Chaaya Wild, Yala - Day’s Diary 1 “Road Closed”

I love travelling. Now that’s a contradiction to what I usually tell people of my thoughts on tourism, but that’s because this is travelling in a different sense. I don’t much like seeing new places, meeting new people etc. There’s already so much we don’t know about our own little neighborhoods and even ourselves – I don’t see the point in looking elsewhere for knowledge or fulfillment or whatever it is travellers are looking for. But I love travelling. Journeys. By car, on a bicycle, just me and the road.

So although I wasn’t looking forward to this work trip to Yala, I find myself nearly enjoying it. My company is awesome. One is an “immoral” woman who’s left her three-month old baby at home with many different people to take this trip discussing weed and parties. The other is a freak who pierced her own nose (no, I don’t know any other people who’ve done similarly masochistic things) and is stalking me. No seriously. She Googled me last evening and was sharing my personal information with her colleagues, because she didn’t know who I was. And then she saw my hair. [on a completely different (different?) note, I feel it becoming more and more precise to introduce myself and then introduce my hair as well, incase people confuse myself as being owned by my hair. whatever.] And then there is of course our sweet hostess who is probably feeling traumatized by contact with these three media personnel but is hiding it pretty well.

So wait, if all this is so much fun, why am I on my blog at this moment? Proof of the point I’m trying to make.

What I love best about travelling (what? I thought we got over that already, I love travelling, I just don’t have that desire to get any place in particular!) is the wind. Suddenly its like the spirit of the world is touching you. If that doesn’t sound too wrong, that is. So getting to the point:

I love the wind. Not only does it feel awesome when its whipping through your hair and freezing your nose dry and chapping your lips, caking your eyes with dust, but as it hums past you (or you past it) it drowns everything else out and you’re alone with the earth, even when there are four others in the vehicle with you. All that matters is the wind; momentarily you are allowed to kick gravity hard and fling yourself into the horizon ahead of you and just keep gliding.

But I’m not having that today , because although the tourist van I find myself cushioned up in has windows designed to get the widest possible view, they’re not really windows: they’re glass panes. I’m not feeling the heat of the burning sun or the chill of the gleeful wind, I’ve got aircon. And it’s just too cold. And sure, it’s only just 9.30am but we’re listening to Fergie wreck some old diva song for the B.E.P. to boom through clubs.

We are heading into forest reserves where the sun is hard, trees are proud and the air is stiff. We are heading into bare places of the earth where birds don’t just sing, they also scream and laugh and animals are allowed to think and run where their blood takes them to. We are heading into where sometimes you hear flowers bloom and the trickle of water doesn’t just drown others out, but is the only.

We are heading away from the noise, the fumes, the hectic schedules, the late nights, the annoying ring-tones and hammerings and buzzings and honkings and smells and curses and bosses and deadlines and junk food and everythingbadaboutthecity, but we’re struggling to take it all with us.

Inside this cocoon of plastic, glass and metal muscle we’re carefully preserving Colombo air, club hits, cellphones, laptops and canned drinks. We don’t want to get away. We want to be where we hate to belong. Because when the aircon is off, we remember we have skin, and that things can get under it. Because when the fumes disappear, we suddenly discover how bad we smell. Because when we’re in silence, the voices in our head just can.not. be ignored.

Because in the jungle we know, to be human is to never really belong.