Where to…?

Here’s a map showing the route I’ll take for my Big Trip around the world. In each place I’m staying with friends and family, apart from my little backpacking adventure in SE Asia. The UK is ridiculously big and central on this map of course. Hmmm… I think I’m about to be reminded that we are really not that big or central.

Leaving in the midst of the threat of a “no deal” Brexit crash out of the EU is… interesting. At the recommendation of my cousin’s daughter, I’ve just watched John Oliver’s 22 minute piece on Boris Johnson on You Tube. A good way to negotiate the transition from the UK to the USA. It’s both hilarious and scary. Worth a google especially for people in the UK or indeed USA if you’ve not already seen it.

Last night, along with the You Tube recommendation I enjoyed fabulous hospitality from my cousin and her family. Among other things I was so grateful for this very English comfort to set me on my way 👆🏼

In the meantime, I’m about to board my first flight, and hoping that my plan of travelling anti-clockwise in order to avoid too much jet lag will work out…

Travelling light

Well, I was hoping to travel lightly and dwell deeply with people, but I have predictably fallen at the first hurdle and am not travelling as lightly as I had hoped. I have a suitcase (rammed) and a backpack (not so rammed but fuller than it should be). I just got to the point when I couldn’t think what else I could take out. How like my entire life that is! Hmmm…

I wonder whether, on my travels, I will decide to ditch some things? At the moment, the thought of that is a bit scary. But maybe travelling will change my perspective? Other travellers have told me how travelling changed theirs in this sort of way.

How good would it be to hold so lightly to material things that at the slightest impulse of kindness, we could give them away? A friend reflected with me recently on how buying things is like taking. And how when we sell on our stuff on it’s a bit like taking too. “Why not give it away?” he asked. It seems to me that we all need some giving to balance out the taking. And the planet is crying out for it.

I am so touched by many gifts people have given me as we’ve parted. A visit, a lunch, a deep conversation, a cheque with a mandate to find treats en route, a coffee, a beautiful prayer. I receive these with so much gratitude today…

…And I receive my “window seat with power socket” with a giggle!! 😆

Portugal

I’m writing this retrospectively…we actually got back from Portugal a few weeks ago (it’s taking me a while to get used to the technology). And I’m realising that where I pictured I would be posting stuff up as I travel, actually I also have ongoing reflections about the places I’ve visited, some of which will take longer to take shape. So there’s more to be said about my experiences in France, which I will share in due course. But in the meantime, onto Portugal…

I went on a 10 day holiday with a couple of good friends to this lovely little surfer cum hippy dude type place called Odeceixe (pronounced “Oh-de-seysh”) in the North Algarve off the South West coast of Portugal.

Colourful bunting is strung up throughout the village, blowing in the gentle, cooling coastal breeze. The place is so small, you encounter the same local people and tourists each day.

We walked the 3km to the beach most days- a pleasant walk over some fields, and along a quiet road following the tidal river towards the sea.

We stayed in a FABULOUS hostel called “Hostel Seixe”, run by a lovely friendly local lady called Nadine. Most people stayed a few days and then moved on, but we stayed put for the whole 10 days. Why wouldn’t you? It was a really beautiful spot.

The pretty, white washed, orange roofed little houses of the village tumble attractively down a hillside. After quite a steep but short ascent, we arrived at this beautiful viewpoint, replete with a very picturesque windmill with its sails tethered. Here are my friends, enjoying the view over towards the river and the sea in one direction, and the rest of the village in the other. (Either that, or they were posing for a cover for their new music album 😆)

Portugal is a relatively cheap place to eat out in. As you can see, we dined splendidly on the evenings when we decided to go out for a treat. The fresh fish and red wine and the famous Portuguese Tarts (Pastel da Nata) were to die for. A meal including delicious starters, a bottle of wine, three fresh fish dishes, two generous portions of chips and a couple of portions of veg/salad cost us 12€ each. And the waiter brought us some delicious honey liqueur afterwards on the house, too. (We went back there again!)

On other evenings when we cooked for ourselves, we dined splendidly too, and at very little cost. (We bought a bottle delicious local wine in the supermarket for less than 3€.)

