#travel – A Box of Thistles

Sometimes I feel inspired to jot my random thoughts down on paper… don’t know why and, to be honest, it doesn’t happen often. Somehow the repetition of the ‘Next Stop’ message on the bus from the airport to work jolted my vaguely creative brain. I wish I’d thought to take photos out of the bus window. But I didn’t, so you just have my words instead. Not as pretty but they’ll have to do.

Read below or open the ebook.

Next Stop

Dark morning, cold. Sleepless night.

Always the same when I set the alarm for an early start.
5am. Slow start, porridge for breakfast
Bleary eyed boy woken from slumber. Pay back time. Taxi duties.

Next stop. Hamilton. No longer an “international” airport.

Window seat. Murmurs of hellos and excuse mes as passengers board. Morning Politeness. Sleep deprived commuters.

Briefcases and laptops. Headphones plugged in. Noses in books.

Tip tapping on keyboards. Safe in our worlds. Wordless.

Next stop. Christchurch International airport.

Dark gives way to light almost unnoticeably. Head in my book I sense the lightening of the sky.

Then snow capped mountains, sunkissed. Clouds cling to mountainsides and sink in the valleys. A shade of white separates cloud from snow.

Morning light shin8ng on tops of mountains. View from the air. Cloud in the valleys.

Mountains viewed from the air, covers with snow. Cloud in the valleys.

Turn over the Canterbury Plains, enveloped in cloud, nose towards a rising sun. Too soon we dip into the cloud, missing the sun.

On the right mountains, dark seen from above. To the left the cloud covers the ground.

Nose cone of a plane heading into the rising sun. Propeller motion frozen in black stripes against the blue sky. Clouds below.
From light back to darkness. Christchurch beneath cloud. Dampness seeps into my bones as we caterpillar across the tarmac. Heads down, shouldering bags.

Next stop. Bus stop. One to Kilmore Street please.

QR code. Commuting stories. Travellers’ tales. Hermione’s pocket. Full of magical things.

Next stop. Memorial Ave. Houses are shadows through the mist.

Next stop. Fendalton Street. Rugged up, scarves and hats, briskly walking bending into the cold.

Next stop. Harper Ave. Tall silhouette trees. Ethereal giants.
a large tree growing on the right of the photo with branches sprading over the top and to the right. In the background across the grass there are more trees just visible through the mist Nearly there. Next stop Manchester Street near Kilmore Street.

St Luke’s bell tower. Ready to ring the bell. All that’s left. Labyrinth and memories.

Next stop?

I saw this on my Twitter feed this week; “lf you don’t know where you are going you’ll end up someplace else.” (Yogi Berra) And so what? What if somewhere else is better than where you were going? And how much more might you learn on the way there? Travel broadens the mind, they say but your mind has to be open to being changed.

I had an interesting conversation with some language colleagues recently about this. We were in Spain, all recipients of a scholarship to study Spanish at Salamanca University. Our discussion was about how speaking a language helped to understand the culture of the country and the people. We all spoke at least one other language than our own and we had all travelled widely. Some of us had lived in other countries and we reflected that we all had the “travel bug”. We wondered what prompts people to travel the world and to live in different countries. We do it to learn more about the world we live in , to learn about the people who inhabit our world, to learn about the history of the countries and how it has shaped the culture, the landscape, and the people . For adventure, for new experiences, to make friends , to meet new people.

black and white drawing of torso of victorian woman on top of an old fashioned cash register. Holding her head in her hands

Robot high fiving a man wearing casual clothes in a run down part of a city

On the plane from NZ to Madrid l watched two films which dealt with the idea of Artificial Intelligence – Chappie and Ex Machina. Just recently I read “For want of a Nail” by Mary Robinette Kowal which, like the films raises some fascinating questions about identity and how we learn about who we are and our place in the world.

How is knowledge given to the “machine” or robot? Where does the intelligence come from? Whose intelligence is it? Can it “learn” or does it just acquire information or facts. Is it able to attach meaning to the information? Just like an online translation service the output is only as good as what has been input. The words are there but the nuances of the language are missing.

We can learn about the world from books, from the internet, we can “see” the world through the millions of photos , videos and TV documentaries and we can learn about cultures and people. But travel offers the chance to touch and feel and smell and taste and hear. How do you transfer those tangible aspects of knowledge to a machine? These are the things that give understanding and compassion to knowledge. Those two films and the book dwell on that idea of humanity. A sense of belonging to the world, of having your place in the world, interacting with people , the culture and the environment.

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible” said Frank Zappa. So as those of us with travel lust stand looking out across the ocean planning our next adventure we have to be careful not to just “collect ” experiences like souvenirs. We mustn’t allow information to be simply stored in our database. We need to go out of our way, deviate from the norm, go off the beaten track, immerse ourselves and be open to having our perceptions challenged. To truly learn we have to connect with people and touch, feel, see, smell and taste and we must let those experiences inform who we are and make a difference to our lives.

Tag: #travel

Next Stop

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