MilesAstray | passages

__________
travel passages

topic

__________

finding the home within out there

traveling inwards

My soles brought me places, but immersion taught me places, taught me people and lives.

ENORMOUSLY ELUSIVE

The more water the falls carry, the less you see them. The less water the falls carry, the more you see them disappear. Rainy season, dry season – take your pick between misty veils or bare walls; it’s hard to win with Victoria‘s falls.

Victoria Falls / Zambia · 2017

HOSTEL CREATURE

Hostels are anthropological petri dishes, in which all sorts of creatures mingle: Sick Dudes, Awesome Mates, Future Friends, And Others. Everyone is someone who does something. A common technique to scan people’s surface is the following line of questioning: “where you from, how long have you been traveling, where you headed?” Some dig deeper into their conversational partners in hopes of finding versions of themselves in likeminded others. And then there are the occasional oddballs, refreshing palate cleansers so fluid in shape that no label sticks to them. Like the kind of guy bolting into a Kyrgyz dorm late at night, wrapped into a dark coat and darker mystery, insinuating a committed murder with a face so stern that it couldn’t possibly be used to insinuate anything else, but being all jovial and no longer hangry after a midnight snack, now casually clarifying that the murder victim was he himself, killed by a society that had not prevented his near starvation leading to strokes and nerve damage, and alleging that some Balinese villagers worship him and his wife as reincarnations of Hindu gods, before putting on his Kermit sleeping mask.

Bishkek / Kyrgyzstan · 2018

MADE-TO-MEASURE TREASURE

All the pomp, all the rooms, all the gold, left me cold. My Versailles treasure was simple fabric made-to-measure.

Versailles, France · 2022

A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

Peering out their lofty towers, New Yorkers might be looking down on New Jersey – but who’s got the better view really? Of course, the concrete is always taller on the other side and it’s easy to confuse a place we see with the place to be. Ah well, that’s neither here nor there.

New Jersey / USA · 2016

4714 MONKEY

And just like the drizzle, a passenger of the February mist, the people kept pouring in by the busloads until the Great Wall was flooded. They had all come to usher in the New Year – 4714, year of the monkey – but they had come in peace with their elbows holstered, moving together in collective harmony like one enormous serpentine organism.

TRRROIA

It sounded something like “Trrroia” when my Turkish bunk bed buddy in Istanbul shared a travel suggestion with his eyes glowing like dark suns. Our conversations were pleasant, but never made it too far past smiles and the mutual understanding of Raki and cigarettes. Right now, I had no clue what he was saying, but it was becoming increasingly evident by his incomprehension of my incomprehension that “Trrroia" was of some significance. In his irritation he kept firing that strange word with his machine-gun-rrr, until it finally hit me: suddenly, Troy was no longer a faint myth of the Iliad, but an actual place, its ruins firm as fact. With only one intelligible word my dorm roomie had rewritten history for me and sent me off towards the past. I found the Hollywood horsie parked along the seafront of nearby Canakkale – maybe somebody should look that gift horse in the mouth.

Canakkale / Turkey · 2015

SWIM ACROSS THE BRIDGE

If you look close enough, you might find that the fine line between imagination and reality is really a bridge. It is neatly inevitable that by the time you’re reading this your hasty eyes have already jumped to the picture and with it to conclusions. The journey has begun. Your eyes carried you away to the Guatemalan dreamscape by the Mayan name of Semuc Champey. They hypnotized you with a tale of turquoise water dividing the jungle and lured you from reality’s solid bank into imagination’s fluid realm. For things aren’t what they seem. The paradoxical title, reminiscent of a surreal dream sequence at first, is actually the signpost to reality here. Follow it and you will see what you’re really looking at: a bridge. Naturally formed from limestone, it spans a thousand feet wide across the ferociously raging Cahabón River underneath, while shallow pools sit placidly atop. Only by imagining the river, which remains forever tucked away from your eyes, you can see the bridge and swim across it to reality’s bank.

Semuc Champey / Guatemala · 2014

CAPITAL CATAPULT

A trade hub fueled by the canal, a financial center sheltered by a tax haven, a duty-free zone second only to Hong Kong, Panama City is a money machine, an economic engine, a wealth generator. For some. Looking at the ivory towers from across the bay, you will find that the capital catapults only a few to skyline heights, while most are left behind.

Panama City / Panama · 2014

EXPENSIVE POVERTY

What a dark paradox: if you belong to the 35 % of Limeños, who live in the barrios pobres of Peru’s capital, you pay up to 10 times more for water than wealthier residents, according to Oxfam estimates. Water, filling entire swimming pools in affluent Miraflores, is a scarce commodity in next door San Juan de Miraflores, where squatter settlements crawl up muddy hills. Without plumbing, they depend on costly water truck deliveries that don’t make it up the slopes. This translates to additional labor and costs for those living higher up. Despite an infamous perpetual winter drizzle, it almost never rains in Lima, which undermines any efforts to harvest rainwater. And as though the irony wasn’t bitter enough up until here, the occasional rain comes down as torrential downpours, washing out these very hills and demolishing the brittle existences of those who live there.

Lima / Peru · 2013

Black Nazarene celebration, Manila / Philippines · 2015

RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS

This year’s No-Bell Prize in Random Acts of Kindness goes to These Guys “for sharing their joy with a stranger.” From the statement: “these [random acts of kindness] are not necessarily about giving, helping, or being selfless – it could be a fleeting smile between elevator doors; or tipping your bus driver with a thanks; or These Guys asking some passerby to take their picture and share their microcosmic instant.”

