“Just get up and go” seems to sum up the Australian travel ethos. Starting in the Sixties
when Robert Hughes, Clive James and Richard Neville and countless others fled the
confines of Sydney and Melbourne to shake-up the Establishment in London. A flood of
thousands followed soon after. The world opened up to Australian travellers and we
explored it like miners.
Very soon afterwards it seemed that there was no place on the planet that Australians hadn’t visited.
One of the biggest surprises of my travelling life occurred in the Southern Moroccan desert just kilometres from the Spanish Saharan border. The border had been closed for years and no visas were issued but I was still hopeful of entry. The narrow bitumen road had turned into a rough track and there was an old store sitting forlornly in the heat. No vehicles
except my VW and no villages for one hundred kilometres. Alien and forbidding. Inside the store a bloke with a soft drink in his hand and a grin like Luna Park said “G’day” in that lazy Australian accent that makes you. The late travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote an elegy to the
places that we can’t (or won’t) visit anymore. “Back in the sixties”, he said, “you could set off for Afghanistan with the expectation of a 19th Century romantic.
In the streets of Herat men strolled about with roses in their mouths and with rifles wrapped in flowered chintz. But this has all gone. Never, never, never to be seen again.” Bruce Chatwin wrote that in 1980.
smile. Like hearing a classic hit song you had forgotten. It was one of the biggest shocks
of my life. As though I’d landed on Mars and found a tent there!
We travel seriously. We know that we can’t fly overseas or get back home on a ten pound
flight so after we have scrimped and saved enough we get up and go. And we go for years.
Wanderlust is in our DNA. But this is a warning.
Get up and go before it is too late because
so many places have been lost. He also wrote “Man’s real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be done on foot”. And regrettably, we have lost the opportunity to visit so many incredible cities, ruins and shrines in recent years. Four thousand yearsof Middle Eastern history has been
systematically destroyed by the last ten years of shelling, war and terror. Locations such as
Leptis Magna in Libya, Aleppo and Damascus in Syria along with the ruins of Babylon and
Uhr are all probably no-go zones at the moment.
Yemen with its unbelievable desert scenery and mountain ranges is highly dangerous as it
is slowly destroyed by its neighbours.
But there are new beacons to attract travellers. Back in the seventies we couldn’t visit
Cambodia because the Kymer Rouge were slaughtering their own people as well as
foreigners. Vietnam was off limits for decades but it is a favoured destination now. I visited
Afghanistan in 1970 and didn’t see any men with roses but there were plenty with rifles
and hard eyes. Afghanistan was unsafe for Westerners for over twenty years because of
the Russians and Americans warring but now it is much safer again. Put it on your list.
The same applies for the North of Pakistan and the Hindu Kush.
endless list of incredible of places with wonderful history of creative energy and discovery.
Bukara, Baalbek, Najaf, Uhr, Tibet, Samarkand, Ctesiphon, Krak des Chevaliers. The
names get me so excited that I just want to get moving.
Polo was on when he travelled East from Venice (is it true that he was only eighteen
years old at the time?). Kazakhstan. Uzbekistan. Tajikistan. Azerbaijan. The idea was like
going to outer space. There was little information on it and plenty of warnings that we
would never be seen again.
My mate got nervous and dropped the idea (we’re still “Go for the lust of knowing what should not be known... we take the Golden Road to Samarkand”. I don’t know who wrote that sentence but the images it projects really get me excited. Always thought I was a
world traveller until I realised that most of my travelling had been on well-worn paths.
Now so many places and countries have been lost to us or if not lost they have
slipped away in decay or ruin. There is an All we have lost......the list is endless......Gjirokastra, immeasurably old and at the same time brand new and totally
unknown. I’m not even sure where it is! Albania? But I sure would like to visit it.
Forty years ago I suggested to a mate that we should try to travel through China and more or less follow the Old Silk Road that Marco friends) and I lacked the guts to try it alone. China is currently developing the Silk Road into a multi- billion dollar super highway so it can access Europe by land and not have to rely on shipping to move goods. A dusty road is more interesting than a motorway. Go now before it is too late.
The Dalai Lama says we can reduce our suffering and worry if we accept that situations,
politics and life are constantly in flux. Change is constant rather than fixed. Many countries
are lost to us at the moment but others have reversed that trend. There are many Golden
Roads which are largely unexplored. They are waiting for us. Don’t dream. Go now.
John A Wilson, February 2018, Gold Coast
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