Farewells and Acknowledgments

Men created maps. They shaped the living, breathing, three-dimensional world into a flat, calculated, controllable image on a sheet of paper. They drew lines to separate, created scales to approximate, and named landscapes to categorize. Men created maps for the same reason men do everything: to create a sense of control in a world of chaos. But deep down all men know the truth. That drawing lines, building fences, and marking territories has never solved any problems or created any control. The world is chaotic and will be as long as men are around.
During my travels I crossed many lines – country borders, date lines, international lines, regional lines – but I never saw them except on a map. The Mekong looked the same from one shoreline as it did from the other. The trees were as green in Laos as they were in Thailand. The land does not acknowledge maps – but people do.
The longer I travelled the harder it became for me to describe the people around me. In many ways, they had become less foreign to me so I stopped noticing those qualities that had, at first, seemed so exotic and mysterious. The experience itself took on faded shades of grey where once brilliant hues had shone. No longer were the foreign tongues, the endless heat, the unique Asian smells so vibrant, intense and impressive.
As unwilling as I was to let it happen, it happened all the same. I had become calloused, dull and indifferent. My time was nearing to return home. My thoughts began wandering home more than to the next adventure. And so I learned one fo the most difficult lessons for a traveler to learn: Even the Road gets old. All things new will tarnish and all things dreamt of will fade. And at the end of each journey, the soul returns home.
The remaining entries were written while I traveled through Laos and Cambodia. I recorded most of them in an old blue notebook and reading them now, they sound like the final notes from a bittersweet song.
These are my farewell to the trip that had been shaping my life for 20 years. But they are also my acknowledgment that traveling was, for me, more than a one time affair. It is my livelihood. It is me. I am a modern day gypsy.