About ontheroadandoff
CONTRASTS OF A BLUE PLANET…Introduction...
Our world is a world of contrasts…rich and poor, religious and atheistic, in some areas warm and friendly and on the other side of the mountain full of hatred and war. It’s a world where some nations pride themselves in open displays of freedom and yet others kidnap children to carry guns and fight for ridiculously stupid ideologies. It’s a world where on the one hand people are encouraged to run with their ideas, to develop a better world for themselves and their countrymen, and in others to kill, to maim and to blow themselves to smithereens as suicide bombers. It’s a world where so many people have little or nothing to eat and yet in the west, people often eat so much it’s obscene.
My travels have taken me throughout many countries – the rich, the poor, the over-populated and the sparsely populated…in the early 1970’s as a teenager while still at high school I ventured to the US and Mexico in my summer school holidays. By the end of that decade I had travelled through Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Pacific. Since then I’ve had years outside my home country of Australia, but have come to the realisation that this world is so big that an entire lifetime is insufficient to fully experience the many varied cultures and the diverse peoples who exist on this planet. People spend their whole lives in countries that we interlopers just pass through or at best, spend a few months or a year in. There’s little hope therefore to see all that the world has to offer in a single lifetime. We must therefore simply be satisfied with whatever glimpses are offered us, whether by our own efforts of travel and exploration or by the kind gestures of warm-hearted openness and welcoming that the peoples of the world afford us.
In 1975 I headed off on my second trip, this time to Africa via south-east Asia, Nepal and India. My first goal was to reach Southern Africa and to see what the atrocity of apartheid really meant. As a twenty year old en route to Southern Africa I enjoyed my travels in countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Malawi, but was appalled at the situation in Rhodesia and South Africa when I got there. I was in Soweto the month before the Soweto uprising, lived and worked in Johannesburg, shared a flat with other Aussies for a while, and then, because it was all too depressing, I left to discover what Europe had to offer me. I worked in London for nearly a year, and then, having saved a bit of money, made the decision to hit the road again.
It was at this point that a strange event took place. I boarded a bus, the magic bus to Greece with the intention of discovering what all the hype was with her islands. I was the last to board the bus because I had a small contingent of work-mates and my brother to farewell me. There was only one seat left on the bus…and in the seat beside it to my enormous surprise, was my Aussie room-mate from Johannesburg who I had not seen since leaving him in South Africa nearly a year before. Later I was to question what was meant by coincidence, but at that moment, with both Rick and myself looking at each other in disbelief, we just burst into laughter, shook hands and went together to the Greek islands. When I recall this story to other travellers, it is not rare to hear of other fantastic tales, coincidences that are hard to believe. One such example was told to me by a friend who travelled for months all over Europe and wound up one cold evening at a youth hostel in Italy after a two hour walk. He discovered upon his arrival that the hostel was closed for the winter, so he decided to search around for a suitable place to take shelter and sleep until morning because the sun had set and it was getting colder by the minute. He went around the back of the hostel only to find a classmate from his old school who had done the same 2 hour walk and had the same disappointing discovery that he had to spend the night outside in the cold. Together they shared what shelter was offered by the wood shed, telling stories of their travels to each other and sharing their small emergency rations. No doubt some of you reading this will have even more coincidental stories.
Another time, as my girlfriend and I departed Germany, we sent by post a package to an Aussie friend who was living in San Diego and building an amphitheatre in the garden of a scientist’s home overlooking the Pacific Ocean. We left Germany and then travelled across the rest of Europe by car to the UK, sold the car, flew to the US, travelled overland from east to west, popped in on some friends in Vancouver and then hitch-hiked all the way south through Washington, Oregon and California, arriving in San Diego at the front gate of where my friend was staying as the postman pulled up. Into my hands without time to even take off my rucksack or open the front gate, he handed me the package I’d posted three months before.
Travel is a wonderful pastime. Experiences can teach the serious traveller so much. Moments of ecstatic pleasure can last hours and sometimes days, and it doesn’t take a location like Mt Everest to offer such pleasure. It can happen anywhere at all. The true traveller tends not to be a tourist, not to gawk at a person who is different from what he or she perceives to be the norm. The true traveller has no real timetable, and is always able to change plans, to go where an opportunity leads.
