All travel has its highs and lows. Come to that all life has its highs and lows. Think about this for a minute - when did you ever have a whole six months when everything in the garden was rosy and life was completely perfect ?
If you managed to think of an answer then you're a very lucky person - possibly unique. So it would be unreasonable to expect six months spent travelling to be perfect for every minute of every day and it wasn't. It was about as good as it gets though.
The trip took me from my Birthday on April 9th to the middle of October and from London to Singapore by road and yes there were times when it wasn't wonderful.
The true test is did the good times outweigh the bad ones ? Of course they did - a hundred times over and whatever bad times there were are gone, settled back to the road like dust. They don't matter except as a background contrast to highlight the good times.
We started from London on a grey April morning and took the cross channel ferry. Our first night was in Calais at a camp overlooking the docks - hardly the world's most beautiful place. It didn't matter. Everyone knew that we would be racing down through France and Italy, taking the ferry to Greece and then driving on to Turkey. One week of almost constant travel would bring us to Istanbul where our trip would really start. Names from ancient history would tumble through our lives in bewildering succession - Troy, Ephesus, The Dead Sea, Petra, Perseopolois, Palmyre, The Pyramids, Luxor, Abu Simbel. The first section of our extended tour was through the ruins of cultures that were dead and gone before ours was dreamed of.
We raced back from Egypt through Syria and Jordon even more quickly than we had raced to Istanbul before slowing back to a sensible pace to go through Eastern Turkey and into Iran. Iran proved to be a much more beautiful place than I could have imagined. Esfahan alone makes it worth the trip.
Then it was on through Pakistan and along the Karakorum highway which is one of the world's great scenic routes, and into one of my favorite countries - China.
China is vast. We were crossing it for two months seeing much more of the people and the land than I had done on my previous visit. Of everywhere we went I am undecided if I like Lijiang or Yangshou the best - both are wonderful.
When we reached the south coast there was a brief (not to mention expensive) visit to Hong Kong then another week in China before heading on down through Laos, Thailand and Malaysia to finish up in Singapore. In hindsight this was a rather low key finish for me. It's not that I don't like Laos or Thailand but I've seen before all the interesting places that we went and the time spent on beaches (which was the majority, or so it seemed to me) was for me time when I was bored and dissiprited. It would be going too far to say depressed but I wasn't having a great time. What I should have done is left the trip in Hong Kong and gone back to China for a month on my own.
They do say that hindsight is always 20-20.
It didn't matter though. The trip was the thing.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."
It’s a wonderfully liberating philosophy. I’d much rather know where I’ve been than where I’m going. The journeys that we have made combine to make our characters, the journeys we have yet to make build our dreams.
Robert Hale December 2001
