Pt3 - 24:

 

THE LAST LEG

 

Saying goodbye is never fun, unless you’re saying goodbye to dickwads that is. Rosie and Rod aren’t dickwads; they’ve not only given us sanctuary in France, but opened their London home to us and treated us like honoured guests. How do you say goodbye to friends you met only months ago but feel like you’ve known for years? As well as allowing their idiot cat to live, you cook them dinner and present them with a mooning garden gnome to go with the rest of their hilariously rude collection, that’s how. While Rod played guitar in the back yard and Rosie rehearsed for her show in the front room singing a bawdy love song to a battered old store dummy, I roasted a chook and veg for our final meal together. I’ll miss them, though I expect they’re quietly pleased to have their house to themselves again.

They’d both left for the day by the time I rose, inhaled a quick brekky and closed the door on Flanders Road for the last time. Today is a major mission; if I have a good run I might be climbing into the sack about 2am tomorrow morning.

Stage one is the drive to Portsmouth. It doesn’t begin well when I miss the ramp to the M25 and go on a nice little detour around Windsor Castle to meet it for the drive south. I stop for gas intending to put five quid in; something tells me to make it ten instead, a decision I’ll be grateful for later. I arrive in Portsmouth in good time for stage 2, the ferry to Caen. Six hours is too long to spend chained to a pack in the lounge so as soon as I park the bullet on the car deck of the Normandie I shoot up to the reception desk. In a stroke of luck I manage to secure the last available cabin for the crossing.

5308 is very comfortable, the bathroom better than many of the hotels I’ve stayed in. I dump my gear and go up on deck to catch the last glimpses of England. Portsmouth slides by under a clear sky and recedes lowly astern, the sea is flat and calm. Back in the cabin I grab a power nap and then shower until my fingers go all pruney. Dinner is spag bol with a glass of red. It’s 9:30 local time when I roll down the ramp at Caen for stage 3.

Once through the curly bits and on the right road I put the foot down. The asphalt rolls out like an airstrip and I sit on a hundred and forty. I pass through Argentan, Alençon and Le Mans. It’s white line fever on the run into Tours, the luminous foglines disappear to vanishing point in the flat blackness. It’s after 2am and the bullet’s running on empty when I finally pull up at the villa in Antogny. Lucky I poured that ten quid in.

*

Packing for the trip home felt like arranging my own funeral. I sifted and sorted everything into parcels and fitted them into two bags for the flight. I lavished special attention on the mighty silver bullet, cleaning her thoroughly inside and out; we had just the one more drive together before parting company after what’s been a beautiful relationship. With the logistics mostly in hand I took some time to just sit quietly, watch the Vienne drift slowly past and compose myself. I was thus engaged when a knock disturbed my reverie.

I answered the door to a woman with a tally-ho-pip-pip home counties accent who introduced herself as Susan. She’d seen Rosie in the yard a while ago, she said, and had just stopped by on impulse. She and her husband lived along at the next village. “Come up for drinkie poos about 6:30 and meet Bobby,” she insisted. It wasn’t on my agenda but I couldn’t refuse without causing offense. I duly rocked up to their house in Pussigny at the appointed hour only to discover we’d been back on standard time from daylight saving for three days and I’d arrived an hour early. All this meant was an extra hour’s drinking. The red I’d brought evaporated within minutes, after which it was more reds from their extensive cellar, bourbon and sundry other tipples I’m afraid I can’t recall. In fact, I can’t recall much after sitting down to a dinner of…sorry, can’t recall.

Two things I did manage to salvage from the evening were that Yul Brynner is buried nearby and the A10 L’Aquitane runs straight into Charles de Gaulle/Roissy.

Once I’d seen off the massive overhang the next morning I hopped in the bullet and drove out towards Luzé. Sure enough, I found Yul Brynner’s headstone in the small graveyard of the Russian Orthodox monastery of Saint-Michel-de-Bois-Aubry. If I remembered the story correctly, and there’s no guarantee I did, his wife’s family more or less owned the village. It was one last little surprise in what has been a long journey of discovery.

*

L’Aquitaine took me up to Charles De Gaulle/Roissy in just four hours. I checked into the Ibis, dropped my stuff in room 608 and drove the bullet around to the Europcar office. As I pulled into the parking area the odometer ticked over 18,420 kilometres, and what a ride it’s been. I patted the dashboard affectionately and returned the keys.

As night fell on day 253 over the airport architecture of Charles de Gaulle I sipped a glass of chateau red, smoked a cigar and took a mental inventory. The adventure we spent two years planning and preparing for, that we swapped our comfortable, secure lifestyle for, will soon be modern history but the psychological, spiritual and emotional journey may never end. 

Travelling is not only about getting there, it’s also about leaving. Ideally it is a narrative laced with both anticipation and afterthought. You read up and plan your assault but you never really know where you’re going until you’ve experienced the reality. Research creates expectations which are only occassionally fulfilled and rarely exceeded, and no amount of research will prepare you for the smells, the sounds, the tastes, the textures, the people, the culture, the feel of a place. Usually you don’t know where you’ve been until much later, after you’ve processed the experience and the memories have distilled. For two years I fantasised about the Nile and I was still scribbling notes about it months later in France. In Berlin I was thinking about Crete because Samaria still hadn’t quite sunk in even after the seven weeks and five countries that had passed between. Driving is the perfect metaphor for travel: no matter how focussed you are on the road ahead you're always glancing in the rear-view mirror.