Travel has been an integral part of my life. In the late 70’s I again had two years abroad, predominantly in Europe the US and the Pacific. In the 1980’s I travelled to France and Germany. In 1996 I travelled to Malaysia and Europe. In 2001 I embarked upon a journey to China and Europe performing photographic tasks for a major publisher. The idea of Contrasts came to me in West Africa at a place called Paradise Beach. In my former home on Sydney’s northern beaches, Paradise Beach was my closest stretch of sand. Sitting on another Paradise Beach in a place about as far away as one can get from Australia’s east coast, I thought of the immense contrast in front of me. At my Paradise Beach, there were multi-million dollar homes, expensive yachts, an enclosed swimming area and rules and regulations. Here before my eyes was another paradise, a virtually undiscovered part of the Gambian coast used only by locals and with a few bamboo lean-tos selling drinks by those entrepreneurs who knew that one day visitors would start to arrive. And then it dawned on me that everywhere I went I was experiencing these vast contrasts. In many countries across this great planet, people live very much on the line. Their homes are sometimes no bigger than an outside toilet, but they make do with awnings of plastic and tin to extend their living area. Even when a home is more substantial, you find that they’ve never seen a coat of paint, because such luxuries as paint are way down the list when more important things like food are so hard to come by.
90% of the world’s population lives below what we in the west call the poverty line, but so often those countries which have next to nothing, have so much more in some ways than countries which think they’ve got it all. Compare Morocco and the west. In rural Morocco, you find people living in mud-brick houses with few of the modern conveniences found say in the US, but they’re content with what they have. They adorn their homes with beautiful things - precious metals, colourful materials, sumptuous cushions and they really enjoy life. They’re always able to hold a conversation and look you in the eye, whereas in the US, people are not content even when they have their homes full of electronic gadgetry and have two cars parked in the driveway. They are often too busy to talk and can rarely look you in the eye. Perhaps places like America have lost their soul, even in the simple things like cooking, and we all know they lead the world in junk food. This world has many faces, many colours, and many cultures. It’s a world where religious disparities are not a new phenomenon…such differences have been in existence for centuries. It’s a world of vast contrasts at every turn. Even within a country, landscapes, people, even the language can vary greatly. Look at my own land Australia, the rugged coast, vast deserts, snow-capped mountains and the colourful underwater world.
Then there’s the languages, firstly of the original Australians, the Aborigines and then of the many new Australians who have called this country home in the two hundred and twenty odd years since white man settled there. And then look beyond…compare the life of a youngster in coastal Australia with a child in India. The Aussie kid may never have caught a train always being able to travel by car, whereas the Indian may have done so since birth. And planes - that’s a different story. The Aussie kid may have been on several flights before starting school. The Indian may never catch a plane in his lifetime, and he may never go to school, not a real one anyway, one with a teacher for every twenty kids or computers to hook up to the world. Sure things are changing, and yes India is very switched on cyber-wise, but they are worlds away from what we in the west accept as the norm. And so is the majority of Africa, and many parts of South America, and Asia…and…and…and. Consider the AIDS epidemic in some parts of the world. It’s frightening to think that in some African countries, 50% of the population is infected by the disease. Unfortunately western leaders seem unwilling to help as much as they could and still spend obscene amounts of money on weapons and appear to make so many ill-informed decisions. I would like to see world leaders put on some old clobber, buy themselves a rucksack and travel the world at the grass-roots level. Then they’d experience how things really are, and perhaps their decisions would be wiser ones. If nothing else, they’d hear real people talking about real problems.
I am currently on a two and a half year journey around the world. I am ¾ of the way through and may go well beyond the planned two and a half years. I’m on my second circuit of the globe and so far have visited India, Nepal, Tibet, Bahrain, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Senegal, The Gambia, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Rapa Nui, Tahiti and New Zealand on my first circuit and in the past six months or so, have travelled through Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Zambia, Namibia, then to Greece and Germany again winding up here in Morocco en route once more to West Africa, where a school has been named in my honour. From the simple act of giving a talk about Australia in the week leading up to Christmas 2004, followed up by sending some educational material to the school, they’ve decided to name their new school after me.
From Morocco therefore I’ll return there and present them with donations I’ve raised. There’s a lot of hardship being experienced on our blue planet, but there’s also a lot of love. Never before though in years of travel have I come across the animosity felt far and wide towards the United States and her government. Their recent leader George Bush made what appeared to many people to be ill informed decisions. He was considered a dangerous leader. I have also never before come across citizens of that once great country, wearing the Canadian Maple Leaf on their rucksack. This single act speaks volumes. (2009..with a new leader Obama, a positive change is on the horizon).
I hope that the accompanying stories allow those who peruse them to experience something special…not just to share some of the many and varied encounters I myself have been lucky enough to experience, but something more. I suppose what I’d really like is to see that readers become a little enlightened and discover something beyond the stories and pictures…to receive encouragement to travel abroad again or, if you haven’t already, to do so for the first time.
Travel makes us as individuals wiser, and that helps far and wide, beyond borders. In closing I’d like to include a quote from author Tim O’Brien from his book ‘Tomcat in Love’…a truly great read. ’I have discovered through trial and error, primarily the latter, that none of us stands at the helm of the great ocean liner; control is an illusion; destination itself is a pitiful chimera; we are at best mere passengers aboard a drifting vessel, some of us in steerage, some in first class, all at the whim of a ghostly crew and passing icebergs.’
Geof Prigge.
