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No question about it—travel is stressful. Since several people I have traveled with have commented about how I never seem to  get freaked out by anything, I guess I might have some worthwhile thoughts to share.  

Corona Axiom 1: There is a difference between travel stress and travel anxiety.

The body doesn’t like long haul flights, even if you are lucky enough to upgrade to business or first class.  The body doesn’t like to deal with heavy luggage.  The mind doesn’t particularly like dealing with the unfamiliar, especially when jet lagged. There’s the aching head and muscles, the incomprehension of looking at money one has never seen before, of dealing with the facts on the ground rather than the way things looked on a map or in a guidebook, the realization that the person you really need to help you has no idea what you just said.  Some things about travel are just never going to be easy.

But travel anxiety is different. Worrying can be far more exhausting than any difficulty or discomfort we actually face.  And though anxiousness has some of its roots in basic personality, there’s a lot about travel worries we can manage and minimize.

I once came across a diagram showing how we perceive stress.  

Here on the horizontal axis we have perceived difficulty of the task,  ranging from “piece of cake” on the left to “no way in hell”on the right.  On the vertical axis the bell curve measures the stress we feel.  The interesting thing is that on the “no way” end (on the right here), we feel about the same lack of stress as we do for easy tasks.  To illustrate, if someone asked me to turn on the lights, I know I can do that, so no stress.  If someone asked me to do a triple back flip on the way to the light switch, I don’t feel stressed because I know I can’t do it.  When the answer is a sure thing, whether yes or no, the situation is simple.  

The point the author of the model was making is that stress builds as we wonder whether we can actually do what is being asked, with the most stressful point being the 50/50 chance situation—when you just don’t know if you can get through security before you miss your flight, or you just don’t know if something you need really is lost, stolen, or forgotten, or just hiding somewhere in the recesses of your travel bag.

There’s one more important element to this bell curve, and that is that the outcome has to matter.  If you can’t find your passport or glasses, or prescription meds, the stress obviously will be more than if you can’t find that furtive granola bar.   If all you want is a quick hop from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, or Philadelphia to New York, missing the plane probably will delay you an hour or two. Unless you have theatre tickets to Hamilton that night, or it is the holiday season and getting another flight might be hard, or you are rushing to get to a dying loved one, or you spent your last dime on a non-refundable and non-transferable ticket, there’s just not that much at stake. 

But that peak anxiety at the top of that bell curve—when we don’t know if we can actually do something and it really, really matters that we do—is something we can train ourselves to avoid, at least to a degree.  

Sometimes the answer is to dial down how important it is to have the situation be just the way you want.  There are other ways for things to work out. If you are lost, you can try to see it not as a disaster but an opportunity to do, see, learn something different. You aren’t lost, you’re just not where you thought you would be.    If it rains the one day you are in a new and exciting place,  don’t fret, just get wet.  You’ll get dry again.  Happens every time. 

The second is to improve the odds that what you want to happen actually will.  You can allow way more time than you think you need to get to the airport. You can buy travel insurance to make Plan B less financially stressful.  You can get every last detail in place the night before—all these ideas being so obvious they hardly need saying.  Making lists can help.  So can physically blocking the front door with things you can’t pack until just before you leave.  

In my case, for example, flights to Bhutan on the tour I arranged for April only go twice a week at 6am.  If I miss my flight, I am not going to Bhutan, because I don’t have enough time between cruises to wait for the next flight.  Therefore, the chances of feeling stressed about missing the plane are pretty high. So the night before, I am going to fork out the extra money to stay at the hotel right in the Singapore airport, set the alarm on every device I have, plus arrange  a hotel wake up call. I probably won’t need any of it because I won’t be able to sleep—I never sleep well when I have something important riding on the effective functioning of an alarm.  But so what if I don’t sleep?  I’m going to Bhutan!

