People In Passing

If you read the background on this, it just started off as something funny to do and then took off like a rocket. This is his third video, the last one from 2006 was inspiring as well.

More at http://www.wherethehellismatt.com

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

I decided to cobble together all the posts I wrote while traveling last year into a single page (sorry, multi-page code is broken). The blog always lists the most recent post, so if you weren’t reading along from the beginning it can be pretty difficult to navigate through and find all the pieces-parts of the trip.

Round-The-World : Phase 1 (http://peopleinpassing.com/round-the-world-phase-1/)

I have made no edits to the posts themselves. Cleanup, elaboration, and grammatical fine-tuning still remain goals of mine. Just not today. Also, weighing in at a little over 30,000 words, I have not re-read the collected posts start to finish so I don’t know if it flows or is a herky-jerky narrative experience. Consider yourself warned.

All that said, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed experiencing and writing it.

Oh, and Happy Valentines Day too

I actually started writing this three weeks ago, not long after I’d arrived in Istanbul. While I was excited to be in such a diverse and active place I noticed that my sense of awe and enthusiasm were not where they should have been. I found I spent more and more time in the hostel or the nearby restaurant reading or talking to people I’d met. My drive to go walk for six to eight hours a day was gone. I was only six blocks from the Blue Mosque and Hava Sophia and it took me three days before I bothered to go check them out. I was awash in an amazing culture and I was, I can’t say bored, I was tired.

Back at the very beginning of this trip I talked to my friend Candice, who was very excited for my trip and the route I was taking. She had done a year around the world with someone and gave me some sage advice. “From one traveler to another, don’t drink the water, use hand sanitizer a lot, and don’t be afraid to stop if you get tired.”

In Sofia I met a man from Hong Kong named Kerry Pan. Kerry was on an overland journey from Hong Kong to the Middle East. He’d spent the last few years traveling all over the world. South America, Asia, Japan, etc… He would always return home to regroup after a period of time.

In Istanbul I met a German man named Johan (I think I’m spelling that correctly). He had been traveling regularly for 20+ years, all on his motorcycle. He has logged nearly 1,000,000 kilometers and was presently on a journey from Germany to South Africa. We talked about my concerns and lack of enthusiasm and he told me that his limit was six months. He’d taken longer trips but hadn’t enjoyed them as much. He found that after six months for him it just became living. “What pub am I going to hang out in?” “Where am I going to eat?” that kind of thing. The thrill started to wane.

I’d planned the trip, saved enough to get me through a year or more, studied the routes, bought the gear, sold my car, and put my life on hold. It wasn’t until I’d spent months on the road that I realized I might have an upper limit on my attention span for this kind of thing. You can’t know unless you try. No matter what, I know that I tried, and that I’m not done.

I’m glad I had these conversations, and many others, with fellow travelers. When I first started to feel it, I was concerned, and it was nice to have others with a long term trip under their belt let me know they’d felt the same way.

I know there will be some that are disappointed in my decision to stop early. For them, know that it was not an easy decision. I spent several weeks, and countless hours, weighing everything. Was I wasting this opportunity I’d created? Was I stopping too easily? Could I just push past it? In the end I knew that this wasn’t the end, just the end of the beginning. Anyone who thought this trip would “get it out of my system” or “settle me down” doesn’t know me very well. This trip, as long as it lasted, has only opened the door for bigger, more difficult, travel and challenges. So as to not become jaded to future adventures it’s better I stop now and regroup.

Maybe it would be different if I didn’t have my future wife waiting patiently for me at home. She has never pressured me into any decisions about this trip. Still, being away from Summer has been the single most challenging aspect of this whole adventure. Thanks to technology and the availability of the Internet I’ve been able to talk with her often but it’s not the same. I’m sure you can ask anyone posted overseas or in another city about that. There’s also the “Damn, I wish she could see this” factor.

I’ve learned a great deal about myself and the world over the past six months. You can’t not with this kind of experience. You learn what you can and can’t live without, there are more extreme lessons in the world I’m sure, but this has been mine. You learn what is important to you. You learn about the insignificance of so many things you worry about every day. Similar I think to when you age, you realize how to be comfortable in your own skin, and how all that self-conscious crap while you were young, was crap. You realize how everyone is just a person like you. Loves the same, needs the same, lives the same, just differently.

So, with all that said, sorry for the seemingly abrupt end to the adventure. It really isn’t the end. I will spend the rest of my life reaching this goal. I’m more interested in enjoying the ride than unenthusiastically accomplishing a task. Life is too short.

Pacific Northwesterners! I’m back! and unemployed! anybody want to buy me a drink?

What do you get when you combine 1.2million people crowding a city of 500,000 to dance and party? Well in Germany it’s called the Love Parade and it is truly something to behold.

I woke around 9:30 am to get some breakfast and noticed that another of the bunks in the 5-bed dorm I was staying in was filled. Sometime after breakfast we introduced ourselves, his name was Juan Jose (Juan-Jo for short) and he had come in from Madrid for the Parade with a couple of friends. Later he invited me to join the three of them and get some lunch before heading down to the parade. They wore matching red shirts with a white bull on the front, representing the part of Spain they were from, and all three were incredibly nice guys.

We drank a little before heading down to the parade. Some whiskey and coke and a Corona with a Doner Kebab. We didn’t see throngs of people heading for the stations so we thought maybe it was slow to start. This is the first year the Love Parade has been anywhere outside of Berlin since it began in the 90’s.

