I’ve made a lot of mistakes while travelling. A lot. I’ve been ripped off, I’ve lost things, I’ve spent too much money, and I’ve wasted valuable travel time on things that could have been avoided. There are certain mistakes I don’t think are worth making at all – things like spending too much on credit card fees, not checking if your phone plan covers data roaming, and drinking that damn glass of orange juice in Morocco – but there are a lot of mistakes I think are OK to make once or twice, or even ones I think that we should all make quite a bit in our travels. Here are a few of the “mistakes” I’ve enjoyed making over the past ten years of travelling, and some stories detailing when I’ve made them myself.
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I arrive in Osaka on a humid afternoon, my bags bulging with light grey office-wear and books by my favourite authors. I stand on the yellow footprints at immigration, waiting to be fingerprinted and photographed. I take a bus and then a taxi to my new apartment, led by an American representative of my company called Bruce. He has bleached hair and a sweat-stained polo shirt. I go to shake his hand, but he bows instead.
We walk down a long arcade filled with glowing shops, air-conditioning blasting out their automatic doors. I see rows of unfamiliar vegetables, walls of colourful stationery, a casino whose plink and plonk of slot machines resounds out into the night air. We stop at an inconspicuous building with a brown door, my new home.
The apartment’s larger than I thought it would be, although everything is steeped in brown and beige, the furniture chipped and dingy. Many people have lived here before. I pull back the sepia curtains and step out onto the balcony, looking over a sea of low buildings, the dim of lights stretching out as far as I can see. The air feels sticky, flat. It’s my first time in Asia.
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If you’ve been following my Facebook or my Instagram accounts, you’d know that I’m not hiding the fact that I fell absolutely, head over heels in love with Cinque Terre, Italy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know – I can be quite promiscuous with my travel love. But how can you NOT fall in love with a place that looks like this, especially when the sun is shining and you have a glass of wine in your hand?
I’m still going through all of the hundreds of photos I took from my four days there last month, so I’ll be posting a photo essay soon, but I wanted to write a post about some of the logistics of getting around Cinque Terre, especially for those who are on a bit of a budget (like I was…er… always am). I had quite a few people write to me to say that they plan on visiting the region this summer, and so hopefully this guide can help, or perhaps it can help inspire you to plan your own trip there. It is one of the most beautiful places in Italy, if not the world, and I truly believe that Cinque Terre can be visited on a budget. Here’s how.
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If you’ve read this blog long enough you know that I am not a light packer. I mean, I’ve learned a lot in the past few years as I consistently travel with carry-on only around Europe, but those trips are always only a few days, maximum one week. I just can’t help it – I’m love clothes and I love being prepared. While part of me envies those people who can travel around the world with one tiny backpack, the other part of me is quite happy to carry a few more kilograms if it means I get to have options. To each their own, I guess. I’ve also been very lucky (touch wood) that I’ve never lost a suitcase for good. I’ve had items delayed, but I’ve always had them returned to me within 24 hours.
On the flip side of all this, I’ve always wanted to try arriving somewhere with no luggage whatsoever, and then having to buy everything from local shops and markets. I’ve often talked about doing it somewhere in Southeast Asia – I think that Thailand (especially Bangkok or Chiang Mai) would be fairly easy and fun locations to test this out. Me? I chose to test it out in Italy.
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Three days ago I was there, in the place you see photographed above: Cinque Terre, Italy (and that, specifically, is the village of Vernazza). I had an amazing time in Italy, my sixth time to the country; I ate lots of great food, went hiking on beautiful trails, sat by the water with glasses of wine, drank far too many espressos, and even met some handsome Italians (that always helps). And then, with one two hour flight from Pisa and a bus from Stansted airport, I was at home in my flat, unpacking and doing laundry and wondering whether or not I could eat enough sushi to warrant the minimum delivery surcharge (spoiler: I could, even though I ordered so much they delivered it to me with four sets of chopsticks).
Something I often think about – and quite frankly, something I often worry about – is whether or not I’m addicted to travelling. That, perhaps, I’m too consumed by it, and, what frightens me the most, is that I’m often the happiest when I’m on the road. So what does it mean to be addicted to travelling?
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OK, so I feel like I just wrote the post discussing the five year anniversary of this blog, but nope, that was already a year ago. On April 12th, 2010, exactly six years and one day ago, I posted the first of many blog posts on This Battered Suitcase. I wasn’t new to blogging, however – I had been writing on a Livejournal account for seven years before that, which brings my blogging total to 13 years. It’s been one hell of a ride, and it’s nowhere near over – I love blogging and being a part of the blogging community more than ever. And because some of you have been reading for a while (some even since Livejournal!), and because I know that many things I’ve gotten out of blogging have been because of readers like you, I wanted to talk about the future of This Battered Suitcase as transparently and as honestly as I hope I’ve always been. For more on my history with blogging, check out what I wrote on the four year anniversary of the blog; much of what I say there still totally stands. I feel kind of silly writing these posts, but it also feels silly to let the anniversary slide when it’s something that takes up such a huge part of my life.