt precipices hanging over desert canons. Such was the background of the wonderful, cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city. But into this background were cut myriads of brilliant parallelograms and circles and squares through which glowed many colored lights. And out of the violet and purple depths ascended like the city's soul, sound and odors and thrills that make up the civic body. There arose the breath of gaiety unrestrained, of love, of hate, of all the passions that man can know. There below him lay all things, good or bad, that can be brought from the four corners of the earth to instruct, please, thrill, enrich, elevate, cast down, nurture or kill. Thus the flavor of it came up to him and went into his blood.
-- O Henry

travel log #1 - the new york years

In which is discussed - Calexico, Nick Hornby, The Talkative Nature of Those Who Want Your Money, Great Bookshops, New Jersey's Morning Skyline, Village Voice Gossip Columnists, Rain, Retired Special-Ops Men, US Customs Procedures, New York's Fear of Mondays

That whole city that never sleeps arrangement has some caveats they don't tell you about. Okay, it might not have slept, but it sure pays for it on Monday, when it just wants to fester, think about all the chemicals it took on the weekend and absolutely refuse to get off the couch and go to work. It shakes with withdrawals and sleep deprivation. Even Tuesday, the city is still a little groggy - it promises it'll get up and go out by tomorrow, and yeah, it knows it said that yesterday, but... look, come back and see me in a coupla days and i'll be ready to drink whisky sours with you until we vomit up the sun. today i just wanna... chill. cool? if you're gonna have two days in the big apple, don't make them monday and tuesday.

New York and I have an uneasy relationship. Sure, I love it - doesn't everyone? Maybe it's more that I heart it than that I love it. Has your heart ever sung for New York? Have you ever heard it singing for you? Truth of the matter is it don't care - it's a city of no bullshit, and that's its greatest strength and its biggest barrier. So two days in New York, the two days where nothing's happening - in the city with a million stories, what's a boy travelling on his own to do?