When I have to catch a ship for an assignment, I assume things could go wrong—lost luggage, missed connections—so I go a day, or even sometimes two days early, depending on how dire the situation could become. I have seen people in airports devastated by a delay significant enough for them to miss their ship. I have seen people borrowing clothes on an Atlantic crossing because their luggage didn’t make it onto their plane, and there was no way to get their own clothes to them until a week later, when we hit the first port on the other side of the ocean—just in time for them  to fly home.  Both were probably avoidable. Neither of those disasters  has ever happened to me, and I am pretty sure I can keep that record going.

For me, the aching body and the jet lag are all the stress I  willingly accept as the price of travel, and my goal is to stay as clear of the anxieties as I possibly can, and laugh and count my blessings when I can’t,

I’ll discuss Corona Axiom 2 in a subsequent post, but I’ll give it to you here, since it builds on Axiom 1:

Axiom 2a:The mind is capable of magnifying small, solvable problems into huge, unsolvable ones.

Axiom 2b: The mind is also capable of diminishing huge problems into small, solvable ones.

The goal is to try to do more of B and less of A.  I’ll share thoughts on that another time.

 

About a year ago, when I was finalizing my cruise schedule for 2019, I got the speaker assignment on a cruise that would go to Vietnam during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year that coincides with the Chinese one.  

Anyone my age associates Tet with the Tet offensive, which the North Vietnamese army undertook in 1968 during the ceasefire for the holiday.  Places on the cruise itinerary like Hue and Da Nang were in the news every night, Hue because it was so close to the DMZ and suffered according, and DaNang because the biggest US and South Vietnamese air base was there.

As soon as the assignment was confirmed, I knew who I had to ask to join me: my best friend in college, Nancy Strathman Regan( photo above). We were ardent war protestors  back then, and it just seemed too amazing to be able—fifty years later!—to go to the place that, though half a world away,  was such a part of our lives. And now, here we are, on a ship crossing the Gulf of Tonkin ( remember that?) on our way to spend the next few days visiting Hue and the area around Da Nang.  

In Halong Bay yesterday we spent a couple of hours in the nearby town, and I realized that about 99% of the people we saw weren’t alive at the time.  It is such a young population, I am not sure many of their parents were either.

Still, the scars remain on the psyches of many Americans in my generation, who lost confidence in our leaders over their handling of the war, and through the critical lens of the time, formed strong views of social justice at home, which for some of us became lifelong commitments.

I remain an unabashed “liberal,” having never seen any reason to change my mind about values like inclusiveness, equity, and respect for the dignity of all people.  I thought, erroneously it turns out, that America changed for good as a result of the civil rights era, and now I am so deeply saddened by this horrendous backlash against it.  

A deliberate lie told to the American people about an attack on an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin precipitated a power grab by Lyndon Johnson to expand the war.  Even  one lie can have such enormous consequences. Tell that to the dead, both American and Vietnamese, and their grieving families. Tell that to every sentient being and every landscape that became what is brushed off as collateral damage. 

The damage to me is small, limited to a life of American guilt. Don’t argue with me about whether I should feel that way—I do, and I think it is far better to bear it than to try to make it go away.  Others have paid far greater prices for that war, but no one escapes entirely when moral courage and human empathy are drowned out by expediency and use of power for selfish ends.

Presumably anyone who knows me, in person or through this blog, knows where my thoughts are going with this, but I don’t have the stomach to write about our current national  sickness, fed once again by lies and megalomania.  May the uprising begin, strong, robust and committed, because we know we can take down power. We have done it before.  

 

 

 

Once again, I have been too busy and/ or distracted to post anything about my latest adventures.  The cruise I am on started in Singapore and included four ports in Borneo and four in the Philippines. Today we stop in Manila, and then we have only a sea day before finishing in Hong Kong.  I will stay on for one more week, to experience Tet, the New Year, in Vietnam.  

I thought Borneo would be the high point of the cruise, but it is really the Philippines that has been the revelation.  The islands of Palawan and Romblon are straight out of tropical paradise fantasies, Palawan with its beautiful shallow reefs and cliffs that shoot up straight from the ocean floor, and Romblon with perfect beaches of dazzlingly clear water and soft sands.  As usual, I am already trying to figure out how I can get back here soon, perusing Seabourn and Silversea itineraries as far out as early 2021. Once is simply not enough.