Every time I go away, I seem to end up hurting myself somehow. This does not bode well for my Big Trip! The Portuguese holiday was no exception. I looked at the tidal river and thought, “Could I swim across that? It’s not very wide. Sure I could swim across it no problem! I swim a lot further at the pool every week…”

This ☝🏼 is me in naive optimistic mode. It was nearly the last photo of me alive, though!

…and this is the photo of my wounds, which dripped blood in quite an impressive way before I could stem the flow enough to be able to wash my hands and take the photo!

I swam out into the river just far enough to get caught in the strong current (fortunately going inland at that point), then realised I was drifting upstream a lot quicker than I was making progress towards the shore. It’s really quite frightening swimming in one direction but being pulled inexorably much faster sideways! I kept swimming and eventually I reached some rocks on the shore upstream from the beach. I clung onto them for dear life while the tide bashed my toes and legs against their sharp edges. My arms started to ache, I knew I needed to move, but I also realised I didn’t have the strength to hang on much longer, let alone pull myself up. I panicked, but then, remembering mindfulness training, I realised “I’m panicking I need to stop”, began to breathe more deeply, and then was able to use the rational part of my brain to work out that if I edged along the rocks I would arrive in a niche where the tide would push me up onto them, where the rocks were lower down too, so I stood a chance of actually being able to haul myself up onto them.

It worked, I climbed out and up some steps through a bit of someone’s garden and then back onto the public path and the longer way back round to the beach where my friends were waiting for me. Most of my toes had little cuts on them which made walking across the sand pretty painful, but by that point I was just happy to be alive and back where I belonged!

If this is the sort of thing I end up doing when I’m with my friends, what will happen when I’m travelling solo??? Hmmm lesson learned about tides and tidal rivers, anyway. Odeceixe river: 1 Ali: 0

Preparation takes a lot longer than you think

It turns out that going on a Big Trip is a bit like moving house. There are shed loads of jobs that need doing, almost none of which you’d really think of until you actually make a start. Then as soon as you begin to do one job, you find out there are at least 4 other jobs you need to do before you can do the one job you were going to do. This has been going on now for me for the past oooo forever, or so it now feels! Hence the lack of writing on here. Every so often I come across someone who loves preparation. I do declare, they are an alien species. But even the most committed preparation guru would surely be fed up of preparing by now.

Part of the preparation for me has involved doing tasks I’ve been putting off for ever, like downloading endless work videos from iCloud, copying them to an external hard drive in order to free up space for the undoubtedly numerous photos I’ll want to take on my travels. See? Jobs you never even thought were a job. And they all…take…aaaaaages! *Groan*

Some of my preparation has been much more enjoyable, though. Like looking through travel books about SE Asia to work out where I’d like to explore. But now even those tasks have become more about doing a reality check on exactly what my budget and time limitations will be. But of course I do realize most people would give their eye teeth to have such preparations to make.

On one of our Quiet/Meditation Days recently, the sun came out and I went and relaxed in the garden and forgot about it all for a bit. The cat (Xena, Warrior Princess, who is still scared of the cat flap) came and settled next to me in the sun. My brain enjoyed the rest, my body relished the gentle English sun, and I had one of those moments of suddenly feeling very maternal towards the cat. And of being aware that there is so much that I will miss about home while I am away, even though I know the 3 months will surely feel like they’ve flashed by in the end.

It’s less than a month now. Onwards…

Aller en retour

I return to the house,
 heart blue with questions,
 parce que, je n’était pas vraiment là
pour Céline -
 même si j’ai prié.
 Could I have been there more?
 I am sad, because I was better
at being there
when we were younger.
 (In this way, I appear
to have grown down
instead of up.)
 Mais, actuellement, maintenant, 
quand j’ai vu les photos -
 ses beaux amis, sa famille si gentille,
ses copines fidèles,
 sa vie vraiment pleine de lumière,
d’amour; d’amusement, de foi -
 Je suis heureuse.
 I am content,
because it was never about me,
anyway.
 
I return to the house,
 My hands are blood red -
 guilty with raspberries
 we often forgot to water.
 Blessed are those who mourn, for
 they will be comforted.
 Those who go out mourning
 with seed to sow
 will return,
carrying sheaves with them.

