"When the Student Is Ready, a Teacher Will Appear"

Warning: contains 80% introspection and 20% retrospection.

This is me on my last week, in NYC right now. Yes, I've been here before, as I of course had in SF where I hung out just before this, but it's a good soft landing, I'm learning. Instead of rushing off straight back to London or Helsinki and seeing the streets and scenes for the umpteenth time and risking snapping back into my old jaded self, this kind of a semi-familiar setting in between helps me keep up the curiosity and immediateness of the free exploration I've found so invaluable during the last year. If I can keep that up as I go back, good. There's so much to discover right outside the front door. In addition, my brother came over for a week, we drove around New England a bit and went to check out the Niagara Falls and had a blast although bad weather barred further voyaging into Canada (and our Dodge Charger was having electric problems).

Yet, here we are, at the threshold of heading home. It's time to look back a bit, though not conclusively, certainly: I'm putting together a collection of experiences from the trip in a different medium as we speak and hope to have something in a publishable order by summer (yes, I can always dump it online and count that as publishing).

Looking back, the steps I've taken form a logical path. The geographical progress was roughly dictated by my RTW ticket of course, but the introspective progress is at least as logical, and that wasn't planned out in anyway. I think it's fair to say now I left travelling in order to have an excuse to quit my job. Not the other way around. The Google job was a great thing indeed, so I needed something bigger to be able to leave it. A grandiose dream of a round the world trip was the ticket, and I started off with just those - a ticket and a dream, but no plan other than the immediate externalities.

After the month-long rock'n roll tour, the first countries, Mauritius, Madagascar and South Africa were exercises in randomness and extremes from all ends. Finally I was able to just go like I'd wanted and do weird and wonderful things. And I did. One of my favourite images from the whole trip is a hike in the nightly jungle in Northern Madagascar from a main road I'd bummed a ride to with an American tourist heading to a better hotel. I was to follow a road that soon turned into a bumpy spool of dirt paths to a hotel on the beach on a small peninsula, but I was risking getting hopelessly lost. There was no moon, and I couldn't turn my headlight on without attracting hordes of moths and mosquitoes, all headed for my head from above. After a while, I started to see candles and small fires through the trees of the surrounding jungle and saw people pass me in the darkness, some against me, some going the same way. I called out to some of them but got no reply at first. By this time, I was in the middle of a small village that consisted mainly of concrete hurricane shelters constructed by a UN agency where the locals had only open flames as their sources of light. There was not electricity on the island at night and there were no generators in the village. Just as I was about to get worried, someone replied to my questions phrased in (very) broken French and told me that yes, this was indeed the road, but that the hotel was far, but that the lights in the distance behind me were of a taxi that could take me there. Sure enough, there was a car - the smallest Renault I've ever seen, and possibly the oldest, already holding a family of five, who gave me a ride to the hotel itself, another 20 minutes away. It wouldn't have been bad to walk, I thought, but was later happy that I took the cab as the driver helped me translate from my imaginary French to the old nightguard who came out to meet with a stick and a stone. It was a weird week and a bit with many other adventures. I'd lost my bearings and I was playing it by ear.

Thereafter, South Africa was a testing ground. It tested my attitude, patience, persistence, prejudice and fear and taught me much of myself. I loved it, being able to space out in the African vastness as much as I wanted, but at the same time I was starting to get anxious for more meaningful things to do. I revisited my idea of a novel and shelved it after a few chapters, wrote a verbose short story to prove I can finish something, worked on a couple of business ideas and started pursuing one of them. The anxiety was a familiar beast and I was happy to have the energy to be able to tackle it doing creative things, but even these were external responses to an internal condition (existentialist crap which I'll strive to not name). So I got busy, again, and thought I was happy for a while. Which I guess I was, until a combination of hangover and a caffeine-overdose rips down the curtains and you look at yourself again in your essence. Well, something like that can happen to me at least.

I flew to Hong Kong, worked and snooped and shopped around first there and then in Bali, made my way to Bunaken to dive for a week and met my friend Ville for surfing (which I mostly didn't do) in Bali again. I was moving from wifi to wifi at this point, but I did a lot of creative work. By the time I got to Japan, it was getting clear that even the creative work wouldn't help me. I felt stranded in Tokyo and Osaka, the massive foreigness of everything in my face and stomach. Kyoto with it's temples in the woods were a breath of fresh air therefore and I stopped other things to breathe there for a while. I wasn't keen on going to India for the short time I could afford there, and the experience wasn't too pleasant (including people vomiting on our car) and certainly much less interesting and stimulating than Japan had been. South East Asia then I embraced.

