That travelling has a lot to do with letting go, I knew already. That the contingencies provide incredible epiphanies, I knew too. That is why travelling is so intense and one of the best investments we can make to discover ourselves as we discover the World. While travelling I became aware that transmitting sensations is almost impossible, either with words, images, or sounds, because it is a personal experience. To convey the idea that I would make my senses available here to be inspected and all the sensations stored in me to be touched, felt and experienced, in order to encourage those who choose to meet their own address, this is what I intend to do it now.
On the two days of the “slow boat” Mekong river descent from northern Thailand to Luang Prabang in Laos and the following ones, I met a group of people who would stay in my life: an American into NASA, an inspiring Australian couple on the move for two years, an unconventional Finnish, an Englishwoman with an incredible voice, a very educated, smart and extremely funny Italian, a 19-year-old Swiss girl travelling by herself, another American who has a pig as a pet and three Frenchmen who were filming a documentary, among them Theo, who seemed to have come out of the shelf of stereotypes of my imagination:
- Pidgin English speaker, for which he never apologizes, with an exquisite French accent,
- Reactionary anarchist, very cultured for his age,
- Owner of the annoying charm of a cool look in any circumstance, despite the absolute neglect of image,
- Moody, complex, melancholic and an incurable romantic.
With this heterogeneous group of people I lived many adventures, and a misfortune, over an unlikely long period. We travelled together roughly a month, and as we wandered freely in Asia the evenings gave way to what I call “home-based sociological analyses” more and more enthralling. We debated existential questions and explained our cultures and social contexts, which, though compared to the places we were at seemed similar, were quite different. In common we had the fact that, consciously or not, we were looking for something, and all of us were willing to give up whatever we had, to adopt any other place as an address or any fulfilling lifestyle. We were detached from our previous contexts, cultural and material, and available to let go of the current one as well, and that was a very striking point in common. I had had points in common before, life goals and visions, and these relationships were different from what I had been used to: detachment prevailed, and we were also detached from each other. We knew that we would inevitably follow different paths and that we might never see each other again. We would enjoy each moment. The present moment was the only that mattered.
Slow boat, at the Mekong River, Laos (credit: Liliana Ascensão).
With Theo, it was even more special because one day he was interested in the image of Fernando Pessoa in my passport, and so we also talked about poetry, fado, and emotions. To illustrate what we wanted to convey, we exchanged songs and poems, which we tried to translate from Portuguese or French into English, and fed ravishing spiral conversations under beautiful starry skies, as the cliché suggests. The linguistic barrier was only one more delight in this mission impossible of entering the perceptions and emotions of one another, and that for me manifested in the acquaintance of the detachment also from my mother tongue. Those days I barely used it, even to think. Communicating no longer had to be in Portuguese, nor did it have to be with words, which sometimes only made my life harder, as that one time I apparently said yes to eating cockroaches. It was at this point in my travels that I discovered the power of soap bubbles to interact with children, instead of what for them would probably just be strange sounds, and unconscious nonverbal communication became my conscious day-to-day.
I left the group in Siem Riep in Cambodia, which eventually dissipated as well, when my friend Joana joined me from Portugal on her vacation. I then proceeded alone again, and over a month after I last saw them, I coincidentally reached Hanoi in Vietnam on the eve of the departure of the French. I was well aware of my feelings of identity and belonging, for I had been in a more familiar vibration, and the ideological contemplations reactivated that night. On our farewells, Theo and I agreed that letters would be the most appropriate way to honour and perpetuate fado.
The view above the Mekong river, Laos (credit: Liliana Ascensão).
I wrote him from Macao, and several weeks later he contacted me because he had just received my letter and wanted to write me back. I was in Panama, my official address was in Portugal where I suspected I would not arrive even within a year, and the only place I knew I would reach was an Ashram in Lake Atitlan. It turns out that in this village there are no addresses, and not even Guatemala has a postal service. I had no address to receive a letter and not only was I at peace with it, but the feeling was liberating. “You can always come meet me wherever I am,” I said. He replied he hoped to go to work somewhere in Africa soon, “I do not think I’ll have an address either” he said, and we laugh relaxed. It was detachment, and it was the first time I had experienced it consciously as it filled me, and I would gladly share such a feeling with anyone who could experience it. It is identical to the lightness of a sweet breeze blowing momentarily as we bathe in the sunshine of early spring days. It comes, it brings freshness, and it goes.
Revolutionary conversations between travellers, Cambodia.
A few weeks later I was without a phone and for two months I did not buy another. Without an address or telephone, I myself doubted if I still existed to the World, and relying on the old maxim “it is true if it is on Facebook” I would visit my page from time to time. In fact, it was not only for me; unilateral detachment can leave people worried about us. My family did not particularly appreciate this sudden embodiment of freedom, and I could not detach from the eventual consequence of that, as well as feeling that “we are responsible for what we captivate.” It was helpful, and I recognize some attachment to that virtual address, a magical portal to reach wanderers. It was through it that certain time Theo told me “there is a lot of poetry in you”. While strongly resisting the idea of being in a fixed place again, it sounded like music: poetry inhabits me, and I am the dwelling myself.
Liliana Ascensão is a tour leader at The Wanderlust, get to know some of her trips.
