Being truly, madly and passionately in Love with the Earth takes a bold and beautiful soul.
It was an idea. That was all. Why not? Everyone else was doing it. Perhaps that was good enough reason not to. But Climate Change was kicking in big time. How could I travel and still step lightly on the Planet?
Melbourne is downright friendly. I’m staying with friends in the inner north where you can find a cute caravan on the street, veggie garden in the front yard and crazy chickens out the back. People say hi to total strangers around here.
Melbourne is known as the city with four seasons in one day so I took my raincoat, sunhat and water bottle and headed along the bike path to CERES, the environmental education centre and urban farm alongside the Merri Creek. I love their slogan:
You can fix your bike or learn how to do it. It’s all about community sharing.
And education.
You can also volunteer. There’s plenty of projects from constructing a Playspace to Creating a Meditation Space. I don’t have any affiliation with CERES but I’m a sucker for community projects.
I’m going to borrow a few more words from the CERES website:
‘Along with Merri Creek Management Committee and Friends of Merri Creek, CERES and volunteers planted hundreds of trees and shrubs and lobbied governments to clean up the creek. In 1994, after 12 years of remediation work, Sacred Kingfishers returned to nest along the banks of the creek, having been absent for many years.
Now, CERES is an award-winning community place that is visited by people from around the world who want to understand how this place has come to be, and how they can take some of the ingredients back to their own places.’
‘We think the key ingredient is love for each other and the Earth.’
I have to agree.
Happy Travelling!
It’s been a massive Summer and it’s not over yet. I slipped out of an impending Winter in Europe and returned to Australia to see friends and family. Within days of arriving in Sydney the city changed from blue-eyed beaches to a smoke haze that caught in my lungs. It got worse.
Drought and fires have been a given in Australia but now it Is obvious that climate change Is driving a Summer of extremes. Our capital city, Canberra, recorded temperatures never recorded before. Precious North coast forests were ablaze and the smoke haze slipped down the continent and settled in the city. I fled to the South coast for some clean air and Christmas with some of my besties. We kept our eyes on the horizon and our ears tuned to the National broadcaster for weather reports and fire alerts even as we feasted on fabulous food and friendship.
I lay in a smoke-filled tent as the year came to an end, scrolling through stories from friends in the face of the fire. The places I loved most were devastated; ancient Eucalyptus forests and Rainforest that had never burned before burned ferociously. There was no point in waiting, surrounded by tinder dry grass and leaves, beneath a heavy canopy of trees. I was totally unprepared. So I packed my scanty possessions then began knocking on caravan doors and calling at tents. While a blood red sky cracked the night, people packed up everything that represented the perfect holiday and began to leave, still uncertain whether to drive South or North. When someone called out ‘Bermie has been evacuated,’ the decision was made and we headed North in a convoy of controlled confusion, our headlights searing through the thick brown air.
The next few hours were exhausting. No-one had slept more than a few hours as fires roared in from the North and the West, creating their own weather patterns of volatile cloud that shattered the air with loud explosions. The town’s power was cut, mobile phone and internet coverage suspended by the emergency authorities, shops and petrol stations were closed due to fuel pumps, automatic doors and tills no longer operating. We bunkered down in preparation for the worst. It didn’t come that day, even when the sky flared crimson then blacked out at 3pm.
The resolutions I made that night were to hug more, to say I love you and mean it. I also want people to know that climate change is real and to work toward realistic strategies like community building and sustainability.
I’m writing this after evacuating from the South coast inferno, to Canberra where the air quality index went into catastrophic, then on to Melbourne where I’ve been battling a lung infection. My story is small compared to friends who have lost their homes, to 22 people and the millions of animals who have died in the path of the fires, to the loss of the magnificent Australian forests and the global consequences of this disaster. While Governments seem intent on short-sighted policies that encourage fossil fuels, deforestation and deplete scarce water reserves for industry we have to make our own future in the best way we can.
If you like my writing you can find more at: https://jenimcmillan.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/head-in-the-sand/
If you’re looking for really authentic travel experiences, make friends. There are several ways to approach travel and maybe you’ll try all at different times, depending on the season, how far your finances are stretching, if you want to be in the city or deep in the countryside and what sort of social life you want.
I want to put in a good word for house-sitting. I’ve been lucky and had a few by word of mouth, the friends’ network. A month was ideal, enough time to get to know the locals, explore the nearby villages and do some long walks, usually with a dog attached or leaping through the undergrowth to chase a deer or wild-pig.
There’s house-sitting sites too. Google House-sitting and you’ll find a few. Like WorkAway, there’s a joining fee but they seem to be well regulated.
