第一个冲动,推是什么ed you to travel, and do you remember your very first travel experience?
For me, it was a bone-rattling yet soul-saving bus trip to the Czech Republic. Growing up in Lithuania, I was convinced I could never travel thanks to the whole Iron Curtain business; when the Berlin Wall fell, the borders into the West opened, but the cost of travel to such exotic places like Paris or aforementioned Berlin remained astronomical till the mid-nineties.
As a kid, I traveled within Lithuania instead, my dad taking me on bicycle expeditions into the woods or a raft trip down a river. The point of these expeditions wasn’t merely traveling – it was discovery and make-believe: floating down River Dubysa, a body of water most Americans would call a creek at best (it certainly isn’t the Colorado), we’d imagine we were traveling down the Amazon River watching out for man-eating alligators (tadpoles) and hostile indigenous peoples (local fishermen). A bicycle ride down a sandy forest trail would become a Marco Polo mission across the Gobi Desert, transforming a local hunters’ watch tower into a mysterious caravanserai. When I readLes Enfants du Capitaine Grant(In Search of Castaways), boy did I got obsessed with Parallel 37 South (which was to be found somewhere in my grandad’s apple orchard serving as imaginary Patagonia, if you could get past the lurking condors – my grandma’s chickens – and the treacherous, unpredictable pampas in the form of a meadow).
In addition to the world’s geographical peculiarities, I was very much into languages, too. I’d invented my own – a sort of an improvised Baltic Esperanto with its own alphabet I kept perfecting until I was eleven years old – and I was most curious about the way foreigners laughed. I’d never met a foreigner, but, since they spoke different languages, it followed that they must laugh differently, too. How does a German giggle sound? What about a Maori one? The more I researched the matter, the more confusing it got; it appeared to me that the French must be quite hilarious (Three Musketeers), the British a little less so (King Solomon’s Mines), whereas people in Yukon probably never laughed at all (White Fang).
My dad and five-year-old me were obsessed with old maps and Jules Vernes to such a degree that the desire to travel eventually won. At the age of thirteen, I found myself on a tourist bus headed for Prague; not quite the faraway lands of South America or Australia, but I vividly remember feeling intensely adventurous and very much castaway as soon as we hit the uncharted territories of Eastern Poland. Seeing the Sudeten Mountains felt like witnessing the grandeur of the Himalayas, and when we finally reached Prague, it was like entering the Lost City.
It was just a touristy trip where my parents just handed me over to the tour guide – back in the day, all you needed to do was sign a consent form for your underage offspring to venture abroad – and we spent two days riding the bus, three days following the tour guide around Prague like lost ducklings, and another two days traveling back. But to me, it was the most magical journey imaginable. Next year, it was Slovakia. Hungary, the next. Finally, when I turned eighteen, I began hitch-hiking all over Europe – France, Spain, Portugal – and by then, Jules Vernes got replaced by Jack Kerouac.
Over the years, I ventured further and further until finally, I found the 37thparallel South. I remember calling my dad from Rio Gallegos and telling him I was in Patagonia.Patagonia!
For the last eight years, I have traveled freely wherever I wanted to, and I intend to keep doing so for the foreseeable future. But, I still have to pinch myself sometimes. I grew up feeling that the world was closed off for the likes of us in the post-Soviet bloc, our passports sneered at when crossing Western borders. To this day, I never quite fully trust that the world is there for me, too. That’s why the freedom is so delicious: I’m riding across the Andes Mountains? I’m in Havana? I’m in Newfoundland? Me?!
Strangely enough, I’m grateful for that feeling; perhaps it is no bad thing to be acutely aware just how fleeting everything is, how the world can change in a blink of an eye shutting you in, and how freedom is not a guarantee.
And I’m most grateful to my father and Jacques Paganel; next year, I’m planning to take my dad on 4×4 expedition across Botswana. We’ll be searching for some lost treasure hidden in the waterways of Okavango delta, of course.
What was your reason to travel, and what pushed you to go see the world on a motorcycle?Share in the comments below!
Images: Pixabay
