Wandering Secrets

Lately we have found ourselves missing the feeling of having a home. We quit our jobs and left our apartment almost two years ago to backpack several countries and work in China. As some of you may know, life in China wasn’t easy ( that’s the least we can say) but in the end I had come to enjoy it.

We started backpacking the south of China, Laos and a bit of Vietnam two months ago with the daily feeling that we were tired of this way of travelling. Spending a full year without friends and family, in a constant language fog and being taken for a wallet more than for a person isn’t exaclty what we dream of in our travels. Mind you, backpacking has its great advantages, like the overpowering feeling of freedom and the sense of adventure it gives, but we couldn’t help looking forward to getting away from Asia and start a new life elsewhere; with a place to come back to, time to read, to draw, going out at night with friends, a job and more or less a stable life.

We shortened our latest trips trying to rush the process, we booked a ticket back to France at the earliest date to find another job and find a place to live in a new country. Everyday we made plans for our future life, looked all the jod ads worldwise, dreaming about getting a place somewhere nice, having a home. We didn’t expect that, having to come back to China for a month before heading to France we would feel… happy. Relieved. Excited.

After all I said about living and working in China, I surely didn’t expect to have positive feelings about spending another month there. But now that I give it a little thought, China is the closest to a home we have. A place where we understand what people tell us, where we can read the menus without having to ask for the touristic one, where we can’t wait to eat all the dishes we have missed in only a month and a half away. And as much as it hurts to face it, it has somehow grown in me.

We are waiting for the train to take us to the border and we can’t wait to get there; to keep discovering this enormous country, that is, backpacking it. Apparently we are not tired of backpacking, just tired of the places where we do it. China, when you speak chinese, is a great country to backpack. It’s relatively safe, with curious and funny people, basic life is relatively cheap (I mean, with what I’ve earnt here we would only last 15 days in western Europe) and well, the historical part of the country is amazing.

But it’s certainly not easy to travel there, and although I know that I might have to pay the border agent off to grant me passage, although there are 13, 16, 20 and 24 hour train rides on hard seats waiting for us on a freezing train packed with noisy people and dirt, I still smile at the thought of coming back one last time to China.

I don’t know what makes me happier, if it’s coming back to China or actually realizing that I like it there, thus being able to fully enjoy my last month. Because in these last two years we have seen so many places, we have met so many people, lived several summers and winters in the same year, that in the end we don’t realize what we’re doing anymore. It has been very hard for us to find a place that would leave us breathless, or that would leave us with unforgettable memories. We often have to check our pictures to remember how a city was like. Sad.
And these memories are tainted by what we live afterwards. We left Canada thinking we wouldn’t want to live there, that it wasn’t different from what we already knew and we now find ourselves dreaming of buying a little house somewhere in Quebec. Sometimes we look at our pictures and think :” this place was really wonderfull” when all the way there I had hated it. Yin and yang. Face the bad to enjoy the good, and vice versa. Sometimes we learn more from our travels after them rather than on the moment, probably because we haven’t stopped moving for so long.

So realizing that I was happy to come back to China BEFORE changing countries is a great relief, and a pleasure. Because I know that I will do what I can to enjoy every bit of it, even on bad days. And more importantly, I know how to make my travel an unforgettable one.

Until tomorrow.