My Singapore Sling: The Fool’s Journey Home
Nobody had to tell me that travelling was a difficult and testing experience: I began to realise the enormity of my deed the moment I boarded Singapore Airline’s new (jet) pet, the Airbus 380. My weightlessness to the larger scope of the world became apparent as the plane lifted its giant steel wings in challenge to traverse the sky on that clear Sydney morning. I said my vows to my family as I would not see them for some several weeks later - in our hearts we all knew, in one way or another, that this would be the most rewarding trip of all - my first overseas journey.
Before I knew it, the cargo rose to the sky and left me with little more than the assurance of years of research into the aircraft for my safety, as body and soul took to the glorious sea in search of Raffles’s treasure. The plane landed in a swift thud of wheel to concrete and a gentle nudge toward the docking station where I greeted the new land. Of course, that’s just the embellished version - if travelling were that simple, would it really be worth the harrowing fight to simply book the flight?
My final few days in Singapore are an uncertain time for me, caught in the crossfire of families each so welcoming and desirable, while the pull of time and duty presses forever anon. But through the rush of errands and against the tide of the suffocating climate, some truly great things have happened with little more than an open mind.
Reflecting on what I have discovered about my home-away-from-home has led to some rather unexpected epiphanies about myself and about the way I relate to society and the values of others in day-to-day life. For example, I have always reserved a segment of awe to those who are fortunate to call themselves ‘travellers’; those who are comfortable outside their comfort zone and have explored at least one of the world’s continents, entitling themselves as travellers’ as though to demarcate their status as a few notches above the tourist, who are all too often so intent on finding familiar comforts in faraway places.
Since I’ve only been to Singapore and a week in Thailand, I barely feel as though I deserve the title of traveller, nor find it fitting to me as I am constantly seeking some glamorous show of cultural and spiritual pride in every person I meet and everywhere I go. I can’t say, for example, that I have ever had the thrill of a wholly solitary trip in the heart of the city or the midst of the jungle nor have I been caught in the rain without an umbrella. And in just the same way I have to admit that I cheated halfway along my trip in South-east Asia by borrowing the use of a washing machine and dryer, watching cable television, playing video games far too often and relying on bottled water and local dishes that are soaked in a colour I am familar with (after all, who would have thought that real satay is smoky, thick and as dark as soil?)
I suppose that I have been very fortunate to have been accepted into the home of Singaporean locals, so patient with my ‘Western ways’, fiery temper and my fussy ways. I say this because not all travelling adventures are so fortunate nor so nuturing; in fact I would daresay that I have experienced a foreign culture with more domestic sympathies than being off the beaten track.
This is not to say that I have not experienced what I could not have felt at home - I have spoken with the architect of a Thailand temple, been thrashed about in the violent ride of a tuk-tuk, learned to live in an eleven-storey community lot without feeling overwhelmed and sunk my hands deep into foreign soil to literally and symbolically plant seeds and eventually reap what I sow.
But before I solidify such a statement, I should clarify on this musing by saying that no overseas journey can possibly be the same for other person nor can it be equally identifiable on a new visit. I always forget that the scorching hot summer in the Southern Hemisphere means blistering cold for the North at virtually the same time, and even when the closest friends have each taken to their traveller’s journey in different parts of the world, each will return will stories to tell with some familiar and some with a signature wholly unique to the time and place. And an even better example is a pervasive sense of lacking motivation - I’ve thought for a long time that my feeling of lethargy in Sydney was wholly accountable to the climate but little did I know that this was an internal issue I am fostering the courage to combat.
In essence, it took me a long time to break away from expecting and adapting to the notion of pure experience but it was well worth the trial. After all, I have learned above all that cross-culture is more of a stereotype than a reality - we are far more similar in our universal values of peace in smaller communities and desire for self-cultivation than we would lead ourselves to believe. And as I put my mind and heart (and my finances as well!) toward the prospect of exploring another place, I will come better prepared with a suitcase much lighter than I anticipate and return home with more hermetic gifts than those on trinket value. Let’s not forget the fantastic stories and the examples of life-leading by others with are more than worth their weight in gold.
Next time my travel might be exploring inland New South Wales instead to reveal the true colours and my feelings toward the beauty of my birthland - regardless of where and when, one is always The Fool and returns home a little bit closer to The World than they previously knew.
Comments are closed.