You need to be self-contained and obviously, a good level of responsibility is a plus when someone leaves you with their animals, garden and worldy possession. What you get is usually a gorgeous house to stay in rent-free, some instant pets and often fresh garden produce. I’ve managed chickens, turkeys, geese, cats and dogs, weeded and watered gardens and cleaned a swimming pool (my least favourite thing: add chlorine, pump won’t work, scoop up dead bodies).
One gig was an offer from a woman who picked me up when I was hitching in Spain. ‘Oh, so you do house-sitting,’ she said. ‘I’m off to Thailand for a month, would you like to look after my house?’ So it goes, you never know what opportunities come when you’re open to them.
I’d love to hear about your experiences!
HAPPY TRAVELS!
Do you love your food wild?
I do. Especially if it’s highly nutritious and comes for free.
It’s part of the beauty of travelling to wild places… the hunt and the gathering of berries, nuts and fungi.
Follow the fruits of the season. Cherries, mulberries, blackberries and plums, figs then walnuts and almonds. It’s not an exhaustive list and there’s a whole range of plants as well. (List to follow on my next post)
And then there’s fungi…
Take a guide book and double check with an app or a pro local with experience in mushrooms and discover the delicious options. The gorgeous orange ones I photographed are called Lactarius deliciosus or Saffron MilkCap and they are truly divine cooked with garlic.
And I want to add that making japatis, unleavened bread made from wholemeal flour and water and cooked on a campfire, is not only super cheap but also a great staple that goes with cooked food or salads. While technically not wild food it’s an ancient art that’s worth rediscovering.
Bon apetit!
I return from walking the dogs (I’m house/dog sitting again) feeling like a fish in an over-heated pond.
It’s 11 am and there’s a bag hanging from the door handle. While the dogs run for the water bowl, I discover a gift of sweet plums.
At 12, the waft of cologne announces an elderly gentleman from the village. I invite the mystery bearer of gifts inside and talk in broken down Spanish. When a wheel falls off I open the translator but he’s no mechanic. He’s a musician, a poet, and takes paper in hand. Ciruelo: para comerlos 1. lavar las y la piel setira con el hueso.
It’s 2 pm and he’s wearing a freshly-washed shirt. He places almonds on the table. ‘Son de mi arbol’ he announces showing a good set of teeth. He mimes that they are for eating, that I need to crack the hard shells. I show him my hammer before he leaves.
By 3pm I’m thinking about lunch, just like most of the Spanish population, but I’m wilting. Perhaps I’ll eat the plums. ‘Henne?’ comes the version of my name in castellano from beyond the plastic fringes at the doorway. ‘Entrer,’ I reply in mistaken French.
He places the hot silver-foil package and cold can of beer on the table, then disappears into the afternoon.
P.S. I’m vegetarian.
Yikes! I ate the fish!
… Global temperatures are higher than ever recorded. I’m worried. But I figure that the only way we’re going to get through this cataclysmic era is to connect with people and smile as we step lightly.
I’m in the middle of nowhere, seriously.
I just checked the population statistics for January 2018 and there were 52 people in this village. Evidently that was on a good day… so far I’ve seen five in the street, but not all at once.
I’m here to keep the plants alive and walk the dogs while the owners are away. I’ve learned to walk. Big time. It’s twenty minutes up a mountain to the next village (where I hear there are 25 inhabitants) and the capital of the region is an hour away on foot across a ravine.
Day 1: up the mountain to water someone else’s garden.
Day 2: up the mountain and across the ravine to meet a friend.
Day 3: up the mountain, across the ravine, stick out thumb, hitchhike to town, return by late afternoon with full backpack… collapse on couch.
You get the picture?
I’m loving it!
I could go into details about the brand of my tent (the fact that it weighs a tad more than a kilo is a great selling point) or tell you that I have the lightest sleeping bag I could find and it works most of the time, except for Russian Winters and damp river campsites. I also carry very little clothing because it’s easy to find more. But what is most important to me is travelling without personal baggage.
In fact, I find that the longer I travel the more things I discard.
Judgement has been a big one. Not the type that you need when you make decisions about where to pitch the tent or should I swim in crocodile infested waters, but judging other people. It’s a human thing, something we all do, but it feels so much lighter to accept the idiosyncrasies of other people who are mostly trying their best in a crazy world. I’m certainly not perfect at it but I’m practising hard.
People are just people everywhere. Some of us have enough food and shelter, some of us don’t. Some live in safe places while for others it’s a war zone. But we are all trying to get through the day, hoping to make a difference in something small or big. Everyone needs to relax when things are stressful. And we all want to be loved and acknowledged, to be accepted and appreciated.
That’s the start of what may grow into a very long list.
I’d love to hear what you have discarded!