Black Nazarene celebration, Manila / Philippines · 2015

D R O P I C A L

Come sunshine or cloud-shade, sweat or rain – for better or worse, the tropics keep an almost constant solar angle throughout the year, making for eternal warmth. In the Köppen–Geiger climate classification this warrants an A, not for the best, but the warmest climate. Kuala Lumpur falls into the subcategory Af: tropical rainforest climate with no distinct dry season. Meaning: the sky brews hot and humid weather all year round, serving almost daily rainfalls. And when it rains, it rains.

Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia · 2015

SPOTTING GIANTS

You’d think the world’s biggest fish is hard to overlook, but then again, the ocean isn’t exactly a bathtub. To spot the chubby needle in this liquid haystack is an art that takes ample practice and ampler patience. As the only place in the Philippines where the interaction with whale sharks in governed by a tight framework of regulations, Donsol has brought forth a multitude of these artists. Day in day out, they climb the mast and scan the sea, while a group of goofy-looking tourists in snorkel gear sits on deck and keenly awaits the signal to hop in. While more popular whale shark hot spots like Oslob lure the animals with bait and don’t striktly enforce no-touch policies, the interaction in Donsol is ecologically responsible. Sightings aren’t guaranteed, but the encounter is natural when it happens and all the more magnificent.

Donsol / Philippines · 2015

LOTTERY FAIRY

Like astrological beacons of false hope, the Laotian lottery fairies popped out of the early night that befell those long days of work. Splitting the dark with LED-glazed folding tables, their stations attracted a wealth of motorists driven by the same wish: turn little money into big money. An eager lamp would bend its metal neck towards a well-thumbed layer of laminated pages that caged a strange zoo of animals, numbers, and Lao script. Three digits, associated with a creature one might or mightn’t have been lucky or unlucky enough to see in their dreams, all claimed the shortest route to small fortunes. Rooster 428, snake 632, deer 974 – the wish of your dreams was registered with a swipe to conclude the invisible transaction. And hadn’t the upper bosses clipped their wings systematically, maybe the fairies could have seen to granting more wishes.

Luang Prabang / Laos · 2023

PIECE

Oh Santorini sun, fiery minx, you set like no other; dressed in nothing but amorous promises, you lean in to kiss the horizon and our voluptuous human longing for romance begins to dance. But, alas, the faster you near the embrace, the more passion shatters into skirmishes. To hell with loving surrender – we choose a piece over peace any day before the night. None of us can afford time or space for sentiments while demanding our turn in this crossfire of pointed elbows and hectic shutter shot staccatos. Like the tide below, the second wave of people has arrived to replace the first, but the flesh pours in erratically unlike the smoothly transitioning surf that caresses the shore. We are all here, now, but not in the moment and not together. Oh Santorini sun, you lured us with union, but all you gave was divide. Now you wander west to seduce another sorry lot of naive fools, leaving us in the dark.

Oía, Santorini / Greece · 2017

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Austerity is a narrow gateway. Most material possessions are too bulky to fit through. The flood of overindulgence is too wide to pass it whole. Merely a humble iota of societal diversions makes it to the other side and accompanies the Buddhist monk on his path to raw consciousness and spiritual enlightenment. Only after shaving off all distractions delivered by the senses, the innermost mind is sharpened into necessary focus for the journey inwards. But concentration goes only as far as the belly is full. The blossoming mind can’t escape its organic roots. And so the monk’s quest is nourished by the alms giving lay people, who in return feed off good Karma and the Buddhist teachings. A mutual exchange of food for thought.

Luang Prabang / Laos · 2015

ORCHESTRATED CHAOS

Twisting your feet and senses and grasp until you’re mad with hues and scents and dichotomies, the medina of Fes is an orchestrated chaos, underneath, if you read chaos. You shouldn’t though.

Fez / Morocco · 2016

SALASAKA

And so the months passed by as the place kept me. Its spell felt like deliberate inevitability to me, some sort of circumstantial fate. I was stranded well. In a subtle paradise. Salasaka. Melding yesterday and tomorrow today, the Salasakans knew something that was either long forgotten or far from discovery elsewhere. Their wisdom was of the ancestral kind, their lives in rhythm with life itself. Everything was deeply rooted in bygone centuries, in the land, in Pacha Mama, but change was harvested everywhere. Salasaka was not a village outside the world or inside a vacuum. It was right there, where it seemed to belong and want to belong, in a forward-facing folkloric dance between eras. Holding on to ancient knowledge while embracing the next generation’s wit, the indigenous realm lingered beautifully on tomorrow’s verge.

Salasaka / Ecuador · 2012

REV

"Revving the engine is enough to lure them," explained our captain. Then he fed them anyway. Unconditional conditioning. Right off Belize's Caye Caulker, nurse sharks live alongside stingrays, eagle rays, manatees and other aquatic neighbors in an oceanic vicinity known as Shark Ray Alley. Local boat operators use bait in preparation of a touristic snorkel encounter with the harmless animals in the shallow and crystalline Caribbean waters. The dubious feeding practice has conditioned the sharks to line up in front of the boats by the mere sound of an outboard and raises the question of how this unnatural dependence and behavior will affect the animals in the long run. After raising the question, silently inside me, I hopped in, because I’m just like the other sharks.

Caye Caulker / Belize · 2014