"A TRAVELING WE WILL GO"

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Richie

Richie

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Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like Mr Emerson most of us have traveled at some stage in our lives.. I know I have. Like many young Aussies I did the UK/Europe rite of passage before I was married. I spent almost two years away from home traveling, working, then traveling again around England/Wales/Scotland and the Continent. I no longer have foto memories from that time but I can recall in my mind almost all of the good and not so good times I had. From work/live in at a 200 year old pub outside London to driving around Germany, being robbed in Italy then our van breaking down to spending a week camping on a nudist beach on Corfu in Greece. Now that was a real eye opener.
Those two years were among the most enriching times of my life.
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Genoa, Italy a place I forgot in a hurry.
 
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One of the most memorable places I visited back then was Greece, loved the Greeks, so friendly and hospitable. They would invite a complete stranger into their home and give them a meal and even entertain them with songs and music on the Bouzouki.
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Corfu, Greece where we lost our clothes.. :p
 
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I don't travel much anymore unless I have to.
In the past I did travel a lot about Australia, Ireland, some England and France, Cape Town, Tenerife and 3 weeks in Bali in the 80's.
 
Grier said:
Ireland,
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I regret never making it to the Emerald Isle back then. Financial constraints was the main reason as the Poms paid workers peanuts and even less for those like me on a working holiday visa.
Grier said:
France
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I picked grapes in France, down in the Burgundy region. Boy hot, hard work for little pay but they did feed us well.
Grier said:
Bali
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When I went there at 20 they did not even have electricity so we left the city and went inland and lived in a rural bungalow resort for two weeks, pure bliss. If I recall the place was Ubud.
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My bungalow looked something like this without the glass front..
 
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When I went to Bali I had a horrible time. Staying in the white trash area of Kuta I saw racism, ugly bogan Aussies, caught Bali Belly, got slipped a strange mushroom omelette which tasted horrible so thankfully I only ate half. ... . and got hassled by customs on my return... a dreadful 3 weeks
It's worse now I hear. Never again.
The Chinese are getting in there too now and the rice paddies of Ubud are turning into crowded cheap tourist spots and squeezing out the traditional rice farmers .... An island of once mainly devout Hindus in an Muslim majority Indonesian island Nation. A good neighbour to Australia in most ways.

Even Greece and Venice are limiting the hordes of tourists to maintain their own preferred ways of lifestyle...


Cooper Pedy in the heart of Australia where the Opals are found and people live underground in cool burrowed homely caves is worth seeing, as is all of Australia, a land of sweeping plains gert by sea.
Touring around Australia in younger years by roads, tracks, cars, air, caravans, boats, tents, combie van, sleeping around a fire with the stars as a blanket, 4wds, utes, planes, buses, motor cycles, .., was the best travelling I ever did. Cities are boring.
Living in a wonderfully varied Australia is a must see, and glad I climbed the Rock with my eldest when that was allowed.
 
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Grier said:
Living in a wonderfully varied Australia is a must see, and glad I climbed the Rock with my eldest when that was allowed.
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:thumbsu: Sorry to say I have seen virtually nil of the interior of our wonderful continent. WA, (Perth and south) for three weeks👍 , SA (Adelaide, the Barossa for two days👍, Melbourne a week👎,N QLD twice, a month in all. 👍, Tassie (Hobart) 10 days.👍.
Have always enjoyed camping but missus does not, so never been once in 40 years of marriage.👎
 
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Richie said:
What about these places as I have not seen them Terry.
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I visited Cape town and Tenerife aged 14 for a few days only, but bought a packet of cigars and saw a mountain in Tenerife.
It was on a month long ship journey travelling to Oz as a £10 Pom from Ulster, N Ireland.
In Cape town I remember seeing park benches with bold signs saying 'Whites Only". Later, after dark, a gang of black street kids chased me and a ship friend through dark streets seeking to assault and rob us. Running towards the docks I grabbed my foul Tenerife cigars and threw them up in the air along with all my spare coins from said Tenerife. That stopped them with them scrabbling for the petty loot.
We got safely to the ship and next morning heard some young man from the ship had got stabbed and killed the night before when me and a ship mate ran like blazes.

I don't know what it's like nowadays.
 
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Grier said:
I visited Cape town and Tenerife aged 14 for a few days only, but bought a packet of cigars and saw a mountain in Tenerife.
It was on a month long ship journey travelling to Oz as a £10 Pom from Ulster, N Ireland.
In Cape town I remember seeing park benches with bold signs saying 'Whites Only". Later, after dark, a gang of black street kids chased me and a ship friend through dark streets seeking to assault and rob us. Running towards the docks I grabbed my foul Tenerife cigars and threw them up in the air along with all my spare coins from said Tenerife. That stopped them with them scrabbling for the petty loot.
We got safely to the ship and next morning heard some young man from the ship had got stabbed and killed the night before when me and a ship mate ran like blazes.

