Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

“I think that maybe we do not climb a mountain because it is there. We climb it because we are here.”
Jon Carroll

One of my favourite travel writers mentions in several of his books that when you travel you need a mission (or two) to make your time abroad worthwhile. Of course there are those with epic missions, such as the book I have just come across in which a man, just before his 70th birthday, draws a line on a European map between Le Havre and Rome and walks 1100 miles in 71 walking days as a kind of homage to the traditional pilgrimage or the armchair-travelling author of Julie & Julia who decides to make it her mission to attempt every recipe in Julia Child’s book Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

My missions for my time abroad tend to be a little bit more simple. I guess you could divide them up into the places I want to go and then the things I want to do while I am there.

I have four universal missions that I intend to accomplish in each place I travel. Those are:

• In each country I visit I will attend a cooking class in the local cuisine;
• Visit the highest point in each city or town visited;
• Make sure that I experience at least one cliché of the country that I am visiting;
• Record my travels both on this blog and also in a personal journal.

There are also several missions which are related to the places I intend on visiting:

• England (visit the places where Dad grew up and also where Mum lived during her OE; make my journey to River Cottage and meet Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall)
• Spain (visit Gaudi’s architecture in Barcelona)
• Italy (use the only phrase I still remember when I attempted to learn the language during my brief obsession with Italy when I was 14 – “Ci è stato un incidente” ( or “There has been an accident”))
• Morocco (ride a camel into the Sahara)

I’m sure more missions will come, the more reading I do and the more people I talk to… but this is probably enough to begin with!!!

The Pleasure of Possibility

“The palpability of possibility is one of the most precious gifts travel can bestow. And the even greater wonder is that the more you wander, the wider and deeper your sense of the planet’s possibilities – that is, of your possibilities on the planet – grows.”
Don George

When Briar [side note: Briar and I have known each other since we were 13. We have lived together before but never travelled together…] and I first decided that we were going to make this trip, we almost drowned in the possibilities! An avid guidebook-collector, we sat in the lounge with piles of old newspapers, travel brochures and guidebooks trying to decide what our priorities were – where would we stay – what would we do…

As anyone who knows me can imagine, many lists were made!

We each made a prioritised list of the places we wanted to go once we arrived in Europe.

This is what we have finally decided, after months of researching… first stop: Singapore; then a week in London to orient ourselves in the country we will live for the next seven months; on to Cambridge to find a place to call home, and more importantly a job; mid August will see us on a whirlwind tour of Berlin, Prague, Italy (Venice, Rome, Florence), and Spain (Barcelona and Madrid); October we will be off to Morocco for two weeks; end of December – Hogmanay in Edinburgh; Four weeks around France in January with Barry; and somewhere in the middle of it all a week in Ireland!

My Daring Adventure

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
Helen Keller

What makes a person want to travel? I have never really questioned my desire to travel, it has always been innate for me – something I don’t even question. It wasn’t a matter of ‘will I travel?’ – just ‘when?’

I feel as though I have been waiting and waiting and waiting to leave little New Zealand and go explore these places that I have dreamed of for years. To visit these places that I have read books about, watched documentaries on, and heard stories of – I can hardly wait!

Of course initially I thought that Barry and I would be doing our O.E. together, but I guess I got to a point where I felt that if I didn’t just drop everything now, when would I ever get the opportunity? We have talked about travelling since we were at uni together, but there comes a point when you can’t keep putting other things first.

There is a fantastic quote of Mark Twain’s: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – this is what I intend to do.

I think that Barry and I will always travel, but there is a big difference in my mind between a three week trip, spending a few days in numerous places along the way, and actually experiencing the highs and lows of living in a new place with a new way of life. The prospect of living in a new town, half way across the world thrills me. It’s all the little details which I get excited about – of course seeing the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, the Tower of London, I’m sure all of those things will be wonderful experiences, but I am just as much looking forward to wandering down to the market to buy groceries for dinner or catching the tube to work.

I also look forward to the clichés as much as I look forward to those ‘road-less-travelled’ experiences. A double-decker bus ride in London; a baguette and brie picnic-lunch in Paris; a Gondola ride in Venice (only if I can afford it!!).

My motivations for the trip are this: to experience something new – something different and to learn something while I’m at it… the following quote from Patricia Schultz sums it all up…

“With travel, our minds become more curious, our hearts more powerful, and our spirits more joyous. And once the mind is stretched like that, it can never return to its original state.”

My Future in a Chocolate

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Chinese Proverb

About six weeks before setting off on the ‘Big Trip’ I treated myself to a Destiny Chocolate (something like a fortune cookie – but better of course because it’s chocolate!). The message seemed fortuitous… “Long distance travel is in your future”.

Briar and I have been planning this trip for about a year now… it is the first ‘real’ big trip for both of us, and as well as having to contend with the challenges of moving to a new country (how hard can it be?!), we are also both leaving our ‘significant others’. Most people who have heard the plan, and I have been harping on about it for a while now… called me crazy when they learned that I was leaving Barry behind [side note: Barry is my husband, the love of my life, we have been together since we were 17 and have never been apart for more than a week] but what’s a girl to do? Barry has his own ‘Big Things’ to deal with at the moment, and I, having earlier this year hit the big 2 – 5, need to do this before I really get over the hill! (laugh if you will, but the quarter-age crisis is a real phenomenon now!)

We depart on July 9 at 11.55pm… first stop is Singapore for five days (thinking zoo… lots of yummy food… markets… a Singapore Sling at Raffles…) and then on the 15th of July we arrive in London. The plan at the moment is to spend a week in London exploring the big city and then catch the train to Cambridge where we are both going to look for work, somewhere to stay etc…

At the moment everything feels slightly surreal… I get moments of realisation when it’s like ‘wow, I’m really doing this – and it’s going to happen in less than a month!’ and then almost instantly I start thinking about something else because the concept almost seems too unrealistic… well, it’s going to happen whether I believe it or not – if the chocolate told me… it will be so.