(scene, 28 May, 1:45, Istanbul Airport. I emerge out of a toilet opposite Gate A11 to find Charmaine alone with our bags.)
Me: Where’d Dennis go?
Charmaine: He went off to find a post office to send his postcards.
Me (checks phone): I’ve been in there for like twenty minutes. Surely he must have found one by now?
(As Charmaine speaks, she swings her arms more and more wildly; her voice gets more dramatic.)
Charmaine: Perhaps Dennis is gone, gone forever, lost in the halls of Istanbul Airport and doomed to wander its corridors for eternity, his only sustenance the blood of the young women of Morocco; he will lure them in with promises of that one true photograph, and then he will ensnare them to accompany him forever, with no prospect of escape until they have surrendered their mobile phone and their Instagram handles.
(long pause)
Me: Since when were you the hyperactive, funny one with all the weird non-sequiturs?
28 May
Between saying goodbye to Charmaine and Dennis at the airport and pressing the doorbell to my family’s flat, I listen to six songs on my phone which I retroactively decide are a perfect encapsulation of my time in Europe. (Not sure if this counts as pathetic fallacy. Aural fallacy?) I have therefore listed them below, to act as a sort of soundtrack to my post-trip reflections, although said reflections have been streamlined so that you don’t have to read through the dozen or so times I was distracted by a tree.
New Order, “True Faith”
As the synthetic thunder of New Order booms out from my headphones, the bus pulls out from the curb and clatters onto the highway. I’m back in a land where the sun sets and rises without much variance; at seven o’clock, the skies over Lantao Island are already such a deep shade of blue that I can barely make out the clouds. Everything here is so extraordinarily recognisable: left-hand drive, bilingual signage, accented Chinese everywhere. It’s old, familiar Hong Kong, and slightly claustrophobic.
And yet despite the depressing trappings of familiarity, I feel a sudden sense of liberty: for my mind is still halfway across the world, whizzing down Bernstorffsgade and relishing the memory of a crisp Copenhagen wind. Already I am thinking about how I will be able to tell all of this in my blog: as time goes by all of these memories will blur together into a woozy mess, but right now everything is fresh in my mind, more vivid than the biggest cinema screen, and I’m tapping feverishly on my phone, trying to get it all down before it starts leaking away. Because this trip is worth remembering: I can’t remember having so much fun abroad, for such a sustained period of time, and all of it deserves to be recounted, shared, glorified to the largest available audience. Granted, I’ve not gone on any long trips abroad since May 2019, but of the trips I can still hazily remember, none of them have made me feel so extraordinarily happy and blissed-out as this one. (As summer turns to autumn I will hatch plans to move to Copenhagen and/or Vienna; apologies to close friends of mine who’ve had to listen to me talk about the Austrian immigration system for the nth time, I’m still working on it.)
Norman Greenbaum, “Spirit in the Sky”
And yet I cannot deny that I am also exhausted, drained, absolutely spent. Standing up to adjust something on my suitcase, I feel like I’ve left two-thirds of my body behind on the seat; when I sit back down, its ghost refuses to fuse back together with me. Obviously some of this has to do with the fact that I voided my bowels, again and again, in the small hours of Saturday morning (and did so again on the plane journey back — apologies to Turkish Airlines for the mess), but there was also all the rushing to and fro, hopping on and off trains and trams and buses and what have you, all in the pursuit of another shock of the new. I have walked up hillsides and stairways, hurtled my way through streets and hallways, and generally zoomed around three different European cities so that I can see everything, absolutely everything — and the experience has completely sucked me dry.
With maturity comes age; with age comes decreasing mobility. I’d love to do another of these in future, but right now I just desperately need the sleep that eluded me on Friday night, and only partially returned to me on Saturday. But the bus is an express and I know it’s a must to stay awake and prepare myself to alight, even if it’s warm and a delicious breeze is wafting through the carriage.
Electric Light Orchestra, “Don’t Bring Me Down”
Actually, I say this trip has been a consistent blast, but the more my tired mind thinks back to the past ten days, the more there is to nitpick. There’s the food poisoning, of course, but there’s also the KunstHaus disappointment, the cancelled train from Bratislava, and the terrifying, desperate panic when I found myself suddenly alone in Hamburg Hauptbahnhof. Even in places like Vienna and Copenhagen — places I thought would be paradise — I still couldn’t help being a little upset by events not going the way I’d planned, or unnerved by interactions I hadn’t wanted in the first place. Writing up this trip in the past seven months, it’s struck me that I was a bit more perturbed than I’d let on: all those scares and insecurities, those weren’t incidences to brush off easily. Was I in denial all those times? Did I let my mind out somewhere down the road?
Neneh Cherry, “Buffalo Stance”
But look at it from a different state of mind. For every down moment I had, there were also five excellent moments to balance it out. My train cancellation in Bratislava was swiftly followed by the amazing tranceworld of the Wurstelprater amusement park; any exhaustion we had on the Hamburg train was soon swept aside by the exhilaration of Hamburg itself. I know this isn’t just a me thing, but so often I find myself fixating on the one seemingly-bad thing that happened instead of the countless definitely-good things that did; and that’s just not a good thing to do, especially when you’re travelling.
