Journeys of Discovery

Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I was born in a car, my grandparent’s car, which I believe was given to my parents after my rushed arrival into the world soiled the purity of its back seat. As a child I used to memorize number plates because I never wanted to forget the car I was born in, and in some subliminal way I am sure this fermented into an obsession with locomotion.

I remember looking at photos of my parents in their early twenties, traveling up the east coast of Australia in a mustard VW kombi van. There was my tanned father seated in a red fold up camping chair by the sea, or my mother walking through the bush laughing at the camera; it looked so romantic, unpredictable and exciting.  

Luckily I grew up in the bush, so my backyard was a theme park of waterfalls, tadpoles and imagined adventures. I loved it so much that I remember my parents even called the police one day because I had been missing for too long. I am still notorious for going walkabout and my friends constantly berate me for wandering off like a curious stray cat.

But there is only so much a petulant teenager in a small country town can take, especially one drunk on novels by Colette and Kerouac. In my adolescence I fantasized about setting up a famous bohemian warehouse in Paris that bustled with artists, writers and models that would later become “the” movement of my generation.

In my high school year book, my “life ambition” was to be a pirate who sailed the seas and had a lover in every country, my way out of Australian parochialism and the tragedy of familiarity.

Fortuitously enough I have always seemed to get what I wanted, just never the way I expected. I ended in Oxford, not Paris, with a group of nerdy physicists espousing quantum theory rather than couplets, but at least they occasionally dropped “corollary” into casual conversation.
Regardless, once the penny dropped that I was young and free and on the other side of the world from all relevant figures of authority, I was unstoppable.

I flew to Casablanca and followed women in full-length black burqas through pyramids of paprika, turmeric and tagines, while black olive eyes followed the albino one out. I reveled in the osmotic experience of being the other. Huge billboards of the king in sunglasses, which could have passed for Gucci adverts, lined the main boulevards where men walked together holding hands or drank espressos and smoked cigarettes at cafes that spilled out onto the footpaths.

Sometimes it felt like women were invisible. When I asked a shopkeeper a question he would answer to my boyfriend. In a small coastal town where goats climbed the trees (I swear) and every building was whitewashed with blue shutters, I finally found some women: Middle-aged, Western and on the beach with young Moroccan toy-boys.

It was quite a revelation; I thought only men lurked in the annals of sex tourism. I was captivated and watched their every move for days.

In the Sahara, I stayed with a nomad family and ran around in the dunes, playing with dolls made out of pegs with kids who never left their giant sandcastle but could speak three languages.
Their mother had given birth to a girl called Nur, a few days earlier, but she made it seem just like any other day, washing the dishes in a big plastic tub with one arm, her newborn whose eyebrows were decorated in thick kohl, in the other. They nicknamed me Aisha and I took to wearing a thick turban.  

“The only requirement before you enter is to have a HIV test,” said the Dutch Indian man next to me on the plane, trying to convince me to join him at a dubious sounding commune in Pune. Growing increasingly bolshy after my African adventures, I had decided to head to India alone at age 20.  I landed in Mumbai just before dusk and managed to ditch my orgy-advocating friend. I will never forget driving through slums that made my blinkers of Western privilege irretrievably fall off.

It seemed anything I could possibly imagine was happening in India, I have visions of watching a family of gypsy women dance seductively barefoot on cut glass - from age 70 to 5 –  at a party on the rooftops of Rajasthan. Of playing bizarre instruments in caves with gravity-defying moustaches, drinking beer from teapots, marijuana growing wild on the roadside, purple cows with six legs, transvestites dressed as Shiva, being drugged by a carpet seller, a town painted entirely blue, the first storm of the monsoon, marriage to the toilet, the stories of exiled Tibetans and sun salutations on the peaks of the Himalayas.

“You’re coming to Paris,” screamed my mother down the phone to me in Delhi, “I haven’t seen you for three f****** years.”

She had a point.  My wanderings had become quite epic this time, but I had been in India for five months already and was having a ball. Could she not just send me over more money for my 21st birthday? There was an emphatic no on the other end and so it was that I found myself wandering down a Parisian street in a long red flowy skirt, jesus sandals and a few kilograms of beads. Obviously some kind of hippie metamorphosis had insidiously occurred without my noticing. I yearned for a pedicure and a perfectly groomed pooch.

It was there that I met an aunt who attempted to transform me into a polished, beige-underwear, hairspray-wearing mannequin worthy of working on swank yachts in the south of France. It was the antithesis of my promiscuous pirate dream, but there I was, suddenly thrust from the depths of the developing world onto the decks of the filthy rich who lived as though such a world never existed. But neither Capri, Corsica, Croatia or leftover caviar could cure my travel bug.

I wandered through Southeast Asia, survived the tsunami, taught English in the golden triangle and lived in a treehouse for a month, teetering on the prospects of becoming a professional nomad.

Recently, I was walking along a beach in South Lombok and three young girls followed me for hours in the hope I would buy one of their Rp 5,000 shell anklets (I did). A lively and informative discussion ensued, “I’m jelek, [ugly],” said one of the girls in reference to her dark skin. I tried to convince her otherwise and explained that white girls were always trying to be black. When I asked about the big gaping big holes in the sand, the girls told me the precious white sand had been sold. And what about the fires on the headland I asked. I was told they were burning rubbish.

It is seemingly innocent moments like these that make me realize that my addiction to adventure lies in getting underneath the shaky film of paradise to find the truth.

+ Kate Lamb

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