Papyrus Denial

Papyrus Denial

There are very few places in the world I either have not been to or do not care about returning to. That is not to say I cannot get enthusiastic about a trip to a specific spot by specific means with specific other travelers. I do not dislike foreign travel, I’ve just done so damn much of it that I am less and less enthusiastic about prioritizing it. I know it sounds boring and old to say it, but I like staying home more and more. If I make a list of places that I want to go and another list of places I would rather not go back to, you might be surprised. The obvious ones that I can easily avoid start with sub-Saharan Africa. To put it bluntly, I have no desire whatsoever to put myself in that array of harm’s way either politically, criminally or biologically. My memories are stark and decidedly not good about the region and I would define it as everything on the continent other than Morocco and Egypt. It’s not that I see no value in the place or the people, but just that it is a region which I find harder to handle than the value of what it has to offer.

The two parts of the world I have enjoyed traveling to more than others have been Latin America and the Middle East. The former is special to me because of my Latin American heritage and roots. I lived in the region for six years and my father was a Venezuelan citizen. Add to that my return to the area for business from 1985 for the best part of fifteen years, and you can say that familiarity with the region is what spawned my enjoyment of it. The exact opposite is true of my enjoyment of traveling in the Middle East. I have absolutely no connection to the region and no heritage there. I did travel there for business from 1987 on and off for twenty years. By my calculus, I spent perhaps 200 business days in the region, so I certainly had a decent exposure to it, long enough to form an opinion of whether it suited me or not. I cannot say why I feel it appealed to me, but it simply did.

I had lots of exposure to Europe, having lived there for my formative high school years and travelled there for business and pleasure for over fifty years. One might even say that I have been very overexposed to Europe, having seen almost all of it and from almost every imaginable angle. I still enjoy much of what Europe has to offer in terms of its culture and lifestyle, but I have long since lost any special passion for traveling to see all the places I have seen over and over.

And then there is Asia. I’ve spent time in China, Korea, Japan (two full months once in Tokyo), Singapore, India and even Australia. But that has generally been the area that I consider myself to be least familiar with. Take, for instance, the entire area we call Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar and Bangladesh. My exposure there is minimal and, strangely enough, my interest is equally minimal. I don’t know if its about the whole Vietnam War era thing or just that once missed, an exotic area becomes something more to avoid than embrace. In either case, it is a cipher to me and I rarely find any reason to consider travel there.

The two main external sources of travel motivation have been from Kim or from my motorcycle group. They have caused me in the last decade to spend time in Croatia, Turkey, Greece and Sicily. This year we will go to the Pyrenees and upper Portugal. Before that, we covered Provence and Tuscany as only one can do by motorcycle. With the aging out of our motorcycle group, it is unclear how many more foreign trips will get planned. The younger group remains motivated, but the older group is falling by the wayside one by one. That probably would matter less if either Kim or I were excited to see parts of the world that we haven’t seen, but there are simply so few of those spots that hold appeal to us that it has created a real sense of indefiniteness around the whole foreign travel issue for us. There is a motorcycle trip under discussion about Patagonia for early next year, but for several reasons and despite Patagonia being an intriguing part of the world (one that seems somewhat detached from the Latin America that I have mostly known), we are inclined to pass on it.

The places that still seem to hold some interest to the two of us have distilled down to two, for all intents and purposes. Kim has not been to China and feels that it is a big gap on her dance card that should probably be ticked off. I had the opportunity to spend a dozen days traveling all over China (Beijing, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Shenzhen and Shanghai) by planes, trains and automobiles and feel I got a real look at the ground-level China of the modern era, as opposed to the ultra-touristy China of the Great Wall and Terracotta Warriors. While I would find it in me to accommodate Kim’s desire to see China and also use it to fill in some of the tourist spots I missed, I fear that has recently become more difficult. I am reading more and more each day about the new Axis of authoritarianism that has formed between Russia, China and Iran as symbolized by the fact that Putin has only made two foreign trips this year and it was to those two spots. We wouldn’t plan a visit to Iran or Russia now, so I suspect that we are best not planning a China trip either. With Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan today, China seems to be doubling down on its threats of retaliation against someone or something for the impunity of the symbolism of support for a place Beijing considers clear Chinese manifest destiny. When I read books like The Winds of War by Herman Wouk, I always wondered who would be so foolish as to not see trouble ahead when it was so clear. Are we that different today vis-a-vis China than we were vis-a-vis Japan in 1941?

The other place that intrigues both Kim and me is Egypt, and by extension, Petra in the Jordanian desert near Wadi Rum. Kim and I have been all over Israel, including Masada, which is not so very far from Petra, but Kim really hankers to see Petra itself. I have been to both Petra and Wadi Rum from the Jordanian side and admit that it is impressive. Between Lawrence of Arabia and Raiders of the Lost Arc, I am smitten with the area and would gladly go to see it again. It is rather out of the way and is best seen in conjunction with a trip to Egypt according to all the travel booking services and cruise lines. There was a time when a trip to Egypt was simply too dangerous with all the unrest, but with all the other problems in the world and the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan, things seems calmer. Even Joe Biden deigned to visit Saudi Arabia recently, so how dangerous can it be? I’ve been to Egypt in my youth, but its been long enough to make me want to rediscover the latent archeologist in me and add to my antiquities collection with a visit.

So, the other day I went to the local nursery to replace an errant Japanese red maple that was not meant to be in this subtropical climate. The first and only plant I looked at was a wondrous reedy plant with exploding splays of Dr. Seuss-like tops. I was told it was a papyrus plant. My only context for papyrus is the old Egyptian and Mesopotamian scrolls of rough paper, that were made from those very reeds. It won me over immediately with the romanticism of the reeds lining the Nile River in the days of Moses and Pharaoh Ramses II. The papyrus plant now sits near our doorstep and will remind me that I should stop being in denial that a trip down the Nile is still something we simply must do.