Céline

This is my French pen friend who I’ve been writing about. She was a beautiful, caring person, eager to help people when she could, no matter who they were, where they were from, or what struggles they faced. She longed and worked for a fairer, kinder world, in spite of her own health struggles, which led to her death near the end of 2017. I am so thankful that I knew her.

Where to begin…?

Well, apologies if you’ve been keen enough to follow my blog already, it’s taking a while for me to get the hang of it all. I spent just 5 days in France, with my friend Céline’s parents. I must have been 16 years old the last time I saw them face to face, and now I’m 42! We had to exchange WhatsApp pictures to be sure we’d recognise each other. But of course, within moments of meeting, we realised we are still essentially the same, although inevitably major things have changed for us all. I wrote loads in my journal while I was with Bernard and Heidi, much of which I will be pondering over for some time. But here are some highlights…

Monet’s Garden at Giverny, which is near where my friends live was truly glorious, and not at all diminished by the recent heatwave, thanks to the automated watering system. We overheard a guide explaining how Monet schmoozed the local great and good to get agreement that he could divert a river to run through his garden, and create the famous lake too. The garden really does just look like all his paintings. There are numerous green Japanese style footbridges, as in the paintings, and the gardens are a riot of beautiful colours and textures.

The type of trees Monet planted filter dappled sunlight in the most beautiful way. I found myself thinking, “If I lived in a place this beautiful, maybe I would be inspired to paint too…!”

There were many good and funny memories for us to share. Heidi and I laughed about a walking holiday in a “maison familiale”, where the evening entertainment had included a game of charades, which at one point meant that she had to mime being in the shower. She was doing such a thorough job of this that everyone was falling about laughing, and no one guessed what she was doing just so she had to keep going with it! Heidi reminded me that at one point we all had to take off our trousers and put on someone else’s, too. I had totally forgotten about this, which I joked was probably down to post traumatic stress disorder, as I was a shy British teenager at the time (probably wondering whether this was what French people always did!).

Among the happy memories and the sharing of music, we visited Céline’s grave and I heard about how Céline had lived such a wonderfully full life, in spite of the health condition she had suffered with all her life long. I saw hundreds of photos gathered by Heidi and Bernard and her many friends for her funeral at the end of 2017, which were testament to a brave and beautiful, adventurous soul. We talked about the growth of Céline’s Christian faith, which was like a river, running deeper than deep, and about her love for everyone around her, which Heidi said was a real example to us all.

I learnt some new French words while I was there. The list is a poignant mix; “gageures” de santé [the challenges/wars of health], “desplièglerie” [mischief], le décès de Céline [or was it “la déçu”?? – the decease/death of Céline], “frais” as in “d’eau frais” [fresh water, from the fridge]. And I relearnt a lot of vocab too; “le frigo” [fridge], “faire la vaisselle” [do the washing up], “tellement bien” [so much], “plusieurs” [several], “çe nest pas la peine” [it’s not worth it]. I also unlearned some things like when I wanted to say “c’est bien”, I really should say “c’est bon”, in most contexts at least.

There were many “pearls” for us to discover during our time together, and we shared deeply on the topics of love, health, grief, music and much else. Among the pearls were some extraordinary words (possibly a quote?) jotted down by Céline on a very unassuming scrap of rough paper, which Heidi found among her possessions after she died. “Maintenant, je suis un être de lumière au service de l’humanité à chaque instant, indépendament de mon état de santé.” [“Now I am a being of light, each moment in the service of humanity, whatever my state of health”.] What an extraordinary pearl of wisdom to have learned. May Céline’s gift to us be her example.

The journey begins (ii)

Well, so My Big Trip has crept up upon me so I find myself on the late night train to the airport to catch an early flight to Paris tomorrow. This is not really the Trip, but it’s a very important precursor. I’m meeting the parents of a friend who died last year, after a life bravely lived despite a lot of health problems. Et maintenant il faut que je parlais français, pour être vraiment pret. Seeing as I decided to call my blog “la perle” it seems appropriate to begin en France. Alors on y va…!