After boarding the U-bahn towards BerlinerPlatz we discovered that we were just further out than the rest of the party goers. The next stop on the line opened to the cheers of people packed into the terminal and 30seconds later the train was overflowing. Two stops further and the cheering crowd poured out of the train and we followed. Exiting the station we could hear the music and the horizon was full of people as far as you could see.

We wandered about, taking in the spectacle and then dived in to the center. I started taking pictures and people started jumping in front of the camera and grabbing their friends. What’s funny is almost always after they asked for a card showing where they could see the picture. It’s funny because a few years back I ran a nightlife website for Portland clubs (R.I.P. PDXCLUBPIX) and that’s exactly what we’d do. Snap a picture and hand out a card. I had cards printed up for an easy way to point people to this site before I left so I handed some of those out. To those of you that thought I was shooting for a magazine or online publication, sorry, I’m just a traveler, but like I promised you can see your pictures by clicking HERE.

Everyone I talked to that day was friendly and happy to be there. We stayed and danced and drank until the wee hours and then headed back to the hostel for some short sleep before our respective departures the next morning. Thanks again to my new Spanish friends for letting a goofy American tag along!

You must understand by now that my misadventures are my adventures. Ending up in the wrong place is often as interesting as ending up in the right place. Sometimes more.

So with that said… I find myself at an AOL Kiosk in an American themed bar/resturant next to my indoor soccerplex-hostel. Country music on the stereo and belt buckles and cowboy hats on the staff, including a giant backdrop of Monument Valley behind what I imagine would be the dancefloor on a busier night….

But getting here is the story.

Leaving Antwerp was my first use of the Eurail pass I bought. 3 months unlimited rail travel throughout 18 countries in Europe. After validating the ticket at Antwerp Central I recieved an itinnerary consisting of 4 train changes to get to Essen Germany. It should have taken about 4 hours… There was another option that would have arrived there later but with less train changes (and the insidious “suppliment”: extra money for better trains)

In the end both would have arrived about the same time.

I was dozing in and out of conciousness on the first 45 minute leg and phazed in at one point right around the time that we stopped at a station. We’d been traveling about 40 minutes at the time and other people were getting off so I switched into lemming-mode and got off as well.

After the train pulled away the sign on the station was revealed. At that point I realized I had made a mistake. The sign read “Essen.” There is an Essen in Belgium also, just before the stop I wanted.

An agent happened to be standing on the opposite side of the tracks facing me. “Rosendaal?” I said, pointing in the direction the train had just gone. He nodded in reply.
“Oops.” I said with a smile. He was able to print me another series of connections to get to Essen (Germany) and I went back to the platform to wait the 50 minutes for the next train.

Mistake #2

So after the first goof I had an hour to study the train schedule and, although it was in Dutch, it was making sense. My guesses prooved correct for the next two changes.
Until Venlo.

Upon arriving at Venlo I turtled my way over to platform 3b where the train was waiting (changing platforms requires that you go down a flight of stairs, through a tunnel and up a flight of stairs). It was early and the doors were open so I got on board.

The train started moving early. “Do they leave early?” I thought to myself as we pulled away from the station. As we passed the first stop I recognized the name.

Getting all my gear together and through the doors in my way didn’t happen in time and I was still heading in the direction I’d just come from. Oops.

I was able to hop the next Eastbound at the following stop and get back to Venlo, where I waited for the next version of the train I’d missed. During this time I realized I had entered a new country. Not because of any change in the people or architecture, but because the sound of the dominant language had changed. The more gutteral sounds of German were everywhere.

Dutch and German sound similar. I’m told by a Belgian that when the English came to Belgium they heard the language and thought it was German (or Deütch) which was then softened in the telling to “Dutch.” Also now with the announcement there was a very helpful English translation which was never present in Belgium.

Arriving in Essen (the right one) I was tired, hungry, and done with hefting my bags around. I hunted for the busses the info booth told me would be needed to get to my destination. After walking around for a little while I decided on a cab with a very nice Iranian exile for the driver. All the streets are closed for the Love Parade tomorrow so we had to take the long way…

Love Parade = up to 1,000,000 people filling the streets to enjoy dance music from DJs on floats. Google it. It should be interesting.

As I’m sketching out some of the sites I would like to see on this adventure I’ve come across some amazing hotels. Some of the locations are seasonal so it might depend on my ability to be in a certain part of the world at a certain time. Like the Ice Hotel in Sweden which is only open from November through April because that is the only time of the year when it is structurally sound. The hotel is made entirely of ice and reconstructed each year out of over 3000 tons of ice and 30000 cubic meters of snow. You sleep comfortably on a bed of ice, snow, and reindeer pelts in a brisk -5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees F).

Then on the opposite end of the continent there are the Fairy Chimneys of Turkey. A 1500 year old complex of caves that were once used for wine making as part of an early Byzantine monastery.

All points in between… Unusual Hotels of the World is a semi-comprehensive collection of the eccentric to the truly bizarre where lodgings are concerned. I’ve found a great many hotels I’d love to stay at here in the United States if I had the time and the money (most are expensive, in the $250-$350 range).

Regardless, any of these places will be an experience and a nice change from the multi-person dorms I will likely spend most of my nights in.