Here, There and Elsewhere
It’s time to stop writing about my travels. I’ve been to just over fifty countries (55 in total if you separate out Wales and Scotland from England, although they are really just parts of the UK!). Around half of them have appeared in the ‘Here and There’ series. However, there was always a danger than a blog about a place would quickly degenerate into a travelogue or a boring history of the place. I sense that is happening now, so it’s better to stop before I am thoroughly embarrassed. So, I’ll end this series of ‘here and there’ blogs with a broader reflection of travel and experiences overseas.
First of all, my travel has been limited in terms of the areas I’ve visited. Close to half of the countries have been in Europe! Another 15 have been in Asia (almost all in SE Asia). Just four to the Middle East, three to America (none to South America), three to far flung bits of the Pacific Ocean (Papua New Guinea, the Trobriand Islands and Hawaii – although that last is actually part of the US), and a puny two to Australasia (Australia and New Zealand). The two areas that have remained off the list have been the countries of South America (which I regret a little) and all but three countries in Africa (with no major regrets).
However, starting with locations is misleading … you might think I see travel as a matter of ‘ticking off’ another place visited. I don’t, and on that long list of countries, there is a much shorter one of those I have been to several times. Five stand out. These are France, the USA, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. One more, China, is different, and I’ll come back to travel there a little later. Focussing on those first five, why would you go somewhere several times? Unsurprisingly, the answer is work! Each of the three SE Asian countries have seen somewhere between 80 and 100 visits, and almost every one of these has been work-related, nearly always in relation to teaching. The United States is slightly better. I’ve been there several times, and those visits can be divided roughly equally between work and leisure. It is only France where nearly every time I’ve visited has been for a holiday!
As I’ve admitted, SE Asia has dominated in terms of frequency of visits, and that’s because of teaching overseas. The advantage of working as an academic is that it is relatively easy to spend a reasonable amount of the time away not ‘working’! Classes and tutorials are always relatively short (necessary both for the teacher and the students) and even any subsequent individual discussions tend to be limited. I’ve been able to tack a day or so on at the end of a time in a country for a separate activity: time in the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia, at a museum or set of galleries in Singapore, for example. Hong Kong has always been different, as there is a family based there that I’m close to, especially as one of the sons stayed with me in Australia for a while. In fact, I have been to Hong Kong more than to any other place, and my first visit there was more than forty years ago.
There was a time when going to Hong Kong was familiar. A series of steps: off the aircraft, the long walk to immigration, and then on to the train into the centre, a change to the subway, a taxi, and finally into the same hotel. While I would never have described it as ‘home’, the Excelsior on Hong Kong Island was familiar, the only brief moment of excitement finding out which floor and which part of the floor I’d be staying on each time. I was just as boring in Hong Kong as I am at home in Australia. Same breakfast every day! Ah, but I did read the South China Morning Post every day (I don’t bother with a hard copy of a newspaper in Canberra). It was how I knew I was there, as it was the New Straits Times in Kuala Lumpur, and the Straits Times in Singapore!
It wasn’t always like that. The first few times I went to Hong Kong, it was for leisure and shopping. Hong Kong had a Marks and Spencer. Yay!! Later I discovered it had a store called GOD (Goods of Desire), which was full of slightly zany and frequently unnecessary items, perfect to buy and bring back! Once I had agreed to look after a young student, who was to study in Melbourne, visits to Hong Kong were visits to see his family. I had some exciting meals and learnt the basics of Mah Jong. I watched Raymond’s sister Anita and brother Eric grow up and brought them to Australia for a holiday. Given most of my relatives were in the UK, my visits to Hong Kong became my link to ‘family’ rather than ‘travel’. Now the Lee children are grown up, married and with children of their own. Contact has withered away, and the politics of the territory have changed dramatically. I don’t have any wish to go back to Hong Kong: it’s no longer the place I knew.
When work dominated my life, I travelled in a circle. Melbourne to Hong Kong first, teaching and seeing the family. Then I would travel down to Kuala Lumpur. I had friends there, too. It was a fascinating transition, from the packed, busy, never resting world of Hong Kong to the laid-back lifestyle of Malaysia, everything easily put off to the next day, except for the Islamic daily timetable. Malaysia might have had three clear groups, Moslems, Chinese, Indian, but the Islamic world dominated. Finally, I would go on to Singapore, and it was as if I was undergoing the first part of transiting back to Australian life. Singapore was neat, tidy, well organised, and, to be honest, a little boring! Like Hong Kong, it was a Chinese country, but not as frenetic. An ideal stopover before returning to Melbourne. I completed that cycle five or six times every year, spread over a period of close to 15 years.