I don't know what it's like nowadays.
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Be worse I reckon. Sounds as tho you had a close shave then Terry. Quick thinking probably saved you. A Ten Pound Pom eh. Jeez we were generous back then to you Poms. Have you seen the AUSSIE T P P MINI SERIES?
 
Richie said:
Have you seen the AUSSIE T P P MINI SERIES?
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No I haven't Craig, was it good?

My Irish mother hated being called a Pom.
She'd say "I didn't come to Australia with a ball and chain!" 😆

That was then and now the term "pom" has lost its bite, more a term of endearment nowadays.
 
Richie said:
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like Mr Emerson most of us have traveled at some stage in our lives.. I know I have. Like many young Aussies I did the UK/Europe rite of passage before I was married. I spent almost two years away from home traveling, working, then traveling again around England/Wales/Scotland and the Continent. I no longer have foto memories from that time but I can recall in my mind almost all of the good and not so good times I had. From work/live in at a 200 year old pub outside London to driving around Germany, being robbed in Italy then our van breaking down to spending a week camping on a nudist beach on Corfu in Greece. Now that was a real eye opener.
Those two years were among the most enriching times of my life.
View attachment 877
Genoa, Italy a place I forgot in a hurry.
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Where's this quote in the title from?
 
Grier said:
I visited Cape town and Tenerife aged 14 for a few days only, but bought a packet of cigars and saw a mountain in Tenerife.
It was on a month long ship journey travelling to Oz as a £10 Pom from Ulster, N Ireland.
In Cape town I remember seeing park benches with bold signs saying 'Whites Only". Later, after dark, a gang of black street kids chased me and a ship friend through dark streets seeking to assault and rob us. Running towards the docks I grabbed my foul Tenerife cigars and threw them up in the air along with all my spare coins from said Tenerife. That stopped them with them scrabbling for the petty loot.
We got safely to the ship and next morning heard some young man from the ship had got stabbed and killed the night before when me and a ship mate ran like blazes.

I don't know what it's like nowadays.
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A friend of mine who'd spent some time in the US told me something similar . You always need to have a $20 note on you which you can give them if you're being mugged.
 
Grier said:
No I haven't Craig, was it good?
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I enjoyed it. Gave both sides of the narrative. Main reason our govt made that offer was to boost the Aussie population as we still had a White Australia Policy and were only just starting to permit in post war Europeans.
 
Richie said:
Dont recall mate. Google it.
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Found this: "A-Hunting We Will Go" is a popular folk song and nursery rhyme composed in 1777 by English composer Thomas Arne. [1] Arne had composed the song for a 1777 production of The Beggar's Opera in London. [2]

A travelling... is probably derived from that, isn't it?
 
Richie said:
Still waiting Thomas.
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Are you? ;) Remember: it all needs to be typed first. Then I nearly lost my text and was frantically searching for it....
And then there's the topic: A travelling we will go. What answer would you expect from a prisoner? For someone who grew up in a country behind the Iron Curtain where he was walled in and not allowed to travel freely, the topic is a difficult one. Our border to the West was osmotic, i.e. hermetically sealed and deadly for us whereas visitors from the rest of the world could enter the country freely and were most welcome.
All East Germans including myself could do was to travel to places they would not have gone to voluntarily if they'd had a choice: the Eastern bloc countries in East Europe up to Mongolia and down to Romania and that was it. I couldn't be bothered to go east, wouldn't even have gone to Poland , our neighbouring country, of my own accord. The only country I spent a week in, apart from business trips, was Hungary, Budapest in particular. The only reason why I went there was the fact that you could buy clothes from the West and that I didn't want to regret at a later stage that we hadn't taken a honeymoon trip at all.
We didn't like it there, though, and we'd known it beforehand. The Hungarians didn't like East Germans since they didn't bring hard currency. They looked down on us while bending over backwards to please any West German they met. The western clothes were partly faked or self-made and we had to buy them dear on the limited budget that every visitor was allowed to exchange for the trip. Money was so tight that we couldn't live a normal life there. So much for my travel experience in the first part of my life when young people naturally want to see something of the world. Negative report in my case.
Up until this day, some hopelessly nostalgic leftists keep spreading the narrative that back then they were allegedly having a good time at the Black Sea or in the High Tatra mountains but the vast majority of East Germans know that it was all self-deception and indicative of a political agenda. No, the Pet Shop Boys got it right with their song "Go West, life is peaceful there and the skies are blue". It's the hymn of a generation who has given the song a different meaning.
 
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Cant imagine being restricted to where you can travel and not. Ok then, where did you visit after the Wall came down bringing that insidious communism down too and you finally were free to travel.
 
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