I am not actually much of a water sports or a beach person, so I am surprised at how excited I got about snorkeling yesterday. I have really been missing out! I used to swim pretty long distances and was into scuba diving for a few years, but I drifted into other things like jogging, for a while, and tennis. 

I suspect at some point too early to remember ( or past life?), I may have had a traumatic experience being suddenly immersed in water, because I really resist getting wet , though am fine once I have done it. I don’t even like getting in the shower, and will sit around in sweaty clothes rather than take a shower immediately after tennis or just a hot day.  I have gotten in the pool in my condo complex once in the more than five years I have lived there and the jacuzzi maybe two or three times.  I don’t think I have ever gotten into the pool on a cruise, and many times I don’t even bother to pack a swimsuit. I never do the snorkeling or beach outings on tours, and I am really intimidated by the idea of kayaking because I am so worried about tipping over.

It’s nothing, I tell myself. No big deal. Silly. Lame.  Irrational.  But we are who we are.  Nevertheless, I have decided I am done with this nonsense because I am just missing out on too much.  I can’t wait to go snorkeling again, and that’s a start. Embracing change is one of the exciting things about being alive, and I am determined to be as alive as I can.

I don’t think there is anything  beach coming up for a while that I can do to jump in, literally and figuratively, to the new life as AquaLaurel, but maybe I can start by getting in the pool on the ship.  Just because I can. Just because I want to. 

We lost a wonderful poet this week.  Here is a poem by her that resonates with me, and I imagine with many others who have faced the fearsome task of breaking away.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

—Mary Oliver

 

Sometimes it comes on us with a screech and a slam, and sometimes it is so subtle  we hardly notice the signs at the time. Sometimes it’s more like sloughing off skin cells or getting a haircut, and sometimes it’s more like third degree burns, or losing a limb.  Sometimes we yearn for it and other times we view it with incapacitating dread.  But whatever forms it takes, the need for reinvention is one of the facts of life.

I didn’t know it at the time, but living in a different place at age 12, 13, 14, and 15 was one of the best things that ever happened to me.  My father was a physicist so out of sync with the military-industrial buildup of the Cold War that he roamed from job to job for a few years, thinking each change would be more rewarding.  Finally he called a time-out and took a job he didn’t like much, but in a place where my sister and I could have a more stable life and attend a world-class high school.

I began this peripatetic life as an obese 7th grader with poor personal grooming and no particular social skills, and reinvented myself once, twice, three times, as puberty and a growth spurt  took care of much of my baby fat.  I discovered cosmetics (and boys) and the importance of washing my hair, and ended up  looking pretty good by the time I was out of high school.

I reinvented myself in an important way by ditching my childhood name, Laurie, when I went off to grad school at the University of Chicago.  Not a soul knew me by that name, and  I was certain  it was the best chance I would ever get to add that little bit of adulthood to my life.

Life  had dealt me a few major blows I could not have survived if I didn’t reinvent myself as a person who could handle such things.  Just as Rodgers and Hammerstein promised,  after a while those happy tunes we whistle become who we really are. Now I am so enamored of change and reinvention that I honestly don’t know how I will ever manage to sit still again.

I found myself thinking about such things in Christchurch, New Zealand today, as I roamed around a city that less than a decade ago was pretty close to leveled by two major earthquakes and thousands of aftershocks.  The image at the top of this post is not of mist or fog ; it is the clouds of dust and debris raised as a city is being destroyed.

Socrates, through his pupil Plato, believed that society was “the soul writ large.” By this he meant that the same forces, for good or bad, that drove individuals, played out in the strengths and weaknesses of the entire human community.  What tamed the indidual, or drove him or her mad, could be seen everywhere from the marketplace to the palace…and in a leveled city.