I did have the opportunity to travel in Malaysia. In fact, my very first visit there was on my way out to Australia from the UK. My father had taught a young man who went on to work for an agricultural conglomerate, and he was to set up one of the first oil palm plantations in the country. With my wife and three children we spent a week in Teluk Anson, north of Kuala Lumpur. I also went to Penang a few times, sometimes for a holiday and sometimes for work (what a surprise). Closer to KL, I managed odd trips to places like Malacca. With the combination of friendships and travel, it was a place I came to love.
In that trio of frequent visits, Singapore was always the odd place out. It is just a small island, and I didn’t have a network there, nor travelled to places other than the Bird Park and the shops. Visits were always enjoyable, but I always had the sense I was on my way back to Melbourne, and this was the last stage. I should admit that, for a while, it was a good place for shopping. However, slowly but certainly, the cost of living in Singapore kept increasing, and before too long shopping there was no cheaper than in Australia. In my mind, it will always be the place where I transitioned back from Asia into the ‘Western world’.
Finally, on the list of countries I’ve been to several times, there’s China, or The Peoples Republic of China to be accurate. I have been to Taiwan, but only a few times. Like many people, my first visit to China was brief, back in the early 1980’s, a tourist coach trip from Guangzhou. We spent a fair amount of time in the coach, went into a pre-school, where a group of very young Chinese children obligingly sang some nursery rhymes, and saw a few other carefully chosen buildings. The sum result of that visit was that I learnt very little, but I was impressed (and horrified?) by the children who would swarm over to the coach when it stopped, begging for money. Forty years ago, China was clearly a ‘developing country’.
A few years later, visits were linked to universities. I would meet with senior staff to discuss potential areas of collaboration. I would be invited to teach. Teaching was quite a challenge, as the normal pattern was a 3-3.5-hour session, often to MBA students, with the expectation I would talk for at least 3 hours, and then leave some time for questions. Once, only once that I can remember, I taught for a week, five long morning sessions Monday to Friday, to a group of around 300 aeronautical students. How I ended up in that pickle is lost to time, but it was an interesting challenge.
The upside of university collaboration was that I had the chance to go on various field visits. Some were interesting, as with site visits to various industry centres in Shanghai, Tianjin and Beijing. Some were amazing, as visits to centres for innovation and entrepreneurship that would allow me to see work being undertaken at the cutting edge, with extra-ordinary technologies being developed in areas like telecommunications and 3-D entertainment systems. However, by far the most compelling visit was to be taken to one of the provinces that had been partially destroyed by a massive series of earthquakes. I have two very strong images in mind. One was to be shown a mountainside and be told a whole village had simply disappeared: it had previously nestled in the valley below the slopes. The other was to see a hospital being constructed, the emerging building covered with bamboo poles and green netting (the equivalent of our scaffolding), to be told the work had commenced early that year, and the hospital would be fully operational by the end of the year.
I did have some opportunities for tourism. I have been to Xi’an and seen the famous terracotta warriors, part of the Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum, in Lintong County, just outside Xi’an itself. It’s extraordinary. The figures you can see date from approximately the late 200s BCE and include warriors, officials, chariots and horses. What is on display is only a small part of the estimated 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses, and 150 cavalry horses, most of which remain in pitsnear the mausoleum. Recognising it is only a small part of the total site, the sight is truly awe-inspiring. If there is one image that is even more impressive than the serried ranks of soldiers, it is the Qin bronze chariot on display: it consists of an open chariot drawn by four bronze horses, with a single standing driver and a bronze umbrella on a stand placed next to him. Yes, it really is extraordinary!
Perhaps perversely, but I also found the Beilin Museum in Xi’an fascinating, with a huge collection of inscriptions, some on stone and some on bronze sheets. I cannot read a single Chinese character, but the tablets were almost magnetic, the work both meticulous and precisely, almost mathematically organised. It is similar to the experience of going to the Shanghai Museum, a building designed in the shape of an ancient bronze cooking vessel, or ‘ding’: there, on the third floor is the Gallery of Ancient Chinese Calligraphy. As far as I am concerned looking at the calligraphy is another show-stopper.
