I sighed and told her how I had for a long time, held an image of myself as one of those 'wandering vagabonds'. But that lately, I'm coming to see how amongst my class and social circles, the people who come to 'travel' (more often than not in the 'overseas' sense), are the ones who are able to afford to do so, in a certain fashion.
Let's stop 'beating around the bush', I mean of course, that the ones who travel are the ones who are middle-class and able to save on whatever menial job they had landed, as they lived off their parents as much as they could in the meantime.
I started to wonder then whether the idea of myself as a 'wandering vagabond' served as a thin veil of denial of my own class origins, not that far off from the middle-class-funded adventures that my friends were having.
As a child in Indonesia, my parents often took me on trips to islands far from any capital cities or towns. With my mother, I visited the Badui (also spelled 'Baduy') people, whose people are divided into two tiers, as far as my basic understanding goes.
There are the inner Badui people, who dress in white and abhor any outside 'technologies' or way of living. For instance, they weave their own cloth and refuse to wear shoes. The outer Badui are more lax, although traveling everywhere barefoot, they still traveled and saw how so-called 'modern' 'civilisation' had come to encroach upon their relatively secluded community.
One of the most vivid of my memories included the wonder I felt as a child, crossing a bright green bamboo bridge leading into the Badui village, surrounded by iridescent bamboo leaves glittering and shimmering down through the air.
Thanks to my mother's sense of 'adventure' and her connection with a local painter, my brother and I had the privilege of sleeping next to an open fire in a thatched hut with some of the inner Baduy.
It was images and memories such as these that so solidly constructed this idea I had/have of myself as a 'wandering vagabond'. Certainly I was no Badui, but I was no Mary-Jane-with-her-white-picket-fence neither!
What I refused to remember until very recently, was that after 'roughing it' with (insert derogatory or at the very least exoticising label here: e.g. peasant/ natives) I would then return to our 6-bedroom mansion in an affluent and closed-off suburb of Jakarta where I was doted upon by three (occasionally four) maids, a gardener and a chauffeur (who drove at different times: a Mercedes, Lexus, BMW, etc).
So where did this 'need' to selectively recollect my childhood come from? Is it another case of deep-seated upper-class guilt, fostered by an awareness of the poverty that is so overwhelmingly present in my country of birth?
Did I need to see myself as being not only aware of the existence of peoples outside of my own cultural, class and social comforts but also highly skilled and adept at forming relationships across such diverse origins?
Did I want to be the neo-colonialist, able to foster 'friendships' (no matter how unequal) across the wide surface of the globe?
Did I want to use my economic and social means to fashion myself to be one of Socrates' 'citizens of the world'? (without admitting that it was my means that permitted me to be thus)
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After I had sighed wistfully and communicated that I envied her, this friend of mine remarked, 'I don't know if you will ever be able to 'just drift'. You have too much focus and you invest so much in all the places you go to.'
It was here that I had a moment to see the 'wandering vagabond' in a new light. In what ways am I coming to 'travel' in a more honest way?
In my experience, this has been happening more and more by 'staying put' in the one city: 'Sydney'.*
An example that comes to mind is an experience I had during my recent Social Work placement in 'Western Sydney'*. Through my attempts to act as a supportive counselor for a woman who has had twenty-years of personal insight into 'schizophrenia', my horizons expanded by miles. I needed to imagine what it would be like to see things that other people were not able to see, to smell things that seem to come from nowhere, to be so fearful and have that fear dismissed and mocked.
When would you have the opportunity to engage in such wild imaginations whilst backpacking with drunken Poms through South East Asia?
Oh, right, marijuana.
Seriously though (God, I sound like a Yankee stand-up comedian) I am endeavouring to nurture relationships that mean something, that don't just come in a non-reciprocal-exoticising 'travel adventure' packages and I hope to write more on this soon.
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*I note these names with quotation marks to highlight that these labels should not be taken for granted, as older names have been applied to these places. Names that held different meanings and different experiences for Indigenous peoples of different nations and kinships. 'Sydney's first people were the Eora of the Gadigal band. The word Eora simply means "here" or "from this place".
See http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/barani/themes/theme1.htm
