I haven’t really stepped out of the city of Sydney since January. Not even a birthday trip is sorted.
Strange for Carlos. But also sounds like an absolute rubbish to complain about right now. I know.
flash floods sweeping lives in seconds. earthquakes. forests burning. greedy oligarchs and men in power robbing us all in broad daylight. stan wars. single mums fighting for her life putting food on tables. rebuilding houses while other people debate numbers from air-conditioned rooms.
everything literally coming at us. just waiting for a comet to come end this misery.
and here I am thinking,
god I wanna go somewhere.
for 24 hours. 48. a week. quarters. till I miss myself again.
one day where nobody needs anything from me. where I don’t need to fix anything or build anything or figure out what the next five years are supposed to look like.
just put me somewhere else.
china
I wanna wake up somewhere ridiculously futuristic in China where I look outside and genuinely question what year it is.
Shanghai. Chongqing. Chengdu.
trains through buildings. bridges stacked over bridges. thirty floors up somehow still being “street level”.
I think I’d like being confused by a city again.
there’s something strangely comforting about seeing infrastructure so enormous that your own little ambitions become embarrassingly small.
then leave.
a slow train somewhere rural. seeing myself in a lazy panda.
mountains. old houses. tea. somebody sweeping concrete in the morning in a high-pitched yarn w mates.
China interests me because somehow both things are true.
a civilisation thousands of years old and a place seemingly impatient with the present. astonishingly ambitious at being better at everyone who came to conquer them before. whatever it takes.
I’d like to stand somewhere between the two.
kazakhstan
charming morning coffee out of my tent somewhere with the mountains behind the buildings.
an enormous Soviet bathhouse in the middle of the city. marble, domes, steam. all that grand architecture for the very ordinary human activity of getting clean. coz why is something that takes us five mins could feel ceremonial that way.
I like things like that.
then drive.
steppe. mountains. lakes.
stupid amount of sky. kids playing.
I think Kazakhstan is where I’d remember that borders look enormous on maps and completely imaginary from a mountain.
kaui→ solomon islands → fiji
this one I want slowly.
barefoot almost the entire time. it feels home. just lush
Hawaii without trying to conquer Hawaii.
no 17-item itinerary pls. none of that Honolulu club and walmart.
fruit. Tall mountains. ocean. music. white lotus season 1. hook up with someone then sleep.
then Samoa.
stay in a fale somewhere. shower and bath in a random waterfall.
around six in the evening, some villages observe Sa, and everything slows down for evening prayer.
I think I’d love that.
not because I need another thing to romanticise.
just the idea that an entire place can collectively say:
enough for today.
quiet. like when a snowstorm hits a bustling city of Chicago or rural Canadian suburb.
be with your family.
the world can wait twenty minutes.
then Fiji.
swim. eat. sleep. talk to strangers. swim again.
somewhere along those islands I’d probably remember that rest isn’t the absence of living.
somewhere between florida and rio
this one is deliberately vague coz I don’t even know what I want.
Miami first.
Cuban coffee. sweaty night. loud music. energetic people.
then just keep going south.
Caribbean somewhere.
Colombia.
Medellín specifically.
I think I’d be fascinated by how charming and liberal and young it feels against the version of Colombia so much of the world was taught to imagine.
a city once exported to us almost entirely through violence now talking about urbanism, cable cars, public spaces, art, reggaeton, electronic music.
cities are allowed to outlive their reputations.
people should be too.
I’d probably fall in love with Medellín for 72 hours and become completely unbearable about it.
then maybe Galápagos.
stand on San Cristóbal knowing Darwin came ashore there and said yo we all animals you fuckwits. then the world is like ‘sure’.
imagine looking at some birds and rocks and animals and slowly realising that the explanation of life you arrived with might not be big enough anymore.
I love that.
not Darwin specifically.
just the possibility of seeing something that makes an old certainty impossible to put back together.
or maybe I go completely the other way.
Suriname.
because how fucking strange would it be to fly to South America and hear somebody speaking Javanese.
Javanese families taken there under Dutch. generations later: Javanese words, Dutch education, South American home, Caribbean culture around them.
I think I’d have an identity crisis on their behalf.
then realise that’s probably patronising because maybe they know perfectly well who they are.
perhaps it’s us who need identities to fit neatly inside borders.
eat something vaguely familiar.
hear a language that feels like home but isn’t quite mine.
look around and remember I’m on another continent.
colonialism moved human beings around the planet and left their descendants to make coherence out of somebody else’s map. all that to make these imaginary lines and fuels racism and eventually create ego wars. fucking bull give me a break.
then eventually Rio.
walk down Ipanema near sunset and sit on the rocks at Arpoador.
people gather there and when the sun disappears, sometimes everyone applauds.
I find that ridiculously stunning.
we applaud people for winning things.
for performing.
for becoming important.
imagine applauding something that happens every single day. the sun deserves that i guess. I once did it after jogging at a top of a buddhist temple in Luang Prabang. and that has stayed w me forever.
maybe gratitude is just paying attention to ordinary things before they’re gone.
anyway I’d clap too.
then find a plastic chair somewhere and get drunk. someone offering me a cheap bag then I politely refused.
enough philosophy.
morocco → kenya → saudi
Morocco would be sensory overload.
