WHY AM I TRAVELING?
Thoughts from Bosnia & Herzegovina...
Don’t Worry, You Don’t Have to Answer
“What is she saying?” I ask.
“She wants to know why you’re traveling”, he tells me,
“…or something like that.”
I look over at her and our eyes meet.
She’s sitting cross-legged with a baby in her lap,
a plastic cup on the ground in front of them.
Her face doesn’t communicate scorn or resentment,
it is open, waiting.
I look into her eyes and think how impossible it is
to answer.
I could tell her what one guy told me,
that there’s a traveler’s gene that affects 20% of the world’s population.
He had the gene’s code tattooed on his forearm
and is the only one in his group of friends who goes on vacation to exotic places.
This year he’s going to learn to surf in Morocco, meals included.
Or I could tell her how I’ve seen that I was an Incan messenger in a past life
and I still feel the desire to run long distances burning in my legs,
that I think maybe my mission in this life is to be a sort of modern messenger,
telling the northerners that the southerners aren’t rude and deceitful
and the southerners that the northerners aren’t cold and stuck-up,
that goodness and kindness can be found anywhere and have nothing to do with
where you’re from or how much you have,
nothing to do with governments or religions.
I could tell her I’m traveling because I measure wealth in experiences and friendships,
in shared smiles and shared meals, in fruit trees and clear spring water,
in mountains and lakes, fireflies and stars…
“Don’t worry”, he tells me, “you don’t have to answer”,
and he changes the subject.
I turn back to the young man, breaking her gaze.
She turns back to the passerby, with open palm and pleading eyes,
not unused to having her questions go unanswered.
Then again, maybe
she was just trying to make
conversation.
Colleen Freeman
Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, September 6, 2015
It really isn’t an easy question to answer. Even now, 4 months later, sitting by the fireplace in Jaén, Spain with a ticket to Mexico in my inbox, I’m not sure I could give a solid answer. Or if I ever will. But I am grateful to that woman on the streets of Mostar, because even if I can’t answer it, I think it’s an important question to keep in mind:
Why am I traveling?
My initial reaction when confronted with this question and my inability to answer it is guilt. It seems you’d better have a pretty good reason to go waltzing around other people’s countries and cultures besides looking for something “new”, “different”, or “breathtaking”. I like to think that we are all citizens of this world, which belongs to no one and everyone, but our collective desire to explore it is often highly detrimental to the very thing we wish to see. Crowds flocking to see the sea turtles spawn on the beaches of Costa Rica caused many of the turtles to high-tail it outta there without laying a single egg. In the Gracia neighborhood in Barcelona, it’s hard to find a bench that doesn’t have a sticker pasted to it reading, “Tourist go home! You’re ruining my neighborhood.” The gentrification of the neighborhood has pushed out practical neighborhood drug stores, bakeries, tailor shops, fruit stands, hardware stores, etc. in lieu of hip, expensive vegan food and olive oil soap shops directed at hip urban tourists.
I can, of course, think of many good things that experiencing different cultures can bring to a person but the pure consumerist tourism doesn’t offer very much real contact with a culture. Everything is prepared to make your stay pleasurable. Culture in a box.
Am I one of them? Just eating up landscapes, taking photos to upload to my blog? I was here, scratched into a virtual tree trunk.
I want to learn and interact on a deeper level, person to person, culture to culture, heart to heart. I want to see the boring, the ugly, the routine, the day to day… I want to meet you, know what you think of me, of the world, what being human means to you, what makes you tick... Not knowing the language and looking obviously foreign cuts down a lot on learning and interacting. It’s much harder to get out of the bubble that floats you from one destination to the next on the brochure. Though what beautiful destinations they are…
These are some of the reflections I wrote down in my journal after visiting the gorgeous waterfalls in Kravice and the popular city of Mostar. It wasn’t the first or the last time I’ve had similar thoughts. These are reflections and comparisons that I make constantly. I had an art teacher once who told us we should stop questioning why we make art. As a species we have made art for thousands of years, he said, proof enough that art is an essential part of the human experience and reason enough to continue making it. I suppose the same thing could be said about travel or nomadic life. The question then becomes not why, but how.
