English Version | No place like (our) home

When I was a kid, I asked to go to the circus a lot. When I got there, I thought that the large poodles didn’t seem very happy when twirling around and that the lions and tigers going through a ring of fire by the threat of a whip were different from the ones I saw on TV, and the clowns just weren’t funny, full stop. “Mum, can we go home?”, I repeated until I got my way. Yes, traveling is good. But not as good as going back to our place.

In one of those forays which I increasingly avoid (because I am observing around me and it doesn’t seem like there is only one place where there isn’t someone with their eyes fixated on a small screen with a look as if I film movies like WALL-E or a much more poetic Her), and for that I can guarantee it is difficult as hell (in fact, like any “weaning”), I remember having read something that tried to be a meme but has passed on, with the painful harpoon of sharpness:  “Work doing what you enjoy and never again will you enjoy what you do”. It’s funny unny, isn’t it? Yes it is. But the worst part is that it is the purest of the truths. Professor Agostinho da Silva, an inspiring Portuguese philosopher who everyone insists on calling a “writer” or “author”, threw himself into this theme: “The happiness, the happiness of the subject… Had retired since he was born, which is what we should all do, be retired at birth… We have to think about an economy, a society, in any type being retired at birth. Know immediately, if you can understand, that he who does nothing dies quickly. So, search for what you feel in the world you would like to do. The two laws should be: ‘Don’t ever work; please always stay a bit busy.’” (Going to India Without Leaving Portugal, p.15). Is it a bit anarchist? It is. But it is also sublime because to this purpose all could be summed up in one or two sentences: “Man isn’t born to work, born to create, to be a poet on the loose.” In other words, humans aren’t destined to create large works, and we aren’t talking about skyscrapers and highways, but yes of art. From a completely different perspective, and that it is not rooted in the same to take into account more practical and political reasons, the Group Krisis also published in Germany in 1999, the Manifest Against Work, with the Portuguese edition by Antigona. This is a supposed “refinement” of Capital by Karl Marx, which begins with the sentence. “A cadaver dominates society - the cadaver of work. All the powers of the planet came united to defend this dominion: the Pope and the World Bank, Tony Blair and Jörg Haider, unions and businessmen, German ecologicalists and French socialists. All of them only know one motto: work, work, work!” and ends with “The dominating powers can declare themselves as crazy because we risk the rupture of its coercive irrational system. We don’t have anything to lose unless the perspective on catastrophe which they drive us towards. We have the ability to win a world very distant from work. Proletarians of the world, put an end to this!”. In between these trenches, there are eighteen points where several solutions are explained to the problem: Why doesn’t our work fulfill us? Simple... Because it is a job. 

From work. I was, for fifteen years, more nostalgic than lengthy, a  travel journalist. What the hell is that? It’s exactly that: the tiring task of traveling, on average, for 20 days a month, in exchange for a salary. Running around the planet, staying at places made of dreams, eating at the best restaurants, searching for points that are cover worthy, remaining observing, talking with people, taking notes, and, in the end, going back home and writing about it. It may be worth mentioning the name of the publication (Blue Travel), but also at the risk of nobody remembering it anymore, I should mention that those were times of market revolution. The destinations weren’t just outside of normal ventures but the focus of these articles stopped being “places to visit” or “what to eat” to an exploration of the personal experience of the traveler, written in a free and creative manner which many times got close to travel writing, with streaks of Bruce Chatwin or Graham Greene or Paul Theroux or Jack Kerouac, or arrogant members of the Portuguese press, accompanied by the photographic component which would leave aside the usual empty landscapes to have people inside, a type of street photography in exotic places where there is a portrait, which could stem from the hotel worker to the proud young man who would wash dishes at a Michelin star restaurant. The desire was to make portuguese people (for whom traveling “seriously”, with guaranteed adventure, a bit of charm, and some grams of indulgence was still something very distant), dream with the discovery of the most hidden places over the world, which, were after all within reach without the “dangers” they imagined. There was not the snobbery with which a certain travel writer wrote, around the same time, in his chronicle in a renowned weekly newspaper: “The portuguese don’t know how to travel, they go to resorts and don’t leave”, as if the common “tuga” had the ability to board a cargo ship and travel through continents for months, with the money in his pockets and without having to think about his boss from the office might miss him after three months without delivering the boring tedious report with graphs and Excel charts attached. There was a declaration of love to the whole world just like it is, offered to those who read the pages with the declaration: “Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is possible to do”. It was a brave new world (hello Huxley) that opened the doors of perception (hi Morrison), and most importantly, the mentalities. Starting with mine. Half a world traveled, today I have the absolute and unshakable certainty that traveling is indeed that university of life. It humbles us. From the vast planes of the Masai Mara, where we wouldn’t sleep even an hour alone, the asian mountains which take everyone and everything, where we include ourselves, to the smile full of possibility of the indian children who were born under the ungrateful of the “untouchables”; caste to the abandonment of music and ability to dance which all all the hardships take in a brazilian dive bar, we’ll realize that we are nothing and nobody in this world. We conclude, with each kilometer, that each human who we are lucky to cross paths with is a crucial piece in this human chain that hugs the planet. All of the nationalism give birth to people who don’t leave the place they believe to be best. As well as all the wars are perpetrated for people in a suit. Only after the uniforms come in. But never some mountain boots to hike a snowed peak or some flip flops to take off your shoes once you step on the sand of the beach. 

