As some of you know, I like to travel. No. That's not the entire truth. I love to travel. I love the experience of getting on a train, plane or automobile and going somewhere I have never been before. I love the challenge of leaving my safety zone and going to a place where I don't speak the language, where I have no idea what I'm going to see, hear, taste or smell next, and where I'm forced to hastily learn some very basic phrases in the local language just to get by. In the last ten years since I really started travelling, I've managed to get quite a few countries' stamps in my passport: 33 at last count, and I'm not done by a long shot.
Being the Miss Independent that I am, I much prefer to travel alone than with friends, if the safety situation in the destination country permits. I love the absolute freedom to do whatever I want, whenever I feel like doing it - to not compromise on where I'm going to go, what to do there and how long to stay. Apart from meeting a lot of new people I probably wouldn't meet were I travelling with someone, I can indulge my three favourite travel activities to my heart's content.
I can take a quick look at the map then shove it safely in my jeans pocket and head off in the general direction of where I want to go, wandering through the streets, taking a left here and a right there as the spirit moves me.
I can take as many photos as I want. I just upgraded to a Pentax X-70, and it is my absolute favourite toy. I had a Sony DSC-800 until March of 2010, and while it served me well for a long time, it was on life support by then, and there was no way I was taking a dying camera to Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania (my Easter trip this year). I'm learning about shutter speed and aperture and ISO numbers and settings, and loving it.
The most important? I can stop whenever I want, wherever I want, to write as much as I want. I can scout out somewhere comfy where I can watch the locals go about their daily activities and mull over my thoughts on whatever country or city I happen to be in at the time. I didn't write a whole lot in most of the western European countries, mostly because we were on the go all the time. Yes, I was on one of those big organised tours: a three-week booze cruise on wheels, trundling along the highways of Europe. Hello, my name is Australis and I have been on a Contiki tour. Back in 2004, I wasn't the confident adventurous traveller I am today. Back then, I had been to a total of five foreign countries - well, four and New Zealand for three weeks with my family when I was eleven. So I booked a group tour to explore all these new countries with a safety net of a tour manager and thirty of my "closest friends". Since then it's pretty much me and my backpack - no more guided tours for this little black duck, unless safety says otherwise.
Anyways, the point is that I have a lot of "Notes From The Road". One of them is already on here: "Musings from a rusty Estonian bus", from my Latvia/Estonia trip over the Easter weekend in 2009.
There are a whole lot more where that came from. So in the next few weeks, I'll be posting my new series "Notes From The Road" from a whole range of places - from Edinburgh to Pristina, from Tallinn to Marrakech, from Lisbon to Istanbul. Enjoy!
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