So please, don’t visit Bosnia and Herzegovina unless you do it by foot or by bike. It’s one of the most beautiful, pristine countries I’ve visited in Europe!
September 8, 2015.
We’re deep in Bosnia now. Tomorrow we’ll reach Visoko and the Pyramid of the Sun. The landscape is beautiful, green and mountainous with small, Bavarian-esque towns and people selling honey and furs on the side of the road. The season is beginning to change. Here in the mountains, the temperatures are decidedly autumnal and the tips of the leaves are starting to turn yellow. It’s a pleasure to climb into the sleeping bag and zip it all the way up!
There are a lot of houses being built or recently built, unfinished with bare brick waiting to be plastered and gaping windows waiting for glass. Most of them are being lived in; there are chairs and potted plants on the porches and cars in the drive. I suppose it’s the aftermath of war. Begin again. I saw an old house being used as storage for hay. Many of the older houses have what look like bullet/shrapnel holes in the walls.
People look at us a lot when we pass through small towns. I really like those small towns and small roads. Horses, goats, sheep, chickens, an old shovel arm for a Caterpillar with a for sale sign, people sitting around together who are happy to wave back at us… And I think I saw a couple of girls sitting on stools in front of the open door to the chicken coop, watching how the chickens moved about. Country mountain living!
I bet you didn’t know that there are pyramids in Bosnia! That’s right, pyramids – supposedly there are three! Sam Osmanagich, an amateur archeologist, claims that he’s discovered the world’s oldest pyramids in Visoko. There’s the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon (a stepped pyramid), the Dragon Pyramid. We visited the Pyramid of the Moon, leaving our bikes at the bottom and hiking up to the top with our lovely guide, a man who, judging by his calves and his deftness, has probably climbed the pyramid thousands of times to show it off to people like us. Not being an archeologist or a geologist, it is impossible for me to say whether or not the evidence supporting Osmanagich’s claims is valid. The way the oddly formed rocks fit together seems too perfect for a human hand, if that makes sense. In my opinion, only Mother Nature is capable of such perfection.
Pyramid of the Moon, Visoko
Where the nay-saying experts seem to falter, however, is when explaining the existence of an underground tunnel structure (not yet open to the public). And many of those who criticize Osmanagich’s project have yet to set foot on the excavation grounds. It’s all very complicated and mysterious once you start looking into it (if you’re interested, this article by Smithsonian does a pretty good job of explaining the situation while remaining more or less unbiased). But that day that we visited the Pyramid of the Moon, I knew none of the details and was willing to consider the possibility. It wouldn’t be the first time that a so-called amateur is right and the so-called experts are wrong - advances in science and technology require a quite a bit of imagination and risk. So I choose to suspend disbelief and at least entertain the idea that intelligent life existed on earth far before the official consensus tells us. Because… Why not?
September 10, 2015.
It’s 8 am and there’s a gentle rain falling. I don’t want to sleep any longer for fear I’ll get the “zombies” and be groggy all day. We’re just 20k from Sarajevo in a quiet, peaceful valley town. We’ve even met one of its residents. Right as we were about to set up the tent, a man appeared. We immediately said hello and asked permission to sleep here. He said no problem, this is his brother’s land and the neighboring plot is his. He gave us a tour of his land, shared some small, tart red fruits with us and told us about how the war had totally destroyed the valley, his father’s house among those reduced to rubble. And if I understood correctly, his father chose to stay and died with the house. He is a Muslim, he told us. It seems at least half of Bosnia is Muslim. There are mosques in nearly every town. At certain times of the day (five times a day, we’ve been told), Arabic sounding songs are sung over the loudspeakers. They sang me to sleep last night and sang me awake this morning.
Now we have to pack up our wet things and head to Sarajevo to see what we can see. Hopefully the weather clears so we can share some music and bubbles and do the bobsled course.