Sometimes a girl just has to do what a girl has to do. In this case it was hitchhiking with kittens. Or to be more precise, hitchhiking with two friends who were attempting to return to Germany from Greece with two very tiny cats.
I met the two Marias when I was camping on a beautiful Greek Island. As in many parts of the world, a new litter of kittens is a burden to a poor family who can’t afford the obvious solution of de-sexing the animals. One Maria adopted the two abandoned cats near some rubbish bins and became fiercely maternal about them. They were to go to Berlin, whatever the cost.
As it turned out the cost was high even though it was a lot of fun to begin with. The gorgeous little bundles of fluff amused us with their playfulness. They followed Maria everywhere, even into the cat box and then inside a bag when that proved too wieldy to carry. They meowed pitifully as we travelled with various kind people who picked us up: the woman from the Greek Embassy who told us about the recent order for trains that turned out to be the wrong guage for the lines, a classic story that went some way to explaining the financial crisis. Then the kind but reckless man who took us 100 kilometres out of his way because we were stranded at his service station after 10pm closing. As the car hurtled down the highway at 160 kph, I discovered why many Greek drivers make the sign of the cross. It made sense considering I was travelling with two Marias… but I remained rigid with fear.
We reached Kavala at midnight. The man went to a bar with his friend while we unsuccessfully looked for a cheap hostel and finally settled onto a metal bench in an amusement park along the foreshore. (See ‘Where to sleep at a pinch’).
The following day we tracked down a vet – an interesting process considering the three of us neither spoke or read Greek. Each kitten needed to have multiple vaccines and a passport. The cost, 50 Euros, a hard blow for a student. But Maria was determined and the kittens got their shots. Then she phoned the airport to confirm. The woman on the other end of the call repeated, ‘the kittens must be three months old and have their rabies shots before they fly’. The kittens were obviously under age.
Maria boarded the next plane without them. Maria and I were left with the tiny mewling babies and a phone number for an animal refuge in Thessaloniki. And so ended the hitchhiking with kittens story. This time we took the bus.
There’s those moments when the hostels are full and sleeping rough ticks the boxes, both for the sense of adventure and keeping the cash out of someone else’s pockets. It’s a way to travel further, longer, perhaps indefinitely. I have no idea. I’m making it up as I go.
I learnt that it’s possible to sleep anywhere from my Greek friends. My first encounter with concrete was at a tiny music festival in the medieval village of Aghios Lavrentios. I don’t have any photos but believe me, people camped on the church steps, on the hard stone of the plaza, and I (through lack of any other option) was among them.
I spent some days travelling Greece with two Marias, a German and a Romanian. Here was a lesson in how to sleep on a metal bench in an Amusement Park. Yes, we did get busted at 5am by a very nice man who allowed us to pack up slowly before he opened the rides. In the other photo you can see me attempting to sleep on a rocky beach front with a very small cat. This also rates as one of my best hitchhiking missions. (My next post is likely to be How to Hitchhike with Kittens.)
Of course it’s subjective, but I’m a great fan of the 5 million star hotel. I love wild and exotic places full of the murmurs of trees and the rush of pure mountain streams.
I’ve slept on deserted beaches in the height of Summer and moved on when the bite of Autumn approaches.
I started young, risk-taking in the best sense. Living in wild country in Australia from the age of 20. Very much later, I travelled to France where I lived for 4 years, learnt the language and travelled everywhere on foot or bike. This began a decade of on and off solo travel. Two years ago I left every perceived security behind and now I have a backpack and me. I’ve been to most countries in Europe and have had the best time meeting people while camping in the wilds of Greece, walking Morocco, wandering Russia, hitch-hiking in France and Spain. Of course, I could be the exception or something just hasn’t happened YET but I know that it doesn’t matter what you wear … it does matter what your attitude is. BE CONFIDENT because people can see if you’re not and some may take advantage of it. Love what you are doing. Smile at as many people as you can. That guy who follows you was a one off, right? Shit does happen. But adjust, find a safe route. Walk tall. There are cultural differences, there are crazy people everywhere. I prefer to make up my plans as they open up and keep adventuring. I also want to put in a word for Couchsurfing and Blablacar. Both excellent ways to meet strangers and practice a new language. The sites are curated and there’s testimonies for the people who offer car rides or a place to stay. Of course be observant but above all, don’t live in fear.
Note: Some countries encourage wild camping. You are free to pitch a tent where you choose in Sweden, Krygztan in Central Asia, Norway, Scotland, Iceland, Estonia, Finland, Mongolia and Turkey. Some other countries have a culture of camping even though it is forbidden in law so talk to other travellers and they may share their secrets.
The Wildart Wanderer 