What did Christchurch do? It asked, “how can we make us better?” What shortcomings could this disaster be an opportunity to solve? How can we come out stronger, better equipped for the future? What are we prepared to move on from, and what do we want to keep? The construction fence on the Cathedral Square reconstruction site is full of inspirations like the ones in this photo.

 

Among these reflections was the realization that this gave the city a new chance to do a better job than colonials had, of acknowledging and embracing the indigenous people of the region. Ngai Tahu, the  local Maori group, were integrally involved. Many new buildings incorporate indigenous designs and have indigenous names. The library, one image shown below,  is called Turanga, a name that embodies holiness. Balconies and other outlooks are situated to look out on places in the landscape beyond the city that are sacred to them. The exterior and interior evoke indigenous art and themes.

Christchurch’s idea of recovery was not just to rebuild everything the way it was , or settle for utilitarian buildings just to get it done..  Some buildings are being restored, or will be when the millions can be found to do it, but the overall feel of much of Christchurch is very hip, very modern, very colorful, a bit edgy, but very now.  And some of the best things incorporate both—an artisans’ collective inside a historic building, for example. And some things, like the foundations and tangle of rebar in the image below, are deliberately left as rubble, in the process of becoming a haunting form of art.

I like this place.  It feels fresh and new, even amid the large spaces that haven’t gotten much beyond clearing out the rubble. Most of these are ever so practically used as parking lots.  But underneath the ground, the new buildings and restored old ones have  deeper foundations and state-of-the-art engineering to enable them to move with the earth without unbalancing the building above.  The best lesson of all when it comes to reinvention—grow stronger from your mistakes— applies equally to the soul of an individual or a city.

 

 

 

On ships they use the term “in transit” in a rather unusual and somewhat confusing way.  It refers to people who are not getting off the ship, but are continuing on for the next leg of the itinerary.  To me, it seems that the ones in transit are the ones getting off, the ones in transition from one place to another.  When I stay on, all the transiting I do is between my room and the buffet, or if I am unusually good, the gym.

I am now in transit in the usual sense of the word, as I sit in the Sydney airport waiting for my flight to Christchurch, New Zealand.  When I wake up in the morning, I will be in yet another country new to me.  Some day, I will make a list of how many there have been, but most of them still lie ahead in the next couple of months, if the fates agree.

I am going to New Zealand to do a little hands-on preparation for an assignment a year from now that will take me around Australia and New Zealand several times. I will be giving talks that are a little more focused on the ports and surroundings (history, interesting people, main sights), and though it is possible to do this kind of talk without having been to a place, it is just a much nicer comfort zone to have visited at least once.

So off I go!  I will be interested to see the progress Christchurch has made in recovering from the devastating earthquake a couple of years back.  The coastal railroad from Christchurch north was destroyed by landslides from the earthquake, and it just opened last month.  It is one of the great rail journeys in the world, and (lucky me) I will be transiting it in a few day’s time.  Then on to Picton, across the Cook Strait to Wellington, and then back to Sydney for a few days.

Most of my thoughts since I last posted are not about my journey, but my country’s.  Hard to know what to expect, but if the animal world is any indication, boxed-in animals tend to bite, claw, and do whatever it takes to get away. Hopefully the most we will face is some nasty snarling without much teeth, but who knows, when the trapped one has the full power of the executive branch, and a spineless party to fight back with?

At any rate, I wish you all a Happy Blue Year from the land down under.  May it bring much for all of us in transit, in one way or another, to cheer about.

 

 

I have been mulling over comments of several friends of mine about a Facebook post I shared of my time at Borobudur.  I had so many wonderful encounters with Indonesian schoolchildren on holiday and shared several photos my guide took of me with them.

 

The comments were about what a good ambassador I was for the United States. Of course I was just being myself without a thought to any such mission, although in the horrific current climate of American geopolitics we certainly need to try as hard as we can to counter it.

