A Field Guide To Getting Lost
My son, Josh, the little weasel, asked me what it felt like to be living alone in Oaxaca. It got me to thinking. Then I picked up a book at Sharon’s apartment entitled “A field Guide To Getting Lost,” a book written by a woman in San Francisco. It reminded me of a blog entry I wrote one thoughtful day in Bangkok. Here it is for those of you who missed it.
June 12 2005
Perfect Memories
“What A Perfect Day…It’s Such A Perfect Day…And Then We Go Home.”
Have been re-reading a book that I have been dragging around with me for the last year. Pico Iyer can set my imagination afire like no other travel writer. One of his pieces reminds me of the fall of 2003 when I was traveling alone down the coast of Viet Nam. Imagine all the people sharing all the world: I was riding behind Mr. Binh, my kind motorcycle taxi driver, and after three days on the bike my rear-end was numb. He takes me to a small food stall by the side of the road leading out of a little town on the South China Sea, where we wave down a local kamazake minibus that will careen down Highway 1 to Hue. The bus is crammed full of Vietnamese one on top of the other so I sit on some rice sacks until someone gets off and I, the older one, am graciously allowed to have the emptied seat. A couple of giggling girls offer to share a small sweet tangerine with me.
The driver had very long hair-possibly in his 50’s-with a pocked and scarred face…signs of a life lived on the edge. This guy is feeling powerful and narrowly misses oncoming overloaded trucks leaning at odd angles. He is having a great time and I am breathless waiting for my life to end. Suddenly when he throws a dirty towel to the back of the van and it lands in my face he looks back with a grin to see if I am alright. Gasping, I return his thumbs up with a laugh.
“Travel the World and the Seven Seas…Everybody’s Looking For Something. Some of them want to use you�some of them want to abuse you.” For Pico, the best kind of traveling is when you are searching for something you never find. “The physical aspect of travel is for me,” he says “the least interesting…what really draws me is the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don’t know and may never will. We travel, some of us, to slip through the curtain of the ordinary, and into the presence of whatever lies just outside our apprehension…” he goes on to say. “I fall through the gratings of the conscious mind and into a place that observes a different kind of logic.” Transcendence… and pure Pico.
“Nobody told me there would be days like these! Strange Days Indeed.”
Tags: Mexico, Oaxaca, Reading, Reflections, Viet Nam
Zoe