Most of the time travelling is also about impressions, kaleidoscopic fragments. It can hardly be otherwise when you cover more than a thousand kilometres through maritime and mainland Greece by ferry, foot, bus and car in thirty-five hours. The seconds, minutes, days tick over, countries and customs pass by, you filter out the crap – like if Earth had an arsehole it’d be in Piraeus, the grottiest place in the galaxy (if you don’t count Cairo, but at least the Egyptians shake you down politely). You forget about the transit lounges, the cold-water dives, the footslogging, the weariness, the petty rip-offs, the thousand stupid frustrations, the agonising downtime, the German tourists – unless they’re colourful like a busload of herrenvolk schoolkids on the Amalfi Coast. You remember instead the satisfaction of solving hundreds of small challenges every day, stuff you take for granted at home, like feeding yourself, getting films developed, deciphering a bus timetable, coaxing money out of a hole in the wall that doesn’t speak your language, buying a train ticket, scoring toilet paper, driving a car on the wrong side of the road, finding somewhere – anywhere – to crash for the night. And you remember how lucky you were to survive a mugging in Amsterdam.

Travelling is about losing yourself and finding yourself simultaneously. It’s about winding up in places and wondering how you got there, and once you're there it's about surrendering to the moment and trying to suspend judgement. It's not about "doing" a destination, it's about "being" there. It’s about happy coincidences and casual meetings that end up yielding memorable experiences, like the drive through Jordan, and teaching you something about both your fellow travellers and yourself. It’s about discovering fears you’d rather had remained undiscovered and remembering things you’d rather forget. But always it’s an adventure that nourishes and enriches the receptive soul.

I’ve said elsewhere I don’t understand homesickness, not even sure what it is. Yes, I’m ready for a rest, ready for my own bed, ready for my own bathroom, ready to reconnect with family, ready for a barbie and a few beers with mates, but I don’t believe I’ve missed any of that for a minute and those needs will be soon satisfied. I’m not sure how well I’ll slide back into the routines of daily life, how the world back home will look to me after experiencing so much of the world beyond. 

On the one hand, I’ve learned to appreciate the quality of life we enjoy in Australia, our diverse and ancient landscapes and our dramatic coastline, our rich indigenous culture, and I'm grateful to have been born into a liberal Western democracy with tasty cheese. On the other hand, you don’t spend nine months navigating exotic cultures from the call of the muezzin to the pealing of cathedral bells, from the wonders of Roman plumbing to the Eiffel Tower, from the heights of Mt Sinai to the leonine jebels of Wadi Rum to the wind-lashed wilderness of the Scottish Highlands, from the Renaissance masters to the Impressionists without becoming conscious of how proscribed and parochial life can be in a small regional city like Bunbury. It occurred to me that if I ever write the book I’ve been threatening to write I’ll be spending an awful lot of time sitting in front of a computer in a small room; it’ll be like those old black and white TVs where the picture collapses into a little white dot in the centre of the screen when you turn them off.

*

Showered and shaved, closed the door on room 608 and descended to the restaurant for the breakfast smorgasbord. Wheeled the bags into the lift and out onto the concourse for the shuttle to terminal 1. At check-in lined up behind a Japanese family who appeared to have purchased the entire stock of some department store, one of them pushed a trolley with a carton the size of a small garden shed on it.

Airborne at 12:40. American neighbour and I exchanged not a single syllable for the whole twelve hours to Kuala Lumpur, suited me fine. Amused myself playing with the seat technology in the brand new 777. Apart from the pop-up LCD screen the left armrest opened to reveal a remote control that doubled as a cellular credit card phone. Pushed all the buttons and surfed all the audio and visual channels. Even tried the interactive gaming option but quickly got bored with that and focused instead on the controls in the right armrest. Adjusted footrest, recline angle and lumbar support. Burned off 90 minutes watching the formula fisticuffs of The Fifth Element with Bruce Willis.

Completely frazzed by the time we touched down in KL, scene of the great delay fiasco in February. Queued at the transfer desk with a thousand sweaty punters to earn admission to the Golden Lounge. Took forty minutes to travel five places. Up in the lounge grabbed a shower and changed clothes.

Airborne again at 10am. Another 777. British neighbour and I exchange not a word for the whole five hours to Perth. Already played with all the toys so watch the flight data roll by on the cabin display. Bored into watching the new Batman movie, yawn. Read some Bryson. Finally nod off and come around just north of Geraldton, three hours sleep in the last twenty-five. The green patchwork of mid-west farmland stretches out to the left while the vast emptiness of the Indian Ocean blends into the vast emptiness of sky out to the right. Announcement confirms what my ears are telling me, we're beginning our descent: “Please return to your seats. Place them in the upright position, stow your tray tables and fasten your seat belts.” Now we’re on final. The familiar cityscape rises gradually to meet us, the concrete runway network is under the wing and the wheels chirp in a seamless landing.

The physical journey is over. 

The inner journey continues...