Travellers Blues

Coming from Ireland, the sun has a funny effect on you. Standing in a sunbleached car park by a Western Australian beach I am struck by it's alienness. Its utter difference from the green green grass of home. Like a rabbit in the headlights with a Golden Eagle hovering overhead, you feel vunerable, and far far away from hom

Like all art, the art of solitary travel is one of introspection and discovery. Constantly faced with a changing landscape, the disorientating familiarness of a new airport, the unconscious but constant referral of coins and notes into your native currency, the gauling comfortableness of foriengers in foreign lands, the love of one's home, and the hatrid of it's failings which stand in grey and dark green contrast to the glorious blue sky of the Australian beach. Jeffry Eugenidies writes in his n0vel 'Middlesex' of the failure of language to totally encompass the totality of emotions. Often, when traveling, one is not simply happy or sad ; rather 'happy but lonely' or 'lonely but excited and enthralled'..

Travel is the modern antidote to frantic lives. The extrication of the self from the so called rat race, the madenning responsibilites of home to the blank sheet of a wild beach, a glaring city or a foreign beauty.