And at least I can take solace from one thing in particular: the fact that I managed to let go of some of my anxieties, to stop worrying about whether I’d have a happy ending or not, that’s a good bit of personal growth for me. I always worried that I’d screw up this trip somehow, that something might happen to me or that my worst tendencies would ruin this trip in some vague imagined way — I didn’t know how, but I just knew it would. Counting down the weeks and days to our meet-up at Hong Kong International, I was so freaked out that Charmaine had to assure me twice that yes, the three of us would work out just fine, and that I wouldn’t mess things up. But during this trip I made peace with myself — a shaky, volatile peace, but a peace nonetheless. The stomach pains in Copenhagen stopped being a catastrophe, my incomplete adventures in Austria and Denmark no longer feels like a deal-breaker. None of these happenings were desirable, of course, but I still ended up feeling a little more at peace with what came my way. That can only mean that I’m a slightly more mature person than I was in 2018/19, and for that alone I’m grateful.
Seal, “Kiss from A Rose”
I nod off for a bit. There is so much a man can say, but Seal is just one of those singers with an impossibly smooth voice and it’s at this point my brain short-circuits and decides to shut down again. I’ve had a long holiday.
Paul McCartney, “The World Tonight”
The bus slides off the highway and onto the main street of my district as I wake up. The LED lights and crowded pavements of my suburb materialise out of the dark as I watch, a glaring reminder of the same old familiar world that Hong Kong presents. In my mind I’m already thinking of places to go next, places that I might explore. I’ve always wanted to see Argentina or Morocco, two countries on continents I’ve never set foot on; or maybe I’ll aim for something closer to home and do Korea or Vietnam next — I might be a Europhile at heart, but there’s much to explore closer to home, too, and it would be a shame to only focus on the monolith that is Western culture.
But of course travel is nothing without the people you go with — and right on cue, both Charmaine and Dennis send texts confirming their own arrivals at home; and I know that even though we might never go on another trip together, I’ll always keep in mind the time I had with these two people, these two beloved travel companions I’ve shared roomspace with these past ten days. They were witty, they were kind, they had the most excellent empathy when the situation called for it (although their advice on dealing with food poisoning was rubbish). This week’ll be emptier without their commentary somehow, the energy lower, the anticipation lesser; I’ll miss being able to share with them the new things I’ve seen, or hearing about their latest animalistic discoveries.
In the end, it all dovetails nicely with the raison d’etre for these blogs. I have nothing but the hugest respect for people who travel solo, but at the end of the day it’s just so much nicer to come back to a room full of people, and to tell them of the awesome mysterious castle just around the corner, or the kind-hearted old lady you sat next to on the tram (and then hear their stories in return, too). I’m grateful for the week and a half I had with these two people, and as I step onto the pavement at my local bus station, I allow myself to flash forward to the day where the three of us gather with our suitcases at the departure halls of Hong Kong International Airport, and head off once more to shores unknown. A man can dream.
And I think that’s everything! It only remains for me to thank you for reading through this series of travel blogs; whether you read through all 45,000 words or just came by for the photos, I’m grateful that you felt interested enough to share in the joy of my travels. I’ve got a couple of trips pencilled in for 2024, and hopefully in future I’ll have the time to write those up too — in the meantime, you all have a great year, and I’ll see you around here sometime.
That night, safely ensconced in two familiar blankets and with my bowels still growling sinisterly, I dreamt I went back to Copenhagen again. I was back in the Tivoli Gardens, just as the sun was slipping beneath the horizon and the lights were turning on. Dennis, Charmaine and I were walking underneath the arches, underneath the trees shining green and gold in the twilight, and hundreds of people were crowding past us. Fragments of voices in different languages faded in and out of one another, like a radio spinning out of control — and they were all on roller skates. (I have no idea where the roller skates came from. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Xanadu.) As I watched, I saw familiar faces emerge in amongst the crowd — the pink-haired receptionist from the Vapiano’s in Vienna, the kids we saw in Bratislava, the guy on the train from Hamburg, the young waitress at the Danish Designmuseum. They zoomed past us, their laughter ringing in my ears, and played hide-and-seek in the shadows.
I spun around to see the look on my friends’ faces, but they too had magicked on roller skates and were disappearing into the crowd, their wheels clattering loud on the cobblestones, their faces suffused with the utmost wonder and joy. I stood at the entrance to this tunnel of light, taking in all the people and the structures floating before my eyes, and even though I knew it was a dream I still felt the tears wet on my face, for I had been there, been blessed enough to see all this and meet all these wonderful people, and spent what I knew would be the best ten days of 2023 in a paradise with such beautiful company. I waded into the crowd, into the warm glow of that carnival world, and we danced, sang, and embraced, all through the night.
Inkpot Shuffles in the Twilight 