the mountains outside and not the peaks in my blouse. A thin man politely asks if he may lean further across to get a photo, then practically sits on my lap. He has a bony backside and it needles. Momentarily, my panic switches to annoyance.
With so much shuffling and pushing, my panic returns and I search for the flight attendants, hoping – no praying – they will tell everyone to sit down. That way the plane won’t tip over and we won’t all die. Logically I know that’s not going to happen, but sometimes, I am not a rational thinker. Just my luck, finally the chance to travel and now we’re going to crash.
I always wanted to go to Nepal.
As an eight-year-old, Tintin and Snowy had taken my imagination on a wild trek across the roof of the earth and introduced me to a wondrous city called Kathmandu. Two years later I stared into the hypnotic blue eyes of Michael York and dreamily followed him to a utopian land high in the Himalayas in the seventies movie Lost Horizon. However, it was a family whisper that stirred my desire. Way back when, my grandfather had secretly visited Nepal. A soldier in India, he’d befriended a Gurkha and, during a leave grant, had spirited away to this hidden kingdom. I’d only ever heard my grandfather speak of this journey once in passing, and his description of a mystical place, where closing your eyes could transport you across caverns, buried deep into my subconscious mind. It consumed me.
Growing up I preferred National Geographic to Dolly Magazine, at odds with my girly school chums. Whilst they plastered posters of Bay City Rollers and Shaun Cassidy on their walls and drooled over boys with mullet hairstyles driving decaled panel vans, I was busy sticky-taping pages from an atlas to my ceiling and ogling at a pin-up boy who wore a gourd over his willy. I couldn’t wait to be old enough to apply for a passport in my own right and disappear into life’s wilderness.
At fifteen, much to the delight of my teachers, I’m sure, I left school with my only pass, Geography, and took any job available. For a country girl from out west whose only qualification was knowing Long Ears and Short Ears weren’t characters out of Noddy in Toyland but a group of people from Easter Island eons ago, career opportunities were scarce.
Reduced to crappy jobs such as milking cows (up to my knees in crap), babysitting (changing crap), mucking horse stalls (surrounded by crap), and picking strawberries (no crap, just back-breaking), I was so desperate to earn the dollars I even took on de-horning cattle (absolutely covered in crap… and blood and mucus and, on my part, vomit). At least I didn’t need to worry about makeup or looking cute. Instead, I planned. I planned how I would immerse myself in a country, discover its essence, its history, its life and its foibles. I planned to be a gypsy, dancing across the contours of borders, singing different tunes, wandering an open road and flying across a sky of uncountable stars.
Finally the time had come. Nineteen, cashed up and gripping passport in hand, I was just about to take flight when I crash-landed in love with a man whose size eleven feet were planted firmly on the ground.
Mal – outgoing, witty, a typical country ocker who called a spade a shovel and thought men who wore pastel were confused (it was the early eighties). Growing up in a large close family in a small tight-knit community, the virtues of work, work and work until you bloody drop dead were firmly instilled. If you wanted something done, he was the man to call. Dependable, available. Always available because he was always there – he never went anywhere. He had absolutely no desire to travel, not even around Australia.
His only inquisitiveness of the sub-continent came when the Aussies were playing Pakistan or India in the cricket. If the Aussies were beating them, fantastic. If they were beating the Poms, even better. As for Nepal, ‘Sorry, they don’t play cricket, so don’t care’
We were so different. He wanted a home, a business and kids. The best-laid plans can disappear in a puff of smoke. Mine exploded! Before I knew it, marriage bells had rung and nappies were being wrung out. Any discussion regarding travel, no matter how long or short a trip, gave birth to Mr Dependable’s three other personas – Mr Responsibility, Mr Cautious, and Mr Procrastinator.
Mr R argued well, always tugging the motherly guilt strings. Good parents don’t drag their bubs to strange foreign countries and subject them to even stranger people and odd food. They stay home, earn a living and make sure bub is well fed, warm and has loads of comforts. Then Mr C would pop his head up espousing the dangers of travelling; bizarre diseases, weird doctors and perilous forms of transport. What if something happened? We’d be too far from home for help. Mr P declared it all too hard. How would you wash nappies, blend baby food, or even get a pram into the travel luggage? No, too much bother. We’ll have to wait until the heir is older.
Years drifted by and we had slipped into the shackles of house repayments and running a business – working long hours, watching every cent, trying to turn the shack into a castle. The bub became a precocious, inquisitive pre-schooler constantly on the go, showing signs of independence. You know the type – turning five, going on twenty.
Whenever the subject of travelling was broached, Mr R returned with a list of reasons why we couldn’t. We had to commit (I felt as though I’d been committed) not just to the business and the house, but also now to the schooling of the tear-about rugrat. Then he too could get a good, responsible job and a mortgage, just like his dad. The dependable rock was firmly entrenched. Mal loved his job as a mechanic. He loved his business. It needed him and he couldn’t afford time away, not even for a short holiday.
I couldn’t even get the rallying support of family, mine or his. The Crepehangers, my doom-and-gloomers constantly reminded me of my responsibilities. ‘You can’t take a child to one of those countries,’ they’d exclaim. ‘He’ll catch lots of horrid diseases; eat disgusting food like dog, rat, fried cockroaches or, heaven forbid, duck embryo. He might get trampled by rampaging animals, or by people who throw tomatoes at each other at weird festivals. And where would he sleep? Not with all those smelly, ferally backpackers you find wandering the world. What if he was kidnapped, run over, lost?’ Gosh, none of these things could ever happen in Australia, right?
Before I knew it, I was mid-thirty, living the Australian dream, shopping my life away, a wallet full of plastic, a beautiful house near the beach crammed with stuff, two-plus cars in the garage and a small business, struggling, but viable. I had it all. Well, didn’t I?
Consumed with wanderlust I devoured every travel book I could get my hands on and pleaded for friends and acquaintances to give me every detail about their trips, never mind how minor. My friends began to hide their holiday snaps from me. Most people run a mile at the suggestion of a slide night. Not me – I’m there an hour early.
‘Why don’t you take a trip by yourself?’ A friend suggested. ‘Lots of women travel solo. It’s so common these days.’
‘Yes, I know, but I want to share my discoveries and misadventures with my significant other,’ I’d cry in frustration.
Travelling with another, particularly your beloved, guarantees always having someone to help carry your baggage, especially after purchasing wonderful ‘can’t-live-without’ bargains found in quaint shops down ‘we’re lost and it’s your fault’ laneways. Someone to share the responsibility of looking after the passports, tickets and other important documents and to pat your forehead when you’ve contracted the Quito Queasies.
Above all, I wanted the romance: holding hands whilst oohing and aahing over breathtaking sunsets with ancient backdrops, someone to tango-dip me under starry skies, to share a cheeky skinny-dip in a blue coral lagoon while palm fronds waved from icing-sugar beaches.
If truth be told, I was afraid. Not of travelling on my own, but afraid I would enjoy it so
