Just back from the Ubud Festival for Readers and Writers (which is a nice way to name a literary festival)-- came back to find that my piece on moments of wonderment that steal upon you at times when travelling is just out in the NatGeo Traveller. There were a few such moments in Bali -- here is the piece.
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It was rush hour for bats, burglars, owls and party
animals: about 2 a.m. I was climbing uphill in deep forest, feeling my way over
unfamiliar slopes and rocks. Trees took away most of the sky and from somewhere
in the distance came the roar of rushing water. It was the dead of night, yet
it wasn’t dark. The light was penumbral, as if it was dawn or dusk—for this was
a walk through Norwegian woods in the improbable thing that is a Scandinavian
summer.
The rushing sound intensified into a roar. It turned
out to be a fierce little river crashing over rocks and boulders, throwing up
high clouds of spray. A frail, two-foot-wide bridge plunged bravely across the
raging water. Dreamlike, we stepped on the swaying bridge blinking against the
cold, fresh water misting our faces. Below us were boulders and trees frayed by
water. Minutes turned into eternity, with each step land was further away and
our link with life—that narrow hanging bridge—appeared more tenuous. When at
last we returned to firm land on the other side, the Norwegian novelist who had
brought the three of us along for the night-walk passed around a hip flask and a
smoky single malt curled down our throats, sweetly warm and rich.
We walked on. The dusk that was also dawn lightened
further, the woods thinned and opened out onto an empty road that looped over
the shoulder of the hill. The headlights of a waiting car snapped on and it glided
towards us. No forbidden substances had changed hands yet everything was
happening as if in a trance. As the car drove us back towards the tiny mountain
town of Lillehammer, the sun, which had never properly set, shook itself fully
awake again, returning us to real life.
I’m not sure what I had
expected on my first trip to Norway. Certainly I hadn’t planned a walk in night-time
woods, one that would turn into strange magic. In a succinct statement of how
she journeyed through life, the old Queen of Tonga,was categorical: “I Just Bes,” she said. In other words, “Just
chill”—and let interesting things happen. It’s not a bad motto for travel,
life, and much else.
Many years ago, as a
student, I was traveling in Italy and a string of missed trains forced me towards
Assisi. The streets of the little town were hilly and cobbled, every stone felt
storied and beautiful. Since I knew nothing about Assisi except that St.
Francis fed the birds there long years ago, I was astonished to find that its
main basilica was covered in frescoes by Giotto and Cimabue. I had seen the
paintings on grainy postcards at tourist shops elsewhere in Italy, and here
they were in life, massive and unbelievably luminous. I went back to the church
again and again, cancelling other plans to be able to stay on in Assisi.
Some
years on, in 1997, parts of that church came crashing down in an earthquake,
and several of the frescoes were ground to dust. A day or two after the quake,
a committee gathered in the church to assess the damage. Even as they were
examining the building, an aftershock surged through the town. It killed four
of the experts assembled inside the church, and more frescoed walls and domes disintegrated.
What made me miss train
connections and end up in Assisi? It had seemed serendipity then, and after the
earthquake it appeared even more a miracle that I had seen the frescoes when the
church was still intact. In one of his books on steam trains, Bill Aitken is
stranded on a mud flat in a boat, waiting for a bus that refuses to come. “Sitting
on that sandy shore as the twilight deepened, a profound air of beatitude
settled on both mind and body,” he reflects, “…At such moments, you know
exactly what eternity feels like. Had I been in a less contented frame of mind
and cursed the lateness of the connecting bus, the moment would have been
lost.”
Naturally, such moments,
when infinity appears within reach, don’t time themselves to arrive when you’re
atop Everest or standing before one of the world’s listed wonders, trying to
feel what you’re meant to. More tourists than can be numbered have said of the
Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower that when, at the end of long travels and ticket
queues and crowds, they were finally standing before the legendary building,
all they felt was a stale sense of déjà vu and mild disappointment.
One morning, after weeks of
struggle trying to swim, I realised I was halfway across the waterfor the very first time. I had left off
clutching the walls of the pool. I was no longer inhaling water instead of air.
I could not pin down what was different, but the struggle was over. My arms,
legs, head, lungs were inexplicably doing what they had been supposed to do all
along, in sync. I no longer needed the reassurance of land.
Water was in its own way, a
different planet and it seemed to me that my profound weightless, soundless
ecstasy in moving through a different element altogether had been felt before
only by Neil Armstrong on his first moonwalk. And by about a hundred thousand
other people who, like me, learnt to swim late in life.
To seek out such moments
people dive with sharks, ski across the North Pole, and raft in white rivers. Or
they try to swim. To each of us at these times, extracted from our normal
surroundings and put into one where we have no idea what to expect, it is as if
our minds are being spun around in a kaleidoscope to show us a world entirely
new.
Travellers are often given the sense that they must consume whatever information, impressions, and sensations a place affords, click more photographs than can ever be looked at, make notes, then move on to the next place on the list of things to see.
Yet,
like inspiration or ideas or love, moments of travel magic, as in my Norwegian
Wood, have a tendency to steal upon you when you expect them least. When you
aren’t trying. That perfection of unhurry cannot be worked towards, it needs
you to let go and, like the old Queen said, just be.
