Working My Way Back to Me
I keep seeing this TV ad for Land Rover that highlights the Dragon Challenge in Hunan Province, China. Land Rover must be in advertising saturation mode since the ad is on all the time. It seems to be an amazing 99-switchback mountain road combined with a 999-step staircase going 45 degrees up the side of a mountain. In the commercial, the Range Rover Sport climbs straight up the wide staircase and stops at the top with just its front wheels over the top and its back wheels not quite over. That bothers me to my core. I feel like that was a risky stunt going up such a steep and long stair flight, but to stop perilously teetering on the edge at the top, where it feels like the car could easily roll back and then not stop until it crashed to the bottom is a heap of metal and rubber, is just too much to stomach.
I finally went on to Google Maps to try to find this fabled road and stairs and discovered how much more interesting this place on Tianmen Mountain really is. To begin with, the stairs are called the Stairway to Heaven and they are at what is called the Tianmen Cave. This “cave” looks like an ominous geological structure on Google Maps, but in the online images it looks like a cliff on the side of a mountain. If the bottom of the stairs is way down in an actual open cauldron or cave, that is even more cool. The most interesting feature of the cliff is that the stairs climb to what is called the Gateway to Heaven, which is a hole in the 443-foot rock wall of the mountain. I’m suddenly wanting to go see this amazing-looking natural wonder, supposedly caused about 1700 years ago by a landslide that removed a large section of the cliff and left the large oval hole.
That is probably more than you wanted to know about some obscure spot in the deep inland parts of China. I understand that. There are lots of neat places and formations right here in the U.S., much less the less remote parts of the world. We regularly travel to the canyons of southern Utah and northern Arizona, but I’m not sure I’ve begun to see all the great natural wonders of our own country. Two years ago, we were in Greece and were quite taken by the hills around Kalabaka, on which about twenty monasteries were perched. It became a more memorable part of that trip around Greece (done on motorcycles) than the Acropolis, Corfu or Delphi, the billed highpoints of the trip. It was a real hidden gem. These are the spots we discover on our travels that make the traveling worthwhile and that are perhaps unanticipated by the “brochures”.
I am going through a strange quandary (not really a crisis, but a state of confusion that precedes crisis). I am getting to the age and time of life when travel is supposed to be one of my go-to activities. Being a person who grew up living on three continents (North America, South America and Europe) and who traveled extensively both for business and pleasure throughout my life, I have not lacked for seeing the far-flung parts of the earth. I occasionally exaggerate my own travel-broadness by implying that I’ve here or there, but mostly I have been here and there. I will declare that Antarctica is still not a place I can claim to have travelled but that the other six continents have been well-traipsed. I am light on Micronesia and parts of Southeast Asia, but Africa (North, West, East) and South America have lots and lots of pins covering them. I’ve been to Pakistan, but most of the mid-Asian “Stans” are still not visited, nor have I seen Mongolia. The question I find myself asking is whether it matters.
These days I can go online from my home, office, iPad or even iPhone and see most any place in the world in amazing detail. I can watch You Tube videos or even see entire documentaries about a Young girl in Mongolia or the history of the Easter Island stone heads. Does physically being there matter? The obvious comment most will make is that life is about experiences. That may or may not be relevant depending on how we choose to travel. If we go the cruise route it is clearly more about comfort than experience. If we are on “horseback” on a motorcycle there is a greater possibility of an experience, but is that a motorcycle experience or a local experience? Few of us take the backpacking route that we may have in our youth and I’m not sure many of us would want to stay in too many hostels.
There is a great movie with Martin Sheen (written and directed by his talented son, Emilio Esteves) called The Way, which is about a man who traces the steps that claimed the life of his backpacking son. He is walking the pilgrimage of St. George, called the Camino de Compostela that wends its way across the north of Spain. The whole story is about his reluctantly making friends during his trek and thereby opening himself up to all that life has to offer. The spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen the movie is that he ends of embracing the experiential path of life and the ending scene has him walking through a souk in Morocco or some such place with a big smile on his face. We are led to believe that he has chosen this life over the life of the Ophthalmologist with a practice in Santa Barbara and a set golf game every Wednesday. The movie is an inspiring reminder of why we live.
After a two-week Viking cruise to New Zealand and Australia (including Tasmania) this February, Kim and I have decided we are pausing on taking more cruises. We found little on that trip to inspire us. Meanwhile we had the most amazing and inspiring trip to the Ring of Kerry in Ireland a few months ago. We found more inspiration in the seaside scenery of Ireland than the seaside scenery of New Zealand. We still haven’t figured out why that happened, but we do suspect that we didn’t have the immersive experience with one that we had with the other. Our plans now include a motorcycle trip in a few weeks across Turkey (including Gallipoli, Troy, Ephesus and Cappadocia) and a trip next summer to Krakow, Poland that will extend into Transylvania to visit Dracula’s Castle in Romania. Hopefully those will be great experiences.
I am a global citizen. It pains me to see nationalism rise in preference to globalism. I have less and less need to travel and yet I have ongoing desires to travel and gather more experiences. I want to go ride the Dragon Challenge in Hunan and see the Tianmen Cave for myself. I want to be Martin Sheen walking through the souk with a smile on his face. Mostly I want to work my way back to me by traveling for the value of filling my life with more experiences.