Finding My Place

It's been nearly nine months since I stepped back into the UK. How odd. I spent the first few months in a daze, trying to find my feet. I think I've found them again (in shoes instead of flip flops!) although I was supposed to be outta here in January. However, life and death has conspired against me and I am now leaving in mid April to spend a year in South Africa working for an NGO. The dream continues in a different guise, with a slightly different me as so much has happened while I've been here that I cannot help but change a little.

After months of resistance, I have now been totally sucked into the British way of life... living for the weekends, having a good old moan about work, having an even better moan about the weather (even though people tell me it's been a mild winter, I have seen snow!!) and trying to figure out what I want from life.

I think I am still trying to find my place in the world, but I have re-discovered friendships here that I never even knew I had... and created bonds with people who I thought had cut and run. The people make the place wherever you are in the world.

My dreams/travels/life/drifting/call it what you will continues in a different blog and in a different stage of life.

As for the understatement of the year: It's been an experience....!

Photo: Notting Hill 2006 ©PDA

Look who's Alone Now

I’ve had the novelty of returning home to familiar places, my lovely family and my friends. I’ve also had the novelty of starting work again in the UK for a sporting charitable trust full of distant memories, past youth and old friends. And now? Now the novelties are wearing off. I feel that it is just me and me and me in this big, miserable, exciting, scary, beautiful, ugly, ambivalent, make of it what you will world. My family of course, have been a great support in all ways and so have a few, select number of friends. But I feel the rest have let me down; so caught up in their own lives, they enjoy the novelty of looking at me after three years, listening to the odd accent I’ve picked up and generally comparing themselves to me or vice versa which I don’t feel is the most productive way to catch up with old friends. Some are too busy for me. Some are too cool for me. So they think! Some have just drifted away as people do. Some just don’t care. Most cannot fathom my life in recent years, most cannot understand the adjustment period I’m having in this country and most therefore don’t know what to say to me which makes for either stilted conversations or silence on their part. And then there’s the people I met on my travels. People who I really connected with for that short period in the same time and place; people who I bared my soul to, people who bared their soul to me and then on occasions, these self same people who turn their back. So all I can say to my old friends, my new friends and all the others inbetween on my email list; where are you now?

Novelties

Spending time with my family, being back in my childhood home, walking down the high road, catching up with friends, people understanding English humour without any explanation needed, going to the pub, going to a wine/cocktail bar, eating a curry, eating pretty much any choice of cuisine from anywhere in the world I choose, television, hi-fi’s, easy and more or less free internet access, shopping in the supermarket (slightly overwhelmed with the choice!), not living out of a bag, living in a house, leaving my toothbrush and shower stuff in the bathroom without fear of it being nicked, going for a drink by the river, riding on the tube, chip and pin payments, choice and number of shops to shop in, clothes everywhere(!), Earl Grey tea, home cooked roast dinners, volume of people and traffic, not using a padlock to secure my belongings, a bath, my bed and pillow, not being intimate with airports, speaking English rather than pidgin-English and lots of sign language, "wrong leaves on the line", working like eveyone else, wearing shoes and lots more... anything normal inEngland is a rediscovered new for me!

The Gulf

And no I don’t mean the geographical Gulf, I mean the gulf that three years abroad can create between you and your friends. For some reason I didn’t think it would be as big as it is But it is. So now I have to deal with it. A price to pay perhaps?

It Began... in Coffee Bay

Returning after over 2 years to the first place we stopped, loved, lived and worked in, but this time on my own was really quite an indescribable experience, but I shall try anyway. I was met at East London airport (yes there is an East London in South Africa!) by the lovely owners of the backpackers in Coffee Bay after an epic journey by boat from Koh Phi Phi to Phuket in Thailand, a flight from Phuket to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, hanging around for a few hours as you do, another flight from Kuala Lumpur to Johannesburg in South Africa…more swinging my pants in Jo’burg and then my final flight to East London followed by a four hour drive to Coffee Bay. Exactly, bang on, precisely 36 hours. I felt lovely. Yeh right. But I arrived on a Friday night which is community night at the backpackers with lots of tribal drumming, dancing and general merriment and despite bowing out due to exhaustion at 10pm the sheer energy propped me up for a few hours with the sound of the drums bouncing off the surrounding hillscapes and both familiar and new faces greeting me with enormous smiles.

After a very well-slept night spent in a tent (an ex-army tent where I could actually stand up – bonus!) I awoke to the sound of the waves pounding nearby and the birds in their morning swan-song, unzipped my front door (so to speak!) and looked out onto a beautiful, fresh view of tropical garden and the Bomvu River. This is where it gets indescribable! It just felt right. I have maintained throughout my travels that the Wild Coast (where Coffee Bay is located) had captured my soul and was my second home; the energy of the last night and freshness of the following morning just re-confirmed to me that coming back, despite reservations was actually my best idea to date! There is always that fear that your memory serves you incorrectly, or rose tinted glasses are worn too much when considering past times and places and that the new reality will somehow be a let down. Especially since when I first arrived with my travel buddy extraordinaire we were quite fresh in our travels, relatively wide-eyed about a lot of experiences and a good couple of years younger in age! Happily for me my concerns were absolutely non existent in the new reality. Of course it was different, the tourists were obviously not the same bunch and quite a few of the staff had moved on, but it didn’t escape from the fact that I felt right at home straight from the start. Oh glorious days!

Inbetween “volunteering” in the office and bar (along with breaking up a fight courtesy of some unfortunate, drunk, chauvinistic, racist pig typical of certain sections of the wider South African population) I went horseriding on the local beaches and surrounding village, swam a lot in the sea (great for curing hangovers ‘cos the waves just bash it out of you!), took spiritual yoga classes in serene surroundings, met up with old friends and made some great new ones as well, picked up a South African accent (according to my English friends, but not according to my South African friends!), continued drinking vodka as my tipple of choice, learnt some new djembe drum beats, organised a festival, fire danced lots, taught other people to fire dance, got back to nature and fed my soul lots of yummy goodness!
[Photo: Coffee Bay, river and dog ©]

The ForgottenPeople

The title sounds like it should be frightfully meaningful in the grand scheme of things.. but ultimately it's not. I think it matters in the here and now but in the long term probably not. Koh Phi Phi has a massive community of westerners, many of whom are around for the high season (roughly October - April) forming relatively close knit groups for a bunch of strangers that are randomly thrown together. Then they leave. And they are never spoken about again. Unless they are coming back. Pretty much. It seems a shame that people can be so caught up in their own little groove on such a superficial level that nothing else matters to them apart from what's happening and with who right now. Oh well. Left actually having grown rather fond of the place really and made some wonderful friends. And the diving is awesome. Maybe I just don’t like being forgotten so easily!
[Photo: Koh Phi Phi Don Viewpoint, Credit: Dru]

People of Strength

The people of Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos - this was gonna be one of those vaguely intelligent posts, but really a summary has more effect:

• Extreme poverty set side by side with hotels catering for the super rich tourist - uncomfortable viewing in all three countries.
• Nixon's secret war that's not very secret anymore which royally f***ed up Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
• Western influences - the bad ones - drugs, alcohol at the extreme end of abuse.
• Pol Pot being a psycho - watch the "Killing Fields" and you don't even come close.

Most locals still have a smile for you anyway. Bloody amazing.