On my own

For the first time in a long time I'm completely on my own out here.

Vanessa left this morning to catch a plane to Colombo in Sri Lanka. I'm biding my time in Trivandrum, the rather unimpressive state capital of Kerala, waiting for a train to Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu, close to Madras on the east coast of India.

Unfortunately the train is due to leave at 4am tomorrow morning, so I have quite a lot of time to bide, quite a lot of time to think, quite a lot of time to reflect. So far my reflections have brought me to the conclusion that I'm experiencing a mixture of emotions. After I saw Vanessa off at the gates of our hotel I returned to the room to find a package wrapped in newspaper with the words "India Survival Kit" written on it. Inside I found various items, all of them useful, including a bag of cashew nuts, a packet of chewy Rennie, some Polos, two pens and twenty Camel Lights.

After opening Vanessa's gift I got something stuck in both my eyes and they watered for a bit. Then I thought I'd have a little lie down. I didn't expect to fall asleep because there was so much going on in my head, but I did. A couple of hours later I woke and was suprised to find that I felt quite differently from the troubled frame of mind I was in before. I experienced a feeling that I hadn't felt for weeks - a feeling of total freedom and a sense of all the possibilities associated with it. I realised I was once again answerable to no-one except myself.

I thought, "I can just stay in bed if I want to. There's no-one here to judge me if I stay in bed all day watching football and cricket and movies and picking my nose."

It's like being at a junction with roads pointing north, east, south and west. It makes no difference to anyone but me which road I choose. There's no-one to influence my choice either way. That's the kind of freedom you experience when you travel alone, the kind of freedom that perhaps it is not possible to achieve in any other way. That's the beauty of travelling.

But maybe it's not a particularly healthy thing to be answerable to no-one, perhaps having a sense of responsibility toward someone else is something which helps us to define ourselves?

As usual I have a lot of questions.

It doesn't help my sense of uncertainty that with every day that brings me closer to my return home and my reunion with family and friends, I feel the pull of home grow ever stronger. Not a day passes when I do not speculate about what it will be like to return. It is pointless to speculate, I know, but after being away for seventeen months and now being within only two months of returning, it's impossible not to.

So I once again find myself considering my options. The time has come to make my decision - which way do I go? North, south, east or west?

North. Then north again, to the top of the world, to the Himalayas. I'm not allowing myself the luxury of the ocean anymore. Therefore I find myself craving the mountains.