Think of a Place

I wrote this as an entry for a travel writing competition where the theme was The Spirit of Adventure. It made me reflect on my own adventures, the things we remember about a place and what we imagine they will be like before we go.

What do you think of when you think of somewhere you’ve never been - a place you’ve only read about or seen as letters on a map?

The Bahamas is palm trees and jewel-bright water; Mexico means red earth and chocolate.

I used to think Australia was all sand: golden, yellow, sun-bleached blonde.

Of course much of it is, with swathes of desert that are uninhabitable. 

But I even pictured it in the cities - piles of it standing in pyramids beside the streets. They were paved with sand too and were blown by a warm breeze against glass-fronted skyscrapers - made blue with reflections of an always-sunny sky. 

I should say that this was when I was about eight, when your idea of the world is shaped by books and cartoons, by your own imagination. I don’t think I grasped that something so far away could also be familiar. 

In the video games I played when I was little, the worlds are all sand or ice, all fire or clouds. The land might be submerged in water and you have to dive under, through the blue, to complete the adventure. There are paintings you jump in to that show what lies beneath.

You believe that you can travel across the Atlantic in a peach and that you could go to the back of a wardrobe and find snow. You think you really could fly if you just ran and jumped the right way.

Imagination is powerful. But it can come with expectation.

Everywhere that exists, however well-documented and however well-explored, exists as somewhere different in your mind.

When I did make it to Australia, what feels like a couple of lifetimes ago, I saw what was beyond the sand. I walked through rainforests and drove a scooter on the road at dusk. I saw that the sky isn’t always sunny, not always the colour of sapphires. There is fog that drapes everything in a grey drizzle like it does at home (I never did get to see if the Blue Mountains were actually blue). Sea stacks and dizzyingly winding roads like at home too.

I discovered that the roof of the Sydney Opera House is actually tiled and the colour of clotted cream - not the billowing crisp sails of a yacht like I’d imagined. How odd to see it emergefrom the greenery of the park I’d walked through to get to it. Like seeing the Statue of Liberty or the Trevi Fountain: oh, there it is.

I only travelled down the east coast but I remember how new it all seemed - how ungrounded in history the cities felt. Swatting horse flies on Fraser Island, standing in the water with rolled-up trousers, you could pretend that there was no one else was doing the same thing on the other side of the island - that no one else had been there before.

It was different in Cambodia.

I had gone there before Australia as part of a round the world trip, taken after quitting a job I hated, already feeling trapped. Being young and naive and fairly carefree allowed for the freedom of an adventure, a tangent in the vague plan of life.

I was volunteering at an orphanage for a month, with time in between to explore (the small town where I was staying was just an hour from the capital). From there you could get a bus to Siem Reap, from there the bus to Battambang (if only every journey could be taken on its bamboo railway...)

Apart from being sure I would get malaria or step on a landmine, I didn’t really know what to expect from Cambodia when I had decided to go - it wasn’t somewhere I had thought about before. There was just something alluring about it, something about the way the name unfurled with a mysterious lilt. There was the sense of something ancient.

You felt this at Angkor Wat, the huge temple complex that appears on the national flag. You wait to watch the sunrise in the blue morning light and, despite all the other tourists there, camera lenses poised, it still felt special. Some things will always have the power to overwhelm, the ability to inspire a quiet reverence. At Ta Prohm - the temple consumed by thick, crawling tree roots - there was an aura of something primeval, something left behind. Exploring it was going back and forward at the same time.

So there was a sort of newness there too. Or at least a sense of something beginning. Devastated by the brutalities of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, the country was still finding its way, rebuilding itself and able to look forward. I remember reading that the people of Cambodia had an unbreakable spirit...

This was all 15 years ago so I’m sure the country will have changed a lot. Even then it was starting to become a sort of eco-tourism destination, nestled between the more popular Thailand and Vietnam. There are countries that will always be seen as developing I suppose - there are some things that will always remain. The ghosts of genocide, the lingering sense of loss. Museums and memorials are there to remind you of it - I remember how haunted some places felt.

But a place stays in your mind the way you experienced it for the first time. It might be somewhere you only ever go once.

When I went to Copenhagen one milky-skied winter, the city was blanketed in snow.

So now I picture it in white.

There is snow on the cobbled streets like icing, the buildings are sugar-dusted too. The gardens and the river are frozen - black ducks waddle on top. At the Louisiana Museum of Art, a Henry Moore sculpture placed outside, near the sea, will stay in my mind as lines of grey on white on blue.

 

Actually I see snow when I think of California.

I went there after Australia, after some time in New Zealand too. 

(I wasn’t exactly going off the beaten track but I was travelling solo: “A lone wolf” a security agent said at LAX…Following in the footsteps of others but seeing the world through my own eyes too.)

I had explored some of Los Angeles, seen the trams and hills of San Francisco, but near the end of my trip, just before going home, I spent a couple of days in Yosemite. With the new season’s warmth yet to reach the national park, much of it was covered in snow. Bobcats and coyotes prowled coolly on the rocks.

The snow was so deep in some parts that it reached the top of wooden huts, buried chairs and tables - what might make the snow so memorable is that, while snow-shoeing among the giant sequoias (it would take the arms of 10 people to wrap around them) I fell through a picnic table as we crunched along.

I always wonder about what stays in our minds when we try to remember a place or think of a certain time. What feelings and images remain. Whole months are reduced to small moments, the memories last barely a second.   

I spent three weeks in New Zealand as part of that trip and it seems to be a bit of a blur too. What I always think of first is the passion fruit ice-cream I had there (the best I think I’ve ever tasted). 

Odd perhaps because actually I was quite adventurous, leaning into the country’s position as a destination for outdoor pursuits. I hiked the Franz Josef glacier - walls and tunnels of ice - and went paragliding in the mist (attached to someone who knew what they were doing). I’d almost forgotten I went river surfing - a prize won in some sort of competition in a bar.

Really thinking about past experiences, playing around with what you see, can shake up the memories and bring things to the surface.

 

I haven’t been back to any of these places since, for now they will stay as I saw them then.

I would like to go back to Cambodia. 

It might be nice to see Yosemite in June. I heard it is carpeted in wildflowers and I can see the waterfall, frozen when I was there, crashing into lush green ground. The picnic tables, dappled in sunlight, will be covered in sandwiches wrapped in red-chequered paper.

There is research to show that planning a trip - anticipating anadventure - can actually make you happier than taking the trip itself. 

Maybe remembering one can too.

Imagination is as powerful as a memory.

 

I’ve always wanted to go to Japan.

It’s somewhere I think of as an intense collision of old and new. 

It’s probably just more exciting to think of somewhere unfamiliar, so different from what you know. Somewhere far away.

I picture paper doors and neon lights, clouds of pink blossom in spring.

I imagine chaos and peace beside each other, pale coloursagainst black.

What do you picture when you think of a place you’ve never been to?

What do you think of when you remember a place you have?