All Of Monday’s Reasons - 1
“There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.”
Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
1. Oyumni
I stood on the platform, looked up and thought ahead, hoping I wouldn’t expect too much of the journey, nor it from me. I wasn’t worried about being alone and away from home. My passport had been burning a hole in my pocket all through the last of my school days and now it was packed safe and close, along with my life savings of £500 and various pieces of equipment to keep me clean, fed, sheltered and comfortable.
Equipment
Backpack, containing:
One-man tent, lightweight, about a foot and a half high
British Army surplus water bottle
Mug
Parafin cooker with two pans and fuel
Knife and fork
Sleeping bag
Foam sleeping mat
Sweatshirt, Pink Floyd’s Momentary Lapse of Reason tour
Pair of jeans
Two t-shirts
Brightly coloured Bermuda shorts
Swimming trunks
Flip-flops
Hiking books
Bandana
Baseball cap, New York Mets
Towel
Book -The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Book - Europe by Train (out of date)
Camera - Pentax P30 camera with zoom lens
First aid kit
Note pads
Pens
Harmonica
Sunglasses
It was July 1990 on a platform of the railway station in Antibes, in between Nice and Cannes in the south-east corner of France, where I was waiting to catch the first of many trains that would carry me over the next month. There in the days before MP3 players, mobile phones, GPS and self-heating coffee in a can, I still thought remote contols were clever, so hard were the times.
My upbringing and my life before this aren’t really of much consequence to the travels at hand, but there are some things I should tell you to let you know why I started this trip out in the first place, so indulge me for a moment and then we’ll be on our way.
I was born in the north of England in Macclesfield, near Manchester, but I don’t know the place because I moved south after two months and never went back. When I was five, I moved to Philadelphia, where I lived until I was eleven. After that I to moved Nice, in France, and when I was fourteen my parents broke up and moved to separate houses, at which juncture I returned to England, to a boarding school, which become home for the next four years.
Because I had moved so much, I didn’t feel English, French, or American. I was a stranger in the UK. It didn’t bother me, but I felt more like I was from nowhere than from lots of places, so I was happy travelling.
The Native American Sioux believe that once in every young man’s life he hears a call and feels a longing to discover his surroundings. This is known as the “oyumni”, or roaming; when that person feels they must satisfy their curiosity of what lies outside the closed community. Travel, with this in mind, is as much an exploration of the self as it is one’s surroundings.
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