But I  got to thinking the last few days what powerful ambassadors those schoolchildren were in return.  Their openness, their shining eyes in their clear young  faces, and  the typical adolescent behaviors they showed( the girls all giggles, the boys all jostles) sent such a powerful messages of humanity at its sweetest and most beautiful.

i don’t share the prejudice against Muslims that is so rampant in American culture, and perhaps for those affected severely by that poison, a trip to the most populous Muslim county on earth simply wouldn’t be an option. However, I cannot see how anyone could go to Indonesia and come back with their views unchallenged not just by schoolchildren, but by adults who smile and patiently let strangers take photos of them, or the hundreds of people whose faces light up as they put their palms together as a simple greeting of good will.  And I am not just talking about people paid to be nice.  I am talking about people on side streets, in local restaurants, and in rural villages, who simply want to convey that we can coexist in mutual respect.

 

If wanting to signal back the same feelings to them makes me an ambassador, then yes, I am doing my best to be one.

I overhear comments from fellow passengers when we are out and about that reveal a lot about what kind of ambassadors they are prepared to be. One thing you see a lot of in Indonesia is motorbikes, and though typically the rider is alone or with one other person, occasionally you see a whole family, with one child  between dad and the handlebars, and one or two more sandwiched between dad and mom.

On one tour bus, several passengers were scandalized.  How could that father and mother endanger their children in that fashion? Look!  There’s one more—a baby— in the mother’s arms.  See that little foot sticking out?  Outrageous!

Another person commenting about another such scene spoke only of her worry that the family might not be safe, with genuine concern that no one be hurt.

i am more practical than sentimental, I guess, and my reaction was to see a father and mother using the resources they had (one motorbike) to do what needed to be done for their family, and I was admiring how they were getting by with what they had.

The first reaction does not bode well for ambassadorship—willingness to pass judgment, inflexibility about the new and unfamiliar.  You can see litter, or you can see faces.  You can see the struggles of the poor, or judge them by standards they cannot possibly meet.

I think the key to ambassadorship, either direction, is generosity of spirit, the belief that people you interact with, or even just observe from a distance, deserve the effort it takes to imagine their lives, not just the quick snapshot one sees. Effective people—whether they are  ambassadors with portfolio or CEOs, teachers, lawyers, politicians, electricians, plumbers, or people like me who are just trying to get a broader picture of the world—are the ones who search for, or even  better, crave the experience of shared humanity. That’s what ambassadors do.  That is who they are.

 

I am now in Singapore after a week in Indonesia. Before I left Yogyakarta, I  got to thinking, over my last breakfast, about how my comfort zone is changing, and how much that can be illustrated by food.

I would not characterize myself as a foodie.  I’m neither fussy nor particularly adventurous. I don’t yearn for any particular food (well, except  frozen yogurt and popcorn), and I am usually happy to have other people choose the restaurant when we go out. I have been so overindulged  in my  recent life that not much on cruise menus really excites me any more.

Add to that the fact that the digestive system gets a little cranky when we travel, (and, unfortunately as we age), so I am always a bit worried that  unfamiliar food may get in the way of my best laid plans and force me to spend the day  in the bathroom rather than on a tour.

So one of the anxieties I carried with me as I went off on the Asian part of My Year of Living Travelly was the challenge of eating when I was off the ship traveling on my own.

I will use the buffet breakfast at my hotel in Yogyakarta as an example.  It was huge, and gave me a chance to see in one place the great diversity of Indonesian cuisine.  I am not a big breakfast eater to begin with, and the first morning my stomach churned at the idea of eating any of it.

On one table, there was a set-up with a mystery stew, at another a chicken porridge (photo above)  with copious condiments, which seemed very popular. At another, an array of dishes that might work for lunch—sweet and sour fish, chicken curry, fried rice and noodles,  and the like.  The condiments were equally mysterious,including  a variety of sambals ( salsas of various fire powers).

Gamely, I tried a little of a few things, and concluded that Indonesian breakfast was not my thing.  The next day I discovered the fruit bar and chowed down on brilliantly colored watermelon and other tropical fruits and ignored the rest.

However, the time I spent with my guides included meals at places  known only to locals, and a few open markets, where they encouraged me to try this and that, and little by little, I got more adventurous. Indonesia was so open to me, and I would be more open to it.