A bike traveler in Makarska, Croatia told us about the bobsled course. The 1986 Olympic Games were held in Sarajevo. Most of the bobsled course was destroyed by bombings but there’s piece of it that survived and you can ride down it on your bike or longboard.
September 13, 2015. Visegrad.
We didn’t do the bobsled course in the end. It was too far to climb to risk having to walk our bikes up a narrow trail just to kill ourselves on a wet, leafy cement course. I watched some videos on YouTube so it’s as if I were really there ;).
I left Sarajevo feeling a bit sour towards the whole money system. It just seemed like there wasn’t much to see without out paying for it. They wouldn’t let us use the restroom in the cafes unless we paid. We gave our leftover coins from Croatia to a beggar girl because since the exchange offices only accept bills, they’re basically worthless here. Shortly after, I noticed a lot of tourists stooping down to pick something up from between the cobblestones in the square. I looked down and saw something gold and shiny. I bent down and picked it up, too. 20 cents of a Croatian kuna. She must have thrown them all into the air, cursing the damn tourists who gave her those worthless coins. And there we all were picking it up from the ground as if it were a shiny treasure. What a crazy world we live in.
Now we have to pack up our wet things and head to Sarajevo to see what we can see. Hopefully the weather clears so we can share some music and bubbles and do the bobsled course.
A bike traveler in Makarska, Croatia told us about the bobsled course. The 1986 Olympic Games were held in Sarajevo. Most of the bobsled course was destroyed by bombings but there’s piece of it that survived and you can ride down it on your bike or longboard.
September 13, 2015. Visegrad.
We didn’t do the bobsled course in the end. It was too far to climb to risk having to walk our bikes up a narrow trail just to kill ourselves on a wet, leafy cement course. I watched some videos on YouTube so it’s as if I were really there ;).
I left Sarajevo feeling a bit sour towards the whole money system. It just seemed like there wasn’t much to see without out paying for it. They wouldn’t let us use the restroom in the cafes unless we paid. We gave our leftover coins from Croatia to a beggar girl because since the exchange offices only accept bills, they’re basically worthless here. Shortly after, I noticed a lot of tourists stooping down to pick something up from between the cobblestones in the square. I looked down and saw something gold and shiny. I bent down and picked it up, too. 20 cents of a Croatian kuna. She must have thrown them all into the air, cursing the damn tourists who gave her those worthless coins. And there we all were picking it up from the ground as if it were a shiny treasure. What a crazy world we live in.
There's actually a lot to see in Sarajevo without paying a dime! Just depends on how you look at it...
I guess if we go to a city and really want to see something apart from just sharing music and bubbles and refilling our food money purse, we should try to find someone who can host us.
Tomorrow we’ll be in Serbia. Bosnia’s been really nice - lots of nature and mountains and simple countryside, really nice people and really gorgeous gorges.
I expect nothing less of Serbia. First stop, Uvac Canyon, one of the seven wonders of Serbia. I’m excited. I’m going to stop expecting anything from cities and just get excited about mountains.
Really, I'm just going to stop expecting anything from anything and just get excited about everything!! Expectations are limiting, excitement is motivating and contagious!
Until next time,
Colleen
__________________________________________________________________________________
Subscribe to our blog and get an update in your inbox each time we publish something new! We promise not to inundate you... we're too busy living it up to send massive amounts of emails!
Note: The blog posts in Spanish are written by Jose, and those in English, by Colleen. Those of you who understand both languages have the opportunity to understand both perspectives! Those of you who do not will have to rely on Google Translate if you wish to have an approximation...or start learning Spanish today!
Subscribe to our blog and get an update in your inbox each time we publish something new! We promise not to inundate you... we're too busy living it up to send massive amounts of emails!
Note: The blog posts in Spanish are written by Jose, and those in English, by Colleen. Those of you who understand both languages have the opportunity to understand both perspectives! Those of you who do not will have to rely on Google Translate if you wish to have an approximation...or start learning Spanish today!