Paula and Me

I was chatting via phone with an East Coast friend last weekend about our travel adventures when she mentioned my recent blog post about vulnerability. I met Paula when we went with a small group on a journey to Ladakh in the northeast of India near Kashmir. She is completely comfortable scrambling up a rock formation like a mountain goat, her long legs leaping from one outcropping to the next. Paula is not young; she was in her mid-50s when we traveled together nearly ten years ago. She is now planning her next trek into the Himalayas along ancient, narrow pathways to villages and monasteries that cling to the side of the mountains or nestle in deep valleys that are impossible to reach after the winter snows arrive.

A few years after we explored Ladakh together, she went on a trek to Mustang, a remote and isolated region of Nepal. I wanted to join the trekking party…three members in all plus guides and bearers…that traversed the ancient trail for nearly a month to experience a colorful Buddhist festival. But I knew I would end up clinging to the steep, narrow, vertical cliff in terror and having to be pried off by the guides as Paula danced nimbly onward. As it turned out, Paula “hit the wall,” as experienced trekkers say.  After a week or so, extreme fatigue sets in accompanied by dehydration.  Some say it is from the altitude but others say it is not.  Whatever the cause, she wanted to stop, to go no further, to turn around and go back. I experienced altitude sickness on the drive up to Leh, the capital of Ladakh, as we approached the Rohtang Pass at 13,000 feet.  It is said about altitude sickness that at first you are afraid you are going to die, and then you are afraid you are not going to die. But with rest, hydration, food and renewal, plus a hike to a nearby village that was on her Must-See list, Paula soldiered on and achieved her long-held goal with stories to tell and photos to show of a celebration that few foreigners ever see.

During our long conversation, Paula also shared a story of an earlier journey to South America when she was on a train high in the mountains. It was nighttime and the train came to a sudden stop. Police appeared from out of nowhere and arrested the engineer, leaving the train parked on the tracks. And so it sat for several hours as the passengers wondered how they were going to get to their destination. Paula said she felt vulnerable not knowing what might happen next. The following day, the passengers heaved a collective sigh of relief when another engineer arrived and took them the rest of the way to the station.

At this point I began to laugh, “And people wonder why we want to travel like we do. Sometimes so do I.”

I am getting ready to return to Yap. No longer a member of the Peace Corps since they “medically separated” me due to the lack of ophthalmic care in Micronesia, I will be an independent consultant working, as I did through the Peace Corps, for the Yap Visitors Bureau and the 2018 Micronesian Games Marketing Committee.  At some point, I will continue on my journey traveling west around the world. Along the way, I may need medical care for an injury or a cold or altitude sickness, but I will go with confidence tempered with awareness of what I can and cannot do physically; what I should and should not do; what I am capable of and how to get help if I need it. I will take precautions before I set out with insurance, a copy of my living will and phone numbers of embassies along the way in my backpack should anyone need to contact my “In-Case-of-Emergency” friend back in North Carolina.

Many people tell me they would never be able to do what Paula and I and so many other travelers do. They would be too afraid to strike out, to travel alone, to go to the places we have been and plan to go to. And therein lies the difference we decided. Fear of the unknown. Paula and I seek the unknown. But we know how to travel safely with pre-planning and the knowledge that experience provides, while not compromising our desire to experience other cultures, different foods and people unlike us.

We know we can make do with only a bucket or hole in the ground or a bush when nature calls; we can sleep in a tent in a village on a high mountain plateau; we can go without a bath for several days or weeks. We have both done that and more. We know that when we do, we will crawl out of our tents, look up at the black night sky and see more stars shooting and revolving around the firmament, horizon to horizon, than we ever imagined existed. We will be invited by a Mongolian granny to come into her yurt in the middle of the Gobi Desert, sit cross-legged on the rugs on the earthen floor, and sip warm milk fresh from the camel staked nearby. We will meet a family on an out-of-the-way back-road of South Africa as a new bride prepares to join her husband in his village a day’s walk away. The bride’s father will tell us about Zulu wedding traditions and will explain the dried bladder hanging by a thread on the side of the bride’s beaded headdress that is believed to hold the ancestors’ spirits, while the girl’s granny smiles at us while stirring a boiling cauldron of blood from the cow that was slaughtered that morning. Or we will end up in a train parked along a track high in the Andes Mountains with no one to steer it safely onward.

That is why Paula and I travel. That is why we go where we go. That is why we will continue our journeys and why we talked about meeting in India and going to an ashram in Kerala in the future. That is why being an armchair traveler is not enough for us.

I fervently hope those who profess to be too afraid to travel to distant places, or perhaps cannot travel, will do more than read this blog and look at my photos. I hope they will be inspired to strike out and travel to a place that is different. It might be a desert or mountaintop close to their home, but a place where they too can experience that canopy of brilliant stars on a moonlit night and exhilarate in the feeling of one world together as we all cling to this fragile sphere as it speeds through the universe.