I hoped not to take another extended hiatus. In fact, I promised I wouldn’t at the end of my last post, but sometimes travel gets the better of you, and things like blog posts seem so much less important than the continuous motion of it all. 

But I’m back – didn’t you miss me? 

I was flying from Albania to Morocco last time I checked in. 

This was a hard decision to make, as I was not only flying away from a certain region that I had enjoyed exploring, but a certain theme that had shaped so much of my adventure thus far. Leaving this felt like I was abandoning something central to what I had wanted to explore. It took time to realize that I was not abandoning it, but opening my lens to a wider scope. After the volunteer program left me hanging, I had no choice but to replan. This decision also bristled the Kerouac instinct to travel for as long as possible over land. 

But I put my head down, jumped the hurdles onto a plane and I was off west again, to touch the tip of a new continent. 

I flew into the south of Morocco, to the city of Agadir, where I took a bus out of the city to the north. In the small town of Tamraght, just north of Agadir, I found a sweet community of surfers. Some were Moroccan and some were travelers from all over. I stayed in a surf house by the beach with them and spent almost two weeks there, making friends and settling into a new culture. 

It was a wild place, where camels roamed the beach and fishermen came back with reports of whales and fish I had never heard of out in the deeper waters. It felt like a new world. There was a familiar feeling to some rural parts of southern Turkey in its Muslim foundation, but with this twist of a new culture. The people spoke a dialect of Arabic that sounded entirely different than anything I had heard so far, and amongst themselves many of them spoke Berber, the local language predating the introduction of Arabic to the region. I thought both were beautiful languages and it tickled the endless itch I have to learn almost any language I came across. 

I spent my days tumbling in the surf, improving my surfing skills and becoming thoroughly addicted to the sport. At night many of us would sit on the roof where I got to pass my guitar around and trade songs with others. The local Moroccans had drums with them they would often play, as well as endless stories of seasons past, of epic waves and surfers come and gone.

By the time I decided to move on I had grown really close to some of the people there and was glad to have met and spent such a wonderful time with them, but it was time to move northward. 

Looking back, I could have stayed longer… but regrets aren’t worth a Moroccan Dirham to anyone. 

From there my stops in Morocco were brief. I was working towards meeting a friend in southern Spain and so I had to be somewhat expeditious. I continued to work northward through Morocco by busses and trains, until I got to Tangier where I caught the boat back into Spain, back into western europe. 

Reentering the western world came with a series of shocks for me. The first and most profound was that I had not realized how distant the western world had felt in the places I had been travelling through. After living in Armenia for four months, I had become accustomed to a different style of life. In the following months I traveled through places that, while significantly different from Armenia, had a similar approach to things like money, architecture, and style of living. The severity of that difference was not clear to me until I crossed back into Spain. Immediately the buildings were bigger, the people wealthier, and the cost of living higher. But these things are just details that are products of a much larger difference I do not yet know how to describe. It was like entering a new game, in which not only were the rules different, but the objective had changed as well. 

I made my way to Grenada where I (by complete accident) stumbled into Semana Santa – Easter week. The streets were flooded with locals, tourists, and giant parades. It was an overwhelm of excitement and celebration and I was glad to experience it. The only downside was that prices skyrocketed, and I found myself camping in the hills to avoid even the cheapest hostels which were either full, or had boosted prices to 40+ euros per night. 

I met a friend from home there, Kai. It was a sweet reunion and fun for me, as I had not seen a familiar face in a long time. We were both excited to explore the festivities, but after a few days we decided it was time we made our way up the coast to the city of Murcia. Murcia is a small city city slightly inland from the coast with a higher crime rate than I had felt thus far in my travels. Within 10 minutes of arriving at our hostel, we were raided by the national police, who were in search of a man who was wanted for homicide in France. They made their arrest, and were in and out quickly, and we continued with our evening, keeping a closer watch over our things, and ourselves.

We moved on from Murcia the next day, excited to explore Valencia, our next stop moving up the coast. Unfortunately, I found the city somewhat underwhelming. It had all of the flash of a western city, but it was there that I realized that is not at all what I am in search of. As someone who was raised in a somewhat rural area, I have taken this year to explore cities in a broader way, to understand what they are, what they contain and why some people love living in them so much. What I have found is that they are not what I am looking for. Time and time again I find myself feeling exhausted by the pace, the consumerism, and the overall stimulation of city life. That being said, I continue to explore them, partially because they contain some of the richest history, but mostly because they are often places that contain the richest concentration of a local culture. 

Unfortunately I did not feel this in Valencia. Maybe I had expected to because it was a name I had heard from afar, but what I found was boardwalks of consumerism, large soulless architecture, and a lack of the street life that often gives life to a city. That being said… the Paella was delicious.

Madrid was the next stop, the beautiful capital of Spain. It was the first time I had felt like I was in a true western city since I left Europe in the fall, and there was a mix of feelings that came with that. 

On one hand I was blown away, once again, by the extent to which money can fund some fabulous architecture. One positive thing I can say about western European cities is that they have put an enormous amount of thought into how to make a city’s architecture cohesive. 

On the other hand it was familiar in a way that I am not looking to explore. It did not feel like an American city, but it felt closer to the world I know than anything I had been travelling through so far. 

After the first few days I spent much of my time wandering through the city park (a beautiful place) contemplating what it was that felt wrong about the experience, and wondering if it was my fault for not appreciating this city I had heard so much about. This questioning was not conclusive at the time. It took a longer process of thought, as well as moving back into the lands of the east for me to finally pinpoint what it was that I was feeling. I have realized that so much of what is important to me in this trip, but also in this life, is to broaden my understanding of the world; of the people in it, and of the fundamental connections that we may all have coming from different spaces, cultures and times. Madrid, and Spain for that matter, was too familiar to the world I have known, and for that reason it felt unpalatable for the headspace I have been in and explored throughout this year. 

From Madrid, the next stop was Barcelona. The trip was beautiful in the evening, as we reached the coastal mountains at sunset and rode through them in the dark, arriving just before sunrise in the last western city I had explored before flying to Armenia.

It was surreal to be back. Simultaneously like I had never left, and like I had passed through an endless whirlwind of experiences that found me back where I began. I had a growing excitement while I was there, similar to the feeling I had the last time I was in the city. It was an excitement for the unknown world to the east. It was once again my launch pad into a world I now knew and was excited to return to. I played frisbee on the beach and got to experience a march for Gaza (pictured above), all the time preparing for the next phase of the journey; leaving the familiarity that felt so uncomfortable. 

Kai and I decided to skip France and take to the sea, hopping on a sort of mini cruise bound for Civitiveccia, a city on the coast north of Rome. We did not buy a cabin, or even a seat, and slept on the floor. Mostly, I spent my time on the deck, looking out over the expanse of the mediterranean stretching out as far as I could see in every direction. There is something about being out on the sea that makes me excited in a way almost nothing in this world can rival. It is a feeling of freedom and excitement and endless possibilities all wrapped together. 

The crossing took about 23 hours, and by the time we touched land, the excitement for the next chapter was brimming. 

I will leave you there, arriving in Italy, with the knowledge that the next post is already in the works, and might arrive before you fight your way to the end of this one. 

D.