Wanderlust, The Tao of Travel & Paul Theroux

A little update on our life here in NZ: After over a month of settling into this quiet, old fishing town of Timaru alongside cliffs and Pacific Ocean,  Josh and I are embarking on some adventures over the next month. Tomorrow, we move in to our own place in the New Zealand countryside. We're renting a house with a big paddock as a backyard, surrounded by farms and cow pastures and are excited to finally live together just he, Asher and I...and maybe a sheep so we don't have to mow the lawn. Neither of us have lived in the countryside before (I myself have never lived in a city smaller than 400,000) and the two closest towns have around 4000 people so it will definitely be a change (and change is a word I have grown to love -most of the time). It's something I've always wanted to do since I was a little girl and first came to NZ so I have a feeling we're going to enjoy living here, whether its a few months or a year. There is a garage unattached from the house that we're going to us as Josh's wood shop and my art studio. I am craving to work with clay and paint again (even though I've only been out of art school for a few months) so it'll be nice to do that out in the country with lots of beautiful surroundings to inspire me. With the help of my green-thumbed mum-in-law, I am also going to learn how to grow a veggie garden (haha!). I will definitely make a blog post dedicated to our little country house next week, including photos because the afternoon sun hits the fields beautifully and needs to be captured.

I have been reading nonstop and falling in love with so many novels and characters lately. I recently read a book called Wanderlust by Danielle Steel and have not been able to stop thinking about it. Has anyone read this book? Why isn't it a movie?! I was pretty apprehensive about Danielle Steel mostly because I feel like she just pumps books out as fast as Jodi Picoult (whom I never care to read again), however I had never read one of her books before so I really needed to try her out and where better to start than with a book titled Wanderlust? I read it until the wee hours of the morning and wished it would never end. It's one of those books that stay with you for days so much that I couldn't start another book for days until I had convinced myself that I was no longer in pre-WWII on the Orient Express or an orphanage in Japanese-controlled China or amidst WWII in London & North Africa. This book was just incredible. It follows a young woman in her twenties named Audrey Driscoll through her escape from her dull, wealthy life in California where she has run her grandfather's house and has mothered her younger sister for years after their adventuring parents died out at sea on one of their great adventures. Her father was a world traveler and a photographer, inspiring her to leave her responsibilities for a few months to go to Europe and discover her own photography/world traveling dreams. Along the way she meets well-to-do friends and falls in love with a travel writer named Charles Parker-Scott who takes her on the adventure of a lifetime on more trains than imaginable, including the Orient Express to China. And after a bloody, tragic scene at an orphanage in a dangerous area of China controlled by the Japanese in the late 1930's that leaves a couple dozen children without anyone to care for them, Audrey rejects Charles' marriage proposal despite her love for him and stays in China for nearly a year waiting for nuns to relieve her and take over the orphanage. What happens after that is an adventurous and emotional whirlwind that I couldn't pull myself away from. If you are apprehensive about Danielle Steel or haven't been into her other books, just take a chance on this one, it's worth it. And I really, really wish they would make this into a movie!

I just started reading The Tao of Travel: Enlightenment from Lives on the Road by Paul Theroux and if you love any kind of travel writing, read Theroux. He's beyond inspiring. This book is a compilation of travel writing that inspired him including excerpts from J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Pico Iyer (who is also an incredible travel writer), Ernest Hemmingway, Vladimir Nabokov and others as well as excerpts from his own books. It's fantastic so far and wonderfully inspiring so I'm going to share a few quotes with you that I love so far:

"The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown, to bear witness to the consequences, tragic or comic, of people possessed by the narcissism of minor differences. Chekhov said, 'If you're afraid of loneliness, don't marry.' I would say, if you're afraid of loneliness, don't travel. The literature of travel shows the effects of solitude, sometimes mournful, more often enriching, now and then unexpectedly spiritual."
-Paul Theroux

"Homesickness is a feeling that many know and suffer from; I on the other hang feel a pain less known, and its name is "Out-sickness." When the snow melts, the stork arrives, and the first steamships race off, then I feel the painful travel unrest."
-Hans Christian Anderson

"Travel holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home." 
-Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life."
-Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Any country which displays more than one statue of the same living politician is a country which is headed for trouble."
-Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules

"There is not much to say about airplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by the negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. The gratitude brings such relief your mind goes blank, which is appropriate, for the airplane passenger is a time traveler. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. Time is truncated, or in any case warped: he leaves in one time zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright -from the moment he departs, his mind is focused on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out of the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above is empty space. Time is brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see."
-Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on those accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
-Mark Twain, Innocent's Abroad (1869)

"When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens."
-Paul Theroux, To the Ends of the Earth

"The best of travel seems to exist outside of time as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life."
-Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Travel is so often an experiment with time. In Third World countries I felt I had dropped into the past, and I had never accepted the notion of timelessness anywhere. Most countries had specific years. In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is twenty years ago in the Soviet Union, ten in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan. Britain and the United States were in the present -but the present contains the future."
-Paul Theroux, The Kingdom by the Sea

Because of this book and Wanderlust, I have discovered my own craving desire for trains and this suits Josh pretty well considering he wanted to be a train conductor when he was a kid. In two weekends, we will be embarking for a weekend on the Tranzalpine Raiway that goes from Christchurch to Greymouth (East Coast to West Coast). When Josh and I travel together it is usually I who takes the photos (though Josh is a pretty awesome photographer himself) and Josh keeps a travel journal. This time I will keep a travel journal as well and when we get back, I will try my hand at writing a travel piece and submit it to a few magazines to see if I have a future in travel writing. I would love to know if anyone reading this has taken other railway lines around New Zealand because we look forward to taking many more. Two weekends after the Tranzalpine, we're Mt. Cook bound.

This is a photo I took at Mt. Cook National Park last year around this time.


And this is what the Tranzalpine Railway looks like. I found these photos off Google but I can't wait to share my own photos after our trip.




I'll end with this awe-inspiring quote I read earlier today:

"For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with...All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder."
-Pico Iyer, "Why We Travel", Salon 2000