I leave Yangshuo tomorrow, and I am ready. I’m so bored. Don’t get upset. Don’t get upset! I know. No one likes to hear anything that could sound potentially negative or gloomy. Trust me, all you chuckle-head-smiley-faces, this is a good thing. It was necessary for me to get a little ho-hum in order to be excited about the world again. You know when you go to a really big art museum, like the Louvre, or something, and after an hour or so you’re kind of saying to yourself, “Oh who cares, obviously everyone can paint a masterpiece, otherwise there wouldn’t be a million here.” You’re arted out. Well mass destination traveling can feel kind of like that. Oh, another river, more trees, and gigantic mountains with caves, and markets with weird stuff everywhere? Everyone’s got that. You just get over stimulated. You get crabby, tired, you need a snack. You just need to sit somewhere for a while and become unimpressed, until you’re ready to be impressed again.
In preparation for my departure I’ve been going through the hostel’s travel books and trying to figure out what’s hot. This kind of thing turns me into an exasperated maniac. There is something to see, something amazing, literally everywhere. How are you supposed to choose? Photography is a big fat liar, and you can base your whole itinerary on a place because of one great photo. Then you get there and realize it was just good lighting. Someone was telling me that about Xian, and the Terra Cotta Soldiers. They basically said, the photo was better than the real thing, and there wasn’t a lot else in the city to hold their interest. Hmmm… This makes planning hard. In some ways I almost feel it’s better to do no research, have no expectations, and then when you run into something incredible (and you will) you’ll be ecstatic, and you’ll feel like you discovered it all on your own.
This is a difficult state of consciousness to adopt. When I left Los Angeles I was looking forward to getting away from circular conversations; Hey, how ya doing, what do you do, what are you working on… whatever. The unfortunate reality is that conversations in the life of a traveler are much more shallow, it’s; where have you been, where are you going, and there’s always a sense of one-upmanship about it, which I find strange, as we’re all doing the same thing. The result is feeling a tremendous amount of pressure to just say you’ve been somewhere that everyone else has been. You end up having urges to do everyone else’s top ten lists. It’s like listening to Top 40 radio only because you know the words and they play the songs at all the clubs.
I’ve been avoiding the entire where have you been, where are you going conversation, and trying to just go. My experiences, and the experiences to come, are just as interesting and valid as any of the others that I could plan out. The point is to live them, which is hard to do when you’re so worried about whether you’ll be able to hit up all the spots that everyone else has placed on your itinerary for you. I’m not pooh-poohing people’s recommendations. I think it’s great. They’ve been around and they want to share their stories. We need to do that. I just think it’s important to remember that their story is not mine, and it doesn’t need to be.
Yangshuo was fantastic, beautiful, relaxing, just what I needed. I’m ready to move again. Hopefully a little slower now…
This is a cell phone photo, so the quality is not great, but that’s the moon up in the left hand corner, peeking around the mountain.
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