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Now let’s step back from the light into the dark, my friends. To the place of no return.
The place of no return is essentially being on your own in a time or place that you sense is dangerous. The place of no return is not a priori a guarantee that something bad will happen, most of the time nothing happens. It’s the time when you know that if something bad were to start happening you would be the only one who could stop it from getting worse. It is those moments in life when you know you are very far out on a limb.
Most of the time your place of no return will be somewhere where there appears to be no one else around, that’s obviously one of the main factors that contribute to making it dangerous. But it can also be somewhere where there are others; and it can be a moment when you are directly interacting with someone who you think could harm you. I’ve been through the place of no return many times but there are 3 that stick out in my mind. 2 of these were in places where there were other people; all of them revolved around feeling trapped by untrustworthy men. I will outline these 3 situations in the next post.
In the first few sections I ran through some of the preparation you can engage in to build your confidence as you travel around and decrease the likelihood that you will find yourself in a bad place or become someone’s target for whatever reason. But you will end up in the place of no return at some point. Sometimes involuntarily, sometimes by choice. For me, I’m in a place of no return anytime I walk home alone at night. Yet I have done it a lot of times and most probably will continue doing it, because I like to walk, love cities at night and… the emptiness is also something pleases me somehow. God I sound like batman don’t I. Read the rest of this entry »
Heya,
Just put up some pictures from part of my walk along St. David’s Peninsula which forms part of the Pembrokeshire coastal trail in Wales. I look at the beauty of the rocks, the colours of the vegetation and the bays and I get happy all over again 
Enjoy!
P.s. I know I’ve said this before but I really do recommend using the slideshow function for this set. The black background and comparative simplicity of the presentation helps to give more of a sense of what it feels like to be there.
Making friends
I started out writing this series with a focus on, and I paraphrase myself: avoiding things getting “tangly” and keeping the “baddies” away.
Indeed.
In all honesty I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to give this post that same safety slant. I mean I’m writing about one of the most enjoyable natural phenomena in the world and as I’m writing I feel like I’m repeatedly tripping over that dastardly question - “So wait… what does this have to do with keeping safe?” WELL. Well. Well I don’t know damnit!
So I think what I want to look at here is how easy it is to make friends as someone travelling on their own, and what I’ve particularly enjoyed in the process. Read the rest of this entry »
If I was insistent on rescuing my bag from the mysterious black hole of the airline industry, it was because it ended up doing far more for me than keeping my belongings together.
Country-hopping with it pressed into my back for the last 8 months, my bag became a sort of friend. Our relationship was born out of necessity, had its growth nourished by a solid diet of frustration and animosity, and ended up finding its feet in acceptance, happiness and a devil-may-care complicity.
My bag, my bag. Where do I begin?
Hmmm, I’ll begin with how I hated it for the extra stress it introduced to my travel arrangements. As I would step up onto the car of a train my mind’s energy would be focused entirely on the question of whether the luggage racks would be full. As I descended the steps of the metro in Paris I would fret an inexperienced gambler’s fret over whether the line that I was about to take would be body to body packed, and fret even more at the thought that even being happy to catch the next one wouldn’t help because with the metro people always come to replace people gone. The root of my anxiety then was that with my bags I basically took up the space of 3 people, and I hated the undeniable reality that I was being inconsiderate to others. Read the rest of this entry »
Hmm… a little bit of research has turned up results that show that Menzies truly aren’t doing too well in the reputation stakes. I had originally tagged these onto the end of the second post about the story of my bag, but decided it deserved its own special place here.
Voila, a small catalogue:
- Frustration with BA Baggage Handling in Hong Kong Airport. I highly advise browsing through the comments too, London + BA + Menzies seems to be a particularly bad marriage.
- Menzies hired undercover reporter to watch handlers at Heathrow; and by the way, British Airways is the worst airline for lost luggage
- Menzies employees at Auckland airport misbehaving
- Menzies employees need closer supervision at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. But Alaska Airlines saved 13.7 million dollars by outsourcing to Menzies. Woo for them!
Hmm.. and there is more to this Alaska Airlines controversy. A baggage cart bumped into the side of a plane before take-off, leading to cabin pressure problems in-flight and an emergency landing, here and here (second post on the page).
Actually, this article (from Seattle PI) is the best round-up of Menzies’ problems in Seattle.
I can understand that things like theft and general poor behaviour will happen from time to time. But is this the odd anomaly or could there be an institutional problem here? The last few paragraphs from the article just above sum it up:
The thefts didn’t concern Greg Curfman, 54, a Kingston resident, who waited for his baggage Tuesday after arriving from Hawaii via Los Angeles. He said he puts his valuables in his carry-on luggage.
But he preferred that Alaska Airlines still used its own baggage handlers, noting that there would be little incentive for a 20-year employee to steal from luggage and lose a union-negotiated salary and pension benefits.
“If you have lower standards, you’re apt to have more problems,” he said.
The last flight of the chain of flights necessary to get me home was from Sydney to Auckland, which ended up being delayed by 2 hours due to a late detected flaw in the plane’s cockpit windows. After getting through passport control whereby there was one immigration official taking care of the kiwi contigent versus the four taking care of the visitors (and there were more kiwis than visitors on this flight), I happily made my way over to the luggage carousel, loving the fact that I only had one bag to pick up and then I was outta there!
Hmmm……… hmmm…..
You know….. I have a feeling it’s not going to come…..
Mmm………………………………………………..
Yeah…..
Suddenly bag after bag is flying off the carousel, and the crowd around it is thinning out drastically as clumps of people at a time make their long-anticipated escape.
And I’m standing there all alone. In my now blatantly lame strategically-chosen luggage-lifting spot. Peering down the conveyer belt as if actively looking for my bag on this empty stretch of black ribbon would be any more effective than chucking the occasional glance from thirty feet away. Read the rest of this entry »
On the 28th of November my big pack and I were reunited. I myself had entered the country on the 15th of November. For two weeks I yearned for my two weeks worth of underwear. It was almost every day that I called up the airport to check on the status, the progress, the “any sign of life!!” of my bag. Sometimes I got the same person answering, sometimes I got someone new; and whenever it was the latter I would feel my heart sink as their innocently cheery beginning of “Oh! Let’s have a look at your file now!” inevitably disintegrated into an impenetrable silence.
I had very little of what is usually considered to be “items of value” in there, in fact the most expensive item was without a doubt my 4/3 mm wetsuit (worth a couple of hundred New Zealand dollars). Screw losing an iPod however; owing to the fact that most of my belongings and clothing are currently sitting in storage in another city, the mishandling of my luggage meant that my options for dressing myself day to day were very very limited. Those blue trackpants that I’m wearing in the photos were my right-hand man. It’s true, you never really appreciate pants until they disappear from your life. Read the rest of this entry »
