Back from Down Under

We got back from Australia yesterday. 12 hours of sleep and I'm almost feeling normal.

I apologize for not blogging during the trip. I prefer to write about things at the time rather than after the fact but it obviously didn't this time. We were camping (tenting) for most of the time which isn't conducive to blogging or sorting photos. And there weren't a lot of internet places, partly because we were (deliberately) off the "beaten path". But even to me, those seem more like excuses. The big reason (problem?) was that we were too busy. Writing and sorting through photos takes me a fair bit of time.

There's such a drive to "fill up" your time, to not miss anything, to see as many things as possible. It's good but it leaves me feeling uncomfortable. It doesn't seem right that you're so busy that you look forward to coming home so you can relax. That's where my last trip to Mexico was nice. Apart from the diving I did, I didn't have any agenda, no sights to see, no places to go, no things to do. Just hanging out in a different place, soaking up the different place.

A recent post by Timothy Ferris interviewing Rolf Potts echoes this:

Travel isn’t about efficiency. It’s about leaving yourself open to new experiences. You can’t do this when you’re racing around on a strict itinerary. If you examine the truly life-affecting experiences I describe in my new book, you’ll find that they most all happened by accident. If you aren’t open to the unexpected — if you aren’t willing to get lost from time to time — you’ll be selling your travels short.

[Suggestion from Tim: reread the previous paragraph substituting "travel" and "travels" with "life".]

[I enjoyed Rolf's book Vagabonding and I'm looking forward to reading his new book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There.]

In any case, it was a great trip and I'm hoping to write it up "real soon". And post some pictures, as soon as I get a chance to pick out some good ones (out of the roughly 4500 I took - about 150 per day!)