Wistful Travelling

As my horizons have shrunk to leafy views of my smallish Australian regional town, and Corona news indicates that they will probably not be expanding any time this year, I have begun wistful travelling.

Rereading old diaries and writings and looking at photos of travels taken, is a visceral experience, tinged with sadness, the warmth of memories and small pingings of hope which are as much as I will allow myself given the voracity of this virus in Europe and Asia. This year was to be the beginning of my travelling years and now they have been postponed, and delayed.

My frustration, if I let myself, makes me damn the bloody Chinese wet markets and which ever bright spark decided to skin bats in the vicinity of bloody haunches of some other beast. Really ! Although in writing this I am reminded of my last trip to Bali when I was delighted to drink coffee made from seed saved from the poo of the civet. Big Sigh. It all feels like a futile debate and does not help my feelings of being stranded on this island which is my loved home and for which I give blessings every hibernating day. That said, I have had to leave it at regular intervals over the years in order to breathe different air. I think this is my fear. That I will be unable to leave.

Having tortured myself with that thought I have revisited some of my previous travel writing and landed in one of my favourite cities ...Amsterdam. It is 2005 and ironically I have written ...Before the greatest cold snap in history and the bird flu reach Europe, I have come to Amsterdam to enjoy the last flush of Autumn....I wrote this 15 years ago and there were warnings !

In 2005 I went on to write .....I have wanted to come here for 25 years after a friend sent me a postcard of a tulip stall looking impossibly stylish and she wrote on the back ...this is your place. ...come ! Now I am here , I am heartbroken that I did not organise it sooner ...if Spain has my spirit, I suspect that on slightly longer acquaintance , Amsterdam will

win my heart . ( 2020 update on the heart. ..Istanbul has my heart. Amsterdam holds my otherness. )

Of course there are the inevitable things about the city ..its tolerance of soft drugs and the sex industry. What I was not prepared for was how these tolerances would impact on the "being here ". This is a city , where the music and the ambience are subtle and gentle despite it being overrun with all male groups on football bonding sessions whose machismo sweeps over me in a scent of testosterone. This is off putting and walking through the inner canal area does have the disconcerting habit of evolving from a deserted, ambient,

gallery lined stroll into a maelstrom of these men in groups and dense crowds.

There also seems to be no way to predict when sex and drug options will suddenly be the focus of the neighbourhood. I have found that men sidling up to me and saying numbers .( which seem quite low really ) is usually a good indication that I am in a red light district. Girls in windows are not all confined to the touristy red light district . One minute you are

contemplating picturesque brown cafes and walking a leafy cobbled street and the next ...there she is ...a girl in a window, cutting her nails or reading a magazine. Nonchalant. Relaxed. And if you keep walking in that direction ...there are inevitably more girls in windows. I seem to spend a lot of time changing direction in Amsterdam.And getting hopelessly lost in what is really a very small city.

Of course there are reasons for that which can be found in the coffee houses which are a feature of the city. My favourite is a delightful light white painted shop run by lovely women to whom you describe your desired mood and they suggest something appropriate to conjure just that affect. They are never wrong and the very normality of coffee house attendance in this city is one of its greatest delights.

I do however believe that the dutch, who do not suffer fools gladly , are the perfect overseers of such a social experiment. This became obvious to me, when one evening taking an inordinately long time to make a decision about what to buy for dinner in a small supermarket, I realised that everyone around me, the well dressed business man, the young hipster couple, the thirty ish younger woman near the fruit were also taking an inordinately long time to make their choices. When I got to the counter, without the required personal shopping bags mandated even then in Holland, the staff were brusque, practical and sorted me out without any decision making required by me. They effortlessly took into account that I knew no dutch, had no idea about the bag rules and wasn`t really up for anything other than getting my dinner home and eating the rather disconcerting mix of strange fishy things , very odd salad mixture and pale chocolate, possibly together.

This approach, which in I have come to associate dutch people, puts boundaries around the unbounded. I much admire the management of tourists in this city by the people of the city. . It could be a nightmare and it is not. It is lovely.