Towel Day
C’est fini
It is the twenty-fifth of May 2024 and I’m throwing in the towel.
I’ve had enough of wondering where and if I will sleep tonight. Enough worrying whether they will let me cross the border. Enough getting up at three in the night to catch a plane that won’t take off before noon. Enough looking for an ATM that will accept any of my cards and not charge an arm and a leg to issue a stack of mystifying currency whose value I can only guess at. Enough trying to write propped against a wall in the corner of a noisy café under a leaky roof.
Enough.
It is Towel Day 2024. I am back home and will travel no more.
It has been eight months, four continents and twenty-five countries. It has been dozens of languages written in some ten scripts and more currencies than I could give change in. Phileas Fogg would sniff at my achievement, but he had a French valet and an Indian princess to drag his pretentious carcass around the world.
I have sailed on rusty ferries among the glaciers in Tierra del Fuego where sea lions play and whales bask in the chilly waters. I rode gleaming bullet trains and trains that still had СССР stamped into the metal frames of their rickety seats. I rode marshrutkas in Central Asia, funiculars in La Paz, day buses, night buses, camels and hot air balloons.
I’ve climbed higher than ever before in my life, camped in trackless valleys that see a handful of people each year, dived among Mayan remains in Guatemala and among hammerheads in Galapagos.
It has been a trip.
It is Towel Day 2024 and I still know where my towel is, though that’s becoming iffy.
I have been called caballero, sama and effendi, but also mi amor, viejo and brat. I was even called amrikan by a Kazakh taxi driver, which I took as a bit of an insult and elected to walk the two dusty kilometres to the no-horse border town. That turned out to have been a good idea.
I learned that there is no Latin America. There is a Tz’utujil America, an Aymara America, an Huari America, even Welsh, Croatian and Yaghan Americas, all unified only by the certainty that English is not a language worth knowing.
I learned a couple of new languages, after a fashion. I now know that Russian will get you further than Kyrgyz when you’re in Kyrgyzstan which has no border with Russia, but will get you nowhere at all in Mongolia, which does. I had long and deep conversations with people with whom I shared not a word of a common language.
I have learned just how unimportant, irrelevant and well-nigh invisible our first world is to the rest of the planet. There are entire continents where our self-important hand-wringing doesn’t even register.
It is May 25th 2024 and I still know where my towel is. That is comforting.
I have met new friends and old.
I’ve encountered people who are determined to visit every country in the world, stopping just long enough to collect a passport stamp then rushing off. I’ve met people who never visit a country for less than half a year and return to the same places again and again. I have met those who have a dozen citizenships and passports to their names and people with none at all.
I spent an evening in Samarkand drinking Uzbek Merlot with a Paris-dwelling Chinese museum curator. In Punta Arenas I met an Italian-Canadian circus artist who trains Myanmar refugee schoolteachers in Bangladesh when she is not climbing mountains in Kyrgyzstan, and claims to have been a much more interesting person when she was younger. I met a Portugal-dwelling Japanese in Ecuador, then met him again in Tokyo.
I found the perfect taco in Austin, sharp-edged shards of truth scattered all along South America, sublime beauty in Japan, stagnant seas of history in Central Asia.
I found the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything in Istanbul, but the question still eludes me.