Enough of that. I have written about some of these places before. More to the point, in giving an overview, I want to make a rather different point. I have been lucky and seen many fascinating places. Later in my working life I was able to do some consulting with a leading hotel group, and that took me to several outstanding places. In addition to Beijing’s Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City, I’ve seen the Pyramids at Giza, the Acropolis, and so many other extraordinary buildings and sights. However, the many remarkable places I have visited have been accompanied by brief moments that have been just as memorable.
What do I mean by that? Perhaps an example might help. Let’s pick Rome. It is a city packed with astonishing buildings, architecture and art. On one visit I stayed at the Hotel Aventino, not too far from the River Tiber and the Circo Massimo, and a short bus journey from the centre of Rome. I decide to head down the hill, cross over the Via Mamorata, not far from that strange building, the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, and wander a little further to find somewhere to get dinner. The Ristorante Pecorino looks fine, and I enjoy my meal. After I’ve been there for a while, I notice the far side of the restaurant seems to be close to a hillside and, if I am not seeing things, the hillside seems to comprise hundreds or, as I later discovered, millions of broken amphorae.
It turns out that I am looking at the edge of Monte Testacci, a mound, a rubbish tip, composed almost entirely of testae, fragments of broken ancient Roman pottery, almost all of which are discarded ‘amphorae’ dating from the time of the Roman Empire. As Wikipedia explains, it is “one of the largest spoil heaps found anywhere in the ancient world, covering an area of 2 hectares (4.9 acres) at its base and with a volume of approximately 580,000 cubic metres (760,000 cubic yards), containing the remains of an estimated 53 million amphorae. It has a circumference of nearly a kilometre (0.6 mile) and stands 35 metres (115 feet) high, though it was probably considerably higher in ancient times.” All this is to explain that when I think of Rome, I don’t just think of all those amazing Roman ruins, but I think of broken amphorae!
Even that example is a little misleading. What has been important for me in my travels has been incidents, and most of those are about people, not buildings, ruined or complete! When I think of San Gemignano, in addition to the strange concert I heard there before the late-night marriage proposal to the person who would become my third wife, the other thing that stands out in my mind is watching the departure of a newly married couple taking place outside the church (one of the many tall, towered buildings in that extraordinary town), a departure witnessed by every resident of the town! To this day, I am not sure if I felt an outsider or just another of the vast crowd of witnesses!
Many years before, if I think back to my travels in Norway, walking with two friends across from Bergen to Oslo, I remember the meal we had on a mountain top. Well, to be precise I remember the extraordinarily mouldy cheese offered to us at the end of the meal. My two friends didn’t look impressed (surprised?), but I was fascinated. Beautifully presented, it was obviously a delicacy, and the very last thing you would imagine you find in the middle of nowhere (as it seemed) of Norway. Of course, the freshly caught trout was delicious, but …
More examples? A leaking lilo (a variety of air mattress), gently lowering me to the ground when camping close to Mont Saint Michel. The camp site owner delivering two fish, still alive, to the door of the cabin where we were staying, situated on the edge of a small lake in Finland. The enthusiastic entrepreneur describing his plans to take his small distilling company in Myanmar to neighbouring Singapore, where he would become a very rich and successful businessman. The two young women young hostellers introducing me and my two friends to the wonders of instant potato in Aberystwyth. The surprised – and eventually delighted – Japanese waitress who helped my wife and I navigate the wholly unintelligible Japanese menu of a small cafe situated under a railway bridge in Tokyo, turning our hesitant order into a delight. Drinking champagne in a small winery in France. Going to the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Many thrilling, funny and silly adventures.
I am confident none of this is surprising. You will have had the same kind of experiences, moments away from the tourist sights, when a small incident, a brief interaction, has been especially memorable. Seeing the Eiffel Tower or Forbidden Palace is a special opportunity, made possible by travel, but having a meaningful moment, an unexpected interaction, these are the moments we cherish. Almost always, these moments are about people, not about the physical environment. It’s our experiences with people that matter the most.