Marrakech. getting lost immediately.
tiles. spices. mint tea. someone successfully selling me something I absolutely did not need. endless shisha.
then Atlas Mountains.
desert.
silence.
Kenya next.
Nairobi first.
I don’t wanna arrive in an African country and immediately leave the people behind to go photograph animals.
I wanna know what people my age are listening to.
where they go at 11pm.
what they complain about.
what they think their city will become. of daniel caesar. of bey.
then yes okay fine.
show me the giraffes and lion king 😭
Saudi last.
and this one fascinates me for completely different reasons.
because how do you comprehend standing in the landscape where the most influential person in history Muhammad lived and Islam emerged?
one man’s life in this corner of Arabia eventually reorganised the spiritual geography of an enormous part of mankind.
drawing millions of low-middle class spending their lives savings to see the Kabah. everyone from everywhere no job titles none of that just facing it and started crying out of disbelief. think about that.
governments disappeared.
borders moved.
empires collapsed.
people kept turning towards Makkah.
there are very few places where geography carries that much psychological weight.
and then you look at Saudi now and it’s basically saying:
okay. now watch this.
Riyadh changing at ridiculous speed. Jeddah opening up. entertainment, sport, tourism, metros, new cities, enormous projects. rights for women.
Dubai 2.0?
maybe.
but Dubai had to create gravity.
Saudi already has it.
religion. oil. history. geography. money.
now it wants culture, tourism and global attention too.
I’d wanna see what happens when one of the most historically consequential places on earth suddenly becomes impatient with its own image.
moscow → belgrade → berlin
Western Europe I can skip this time.
sorry Paris.
give me the places whose names somehow existed in my head before I understood what they were.
Moscow.
Belgrade.
Sarajevo.
places I heard through history. communism. wars. news anchors. Homeland. The Blacklist. spies meeting somebody somewhere at midnight lol.
places that existed to me as politics before they existed as cities.
Moscow especially.
the Soviet Union. the West. the East.
these gigantic ideas we inherited.
then you actually arrive and somebody is buying groceries.
someone is late for work.
someone is making out on the metro.
history makes countries into ideas and ordinary people have to live inside them.
I’d stand inside those absurd Moscow Metro stations.
marble. mosaics. chandeliers.
an ideology made physical underground.
then come upstairs and capitalism is glowing from every shop window.
history rarely has the decency to finish one thing before starting another.
then Belgrade.
Yugoslavia. Tito. socialist but outside Moscow’s orbit. Non-Aligned Movement.
and somehow Indonesia appears in the story again.
I love when travelling does that.
you go somewhere thinking it is completely foreign and find some weird historical thread leading back home.
Sarajevo maybe.
another name I feel like I’ve known forever from wars and history before remembering it’s also just a city where people drink coffee, flirt, get drunk and complain about work.
and then Berlin.
the melting pot would make me crazy.
Turkish families. Arabs. Africans. Eastern Europeans. artists. immigrants. queer kids. techno people who apparently haven’t seen daylight since Thursday.
döner at 3am.
some Serbian DJ inside a former industrial building.
talking to someone from Damascus.
a city once physically divided between competing ideas of humanity somehow turning all that collision into nightlife.
that’s enough Europe for me.
I don’t actually want to collect capitals.
I want supermarkets.
apartment blocks.
laundromats.
people smoking outside work.
some brutalist municipal building I photograph while locals wonder why the fuck anyone would photograph it.
I want to watch one language slowly disappear from train signs and another replace it.
borders becoming distances again instead of airport announcements.
and somehow, copenhagen.
and I want the whole ridiculous trip to end in Copenhagen.
not somewhere dramatic.
Copenhagen.
grey sky probably.
bike somewhere.
coffee that costs approximately one kidney.
sit beside the water.
phone nearly dead.
camera full.
suitcase absolutely fucked.
and no next flight.
that’s important.
nothing left to anticipate.
I’d probably think about Sydney.
Jakarta.
Lombok. Upstate NY.
everyone I love scattered everywhere.
all the things waiting for me when I come back.
the work will still be there.
the horrible news will still be there.
the world will not have magically become kinder because I disappeared for a while.
and maybe that’s precisely the point.
travel doesn’t make you wiser automatically. sometimes you just become the same idiot in a different timezone.
but I think movement reminds me that whatever currently occupies my entire mind is still only happening in one tiny corner of an enormous world.
somewhere somebody is sweeping concrete outside their house.
somebody is closing their shop.
somebody is praying.
somebody is getting on the train.
somebody in Rio is applauding the sun for doing the same thing it did yesterday.
life continuing without asking whether I’m ready for it.
maybe I just want to witness that for a while.
anyway.
one day.
this cvnt will take that day off.
Lalu M Carlos 
Leave a comment