Here, there's the long time on the ground in cities and beaches and ruins, dissected by riverboat trips and night trains. By the time I got to Singapore, I wanted to head to Australia already, thinking the land to paved with gold to say the least. I'd seen amazing things and met great people, yet I wasn't comfortable in my own skin. With horror, I thought of a moment 20 meters underwater in the most beautiful waters in Indonesia among amazing fish and corrals - thinking to myself: "This should be the greatest thing in the world I'm doing. Everybody would want to do this. Why am I not having fun?"

Australia wasn't exactly golden, but the people were. I stayed with Tammy and Melissa in Coolum, Mike and Kate in Sydney and Jan, Karen and Jarrod in Melbourne. This was also a much-needed breather from the constant packing and unpacking, though I felt like I stayed in the country for too long. I didn't know what I was doing on the trip, keeping myself busy with externalities and pretty likely getting on the nerves of the good people who had opened their homes to me. My persistence was rewarded when as the result of a chain of coincidences a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend recommended a meditation retreat he had done. As if in a gesture of desperation, I signed up, did my 10 days of silence and meditation for 11 hours per day and whaddayaknow - it's all been uphill since then. I haven't changed my beliefs (haven't generated any, that is), my lifestyle or my attitude in a conscious way but my goodness if I don't feel better than I did a few months ago. This purification, a catharsis of a kind, helped me enjoy the rest of trip immensely more and I think it's the combined benefits of the internal voyage combined with the external progress I've made that are now ripening. I won't go into the details of the meditation technique because telling about it is irrelevant. Only experience can bring wisdom. Without experience, you must choose whether or not to take my word for it. Yet, with curiosity, anyone can develop experience and ultimately even wisdom.

Since then, New Zealand, Fiji, beautiful South America and North America now have been full of surprises and I've been handling them happily. It is strange - as if every day is better than the previous one. If that isn't progress, I don't know what is. It seems I had a goal after all, and it is the one that I have reached.



 

Peru: Lima, Machu Picchu, Nasca lines

Finally, here are my thoughts on Peru: Lima, Nasca, Machu Picchu and the last leg of the full-time trip.

The Trip: Machu Picchu

After Buenos Aires and Santiago, Lima felt like a pit. The squander was much more visible, and the country looked like a war zone in some places. Which it has recently been in some places, some would say. Otherwise, the effects of recent earthquakes were the major contributor to the atmosphere.

I spent a couple of days in Lima, nosing around and indulging in the wonderful seafood that forms the foundation of Peruvian cuisine's fame. In Lima I had lunch with Kukka, a friend from my hometown who has covered a lot of socio-political issues and developments in Central and South America in the last couple of years, and she was able to shed a lot of light on the country and put my contrasting observations of the continent in perspective. Here is her blog (in Finnish).

The local buses certainly added to my impetus to conclude this bit of the trip. Seven hours to Nasca, quick fly-over at the Nasca lines and then 14 hours in the bus to Cusco overnight, then the four-hour train to Aguas Calientes. We flew over the Nasca lines in a tiny plane which gave me serious motion sickness which carried over to the bus and the train, but not having slept in a couple of days I was too tired to do anything about it. The lines themselves were cool to see and there's a couple of photos in the album. I don't think I made any reward miles on that flight, though.

The Inca Trail was closed for upkeep during February which was also the reason I meant to skip Machu Picchu entirely. Then I thought that it would fit my contrarian sight-seeing attitude to go there now, hoping that the crowds be smaller, and so I did. Even the three-hour hike (or climb, really) up from the town to the ruins was taxing enough, not to mention climbing the sheer stone steps of Wayanapicchu, so I don't feel I missed a whole lot not attending an overcrowded jungle-walk.

Up in the ruins, the mists persisted until about 11 am, after which the whole mountainside revealed it's glory for two hours until the rains descended again. It was a great - one of the highlights of the trip certainly, and rivaling Tikal for my number one ancient-civilizations-experience. I was sore in a big way the next day, and slightly worse the next. I can still feel my calves. Stretching would've been a much better idea than two beers in an Irish Pub harassed by drunk English teens and crashing for 12 hours. Very tired, but very happy.

And this I'm writing from San Francisco. Part work, part friends & fun, I'm here until next weekend, after which my brother Markus and me will throw a little New England / Canada road trip and spend the Easter in New York. What work, say you? There's a bold little venture called Turnleft Guides that I'm very proud to be a part of. We're in the process of launching the very first guides with a busy publishing schedule for the year. There will be a sign-up form on the website soon so you can stay tuned with the developments.

 

Rambling on the Ruins

I've gotten on average five hours of sleep per night in all of South America. It's starting to show through. Here are my heartfelt from Machu Picchu. Rubbish quality courtesy of Nokia N80. More photos and a proper report on Peru (Machu Picchu, Nasca Lines, Lima) coming up!