My son was less than a year old. I spent the whole morning in a farewell to another journey, in games to try and make him pass from his usual sitting position to start crawling, which was long overdue. I didn’t manage to and we went to the airport, one of those stale goodbyes with his face closing nearly in tears, all of which break our heart at the door of the check-in. Landing in Munique to board in Ingolstadt, on a luxury cruise which would go down the Danube River in 10 days. Its route includes stops in the still German Passau, in the Austrian Linz and Vienna, in Bratislava, Budapest and through the zigzagging border between Croatia and Serbia, buildings riddled with bullets on both sides, a testament to the war which had ended a mere 10 years ago, lots of dramatic mountains, dense forests, medieval villages, century abbeys, and even some raves throughout the borders cutting through the muted silence of the night. After the destination would be the magic delta of the European River, which traces the border between Romania and Ukraine. It would be. If both the motors of the boat hadn’t broken down in Novi Sad, Serbia. I called the bureau: “Its impossible to do an article about a cruise having only gone halfway through. We still have a week, I can go to Belgrade and we do a route through the city.” That’s how it went. Housed in an attic that had survived the NATO bombardments in defiance to the UN, property of my friend Marija Pavlovic, a makeup artist who is living in Portugal, it was through her help and her friends, two actors in Gato Preto, Gato Branco that I discovered the most secret nooks and crannies of a city that was once the Paris of the Balkans, its charms, its people, and its cuisine which required, many times, wine from Setúbal which was surprisingly sold in a small and exclusive wine cellar in the city center, the nightlife that went well beyond the screaming Pitbull Terrier, the abundant art galleries, the afternoons by the grass-covered sea banks, a slow life despite the hustle and bustle and a cultural identity and religious rarity. If there are any certainties in travel, the true one, the one without a destination which isn’t the next one, maybe the one before, without a care for time or having anything booked, is that things don’t only happen but they also seem to come to find us. But when I got back, my son ran into my arms. I missed his first steps. From that point on, it only got harder. 

I bet that, if he had been here through these surroundings, Freud was a young man who would explain this need, at times so guttural, of regressing to the time when we were nomadic because we had not yet discovered agriculture and domestication of animals. This search for the unknown, for sceneries that had nothing to do with the ones we were used to since we were children, for flavors not yet tasted, unheard of aromas, the sound of birds which we deemed impossible, or for a completely different language around us. What meanders are these which make it so that after all, and even though we have just been we have just been in a place we have fallen in love with, the return home is always so warm to the soul. There’s an inaudible sigh so intense as we open the door to our home, breathing in the smell which inhabits there. There’s something magical about our bed. It might not be a memory foam mattress and Egyptian cotton, like the one we just slept in in that hotel with Philippe Starck furniture. These walls that we get used to seeing daily and that just a few weeks ago we felt like they suffocated us. In the street where we walked the dog during nights when we didn’t want to leave the sofa. The same faces at the coffee shop which still tastes the same, and is so horrible in comparison to the Blue Mountain that was available at breakfast in the little hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica… But it tastes like home. Traveling is always being away with the knowledge that the return is soon. The opposite of this is immigration. While we are in paradise, which might not actually be paradise but it’s the place where we decided we would be for the next few days or weeks, there’s not a single day where we don’t think about what awaits us in the return home. We run away from obligations, bills, and work which became unbearable, and everyday life which became unbreathable. But the memory of family comes to our head, friends and everything that we know is waiting, and won’t run away, unlike us. At the very least, we exclaim “how I wish that this person would be here with me, looking at this incredible Fjord.” At best, we let out a “what a horrible place, when is it time to leave?”. Then, of course, songs like There’s No Place Like Home are written, probably from someone who three months ago was excited to leave his little land in North Dakota but now prays for the tour to end. Yes, there’s nothing like our home. But it’s for us to know that it is necessary to leave it for a while, with the locked door whispering “let’s give it some time”. Traveling teaches us a lot. If not everything. 

Translated from the original on our The Voyage Issue, from June 2023.Full credits and stories on the print version.