My third and final breakfast was an entirely different experience.  I still passed on chicken porridge (sorry, but to this westerner, chicken doesn’t go in cream of rice, ever), but  I looked around and said, “oh wow, that fish looks good,” and even “I bet that fried chicken is tasty,” (photo below) and  “I wonder what’s inside that banana leaf packet,” and proceeded to pig out on a good half of  what was there, along with tastes of every condiment I saw.

The  first morning, if there had been American comfort food like mac and cheese in the buffet, I would have gratefully  eaten it.  By the third morning I would be asking, “what the heck is that doing there?” while I reached for the nasi goreng, the sambals, and my new favorite, Indonesian salad (shown here)

I can do this.  More than that, I am doing it.  My comfort zone is expanding, welcoming me to more and more of the world.  Now to keep my waistline from expanding along with it!

It began with being welcomed to Bali by an earthquake, and continued with arriving during a Hindu religious festival whose purpose is to sweep away everything negative and invite in new, positive energy.  Overnight rainfall washed the air clean in a dramatic sound and light show. To add to that, tomorrow is my birthday (69), and I will be moving on to Yogyakarta to my next bucket list thing, Borobudur.  The universe could hardly be sending stronger signals that this journey I am on in this part of My Year of Living Travelly is exactly what I am supposed to be doing.

Yesterday I saw glimpses of the fabled Bali, including these rice terraces.

But  what I think I will remember more are glimpses of people on their own journeys, both those whose devotion to their faith was so on display at Holy Springs Temple, shown below, but also in the numerous villages I passed through,  each one with a specialty—wood carving, glass blowing— and each one full  of people simply going about their lives, holiday or not.

The best thing about being a traveler is seeing the ordinary as special. It’s hard to do that in the middle of one’s everyday life.  Maybe that is what far more evolved people than I have managed to do, traveling through every day with new wonder, even if it is on their own street in their own village.  I still have so much to learn about that, as I chase new experiences around the globe.

Sweeping away what holds me back and inviting in what propels me forward is a lot of it, but so is just sitting here at breakfast  on this hotel terrace, shown below,  as a cooler breeze wafts through and dark clouds hover.  Be here now, the world whispers.  I am trying for no more than that.

 

Well, Day Two, if you count getting to the airport hotel in Singapore around 2AM and not leaving the airport before my next flight to Bali. In my mind, this is my first real stop, and this chapter of My Year of Living Travelly is truly underway. Perhaps it is telling that there was a small earthquake this morning.  Perhaps it was Bali saying hello.

Last night I came after dark down a tiny road, to arrive at my hotel outside Denpasar.  The scene around the airport was so honky tonk, so clearly created for tourist revels, and so un-Balinese (except for the phalanxes of motorbikes) that I felt a little dejected by my first impression.

As a little aside, I read recently about how McDonald’s is so utterly predictable in the US, but abroad it actually reflects the culture. Indeed, so far so true.  I saw a billboard showing a burger with the only familiar topping being a fried egg.  There was also a platter of Mc Curry and McRice( no, it wasn’t really called that).

I was so glad to get away from there and escape to the sight of trees in the headlights, and to that last tiny road to someplace real.

And this morning, here I was.

 

Every space that wasn’t occupied by road plus motorbikes, houses, or shrines was cultivated as small rice paddies. Every  entryway to a home or business, even a driveway, and everyplace in between, was decorated with an offering to the gods. And everyone was busy, busy, busy with the new day.

 

This woman kindly allowed me to take her photograph as she laid down little offerings of flowers, crackers and other tidbits, while incense wafted from the platter she carried. Other people waded through muddy rice paddies, pounded hammers, hung out laundry, or cooked breakfast in cafes.

i am grinning ear to ear. There’s nothing better than being among the new and different, and learning about other places that have existed day in and day out before I came, and will continue to do so after I leave, although they will remain forever real as memories.  I am just passing through, and all I can say to the universe is thank you, and offer to it a photograph that  represents how grateful I feel: