Gapyear

I know what I don’t want. Now I have to decide what I do want.

“You’re never going to get the thing you want
Not ’till you work out what it is you want.
You don’t actually want the thing you want.
You only want what you can’t have. You want
it blindly. What it is you think you want

is nothing like you actually want.
You’ve still got to work it out, what you want
and what it is, the real meaning of want.”

Ali Smith The Accidental

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

The Real Work

Wendell Berry

I’ve been away from the UK for eight months.
I’ve not had much inclination to write here, even though I did want to start to use it as a method of communicating with friends and family. I prefer sending individual emails, knowing that the reader will enjoy particular tales and adventures. This blog was never going to be to be a travelogue, and being the perfectionist I am, I wanted to make each entry a potential award-winning piece of creative writing so if I wasn’t entirely happy I didn’t publish the post. Time to relax and just use this as an online repositry to supplement and enhance my diary and emails.

I’ve loved every day and every month. And I’ve come full-circle – I started in Saigon on September 2nd and am now back again, via Hong Kong (twice), Laos, Thailand (twice), Cambodia (twice) and China. One might not think it’s a very impressive list of countries but it was never designed to be a country-bagging trip. I like it in this part of the world and wanted to see if I would feel differently after an extended time here.

I do: I love it more than ever and cannot now imagine a day without seeing the smile on an Asian girl’s face or enjoying a Vietnamese iced-coffee. It’s time to try and put down some roots here while branching out to new horizons. (Hence the title – clever, eh?)

So now I’ll be staying in Vietnam and Thailand for a while with the odd side-trip to Cambodia and maybe Myanmar – now the rainy season will soon be here it will a good time to visit Angkor Wat and Bagan. There are only four months of the career-break year left, and like a final year student with exams approaching I’ll try and cram as much of the things I wanted to write here over the last eight months as I can.

I’ll also put photos, quotes, snippets of conversations overheard and anything else that catches my eye. And some home thoughts from abroad, since the Escape England blog has linked to me!

The more intensely we’ve seen and felt a place, the more it becomes part of us, alters our terrain, redefines our horizons.

A traveler who’s done more than skate across the surface of a place – who’s experienced it, drawn it in like breath, reveled in its details – becomes reflected in a kind of prism. The mirror of place, like the traveler herself or himself, develops many facets.

Jim Molnar: The Place Of Journals: Travelers Map Out Their Personal Landscapes (essay found on the Internet)