Elsewhere again...

Afford me a moment to muse. 

To write some shite about the essence of ‘elsewhere’. 

And by 'write' I mean rewrite, of course, as anything I scribble about travel, roaming, meandering, and mooching I do so inadequately perched on the shoulders of minds immemorial…

Including Teju Cole.

I hadn’t heard of him either until a few years back, when I picked up a collection of essays – Known and Strange Things – from a nook of some obscure bookshop in Cusco.

One piece sees Cole ruminate on the German word ‘fernweh’ – “a longing to be away from home, a desire to be in faraway places”.

Cole suggests ‘fernweh’ is somewhat similar to wanderlust (a grotty, horrible word), but has a sickish, melancholy tinge… a certain imprecision. 

“One simply wishes to be far away.”

I feel that.

The imprecision part, especially. 

Is it boredom of monotony? 

An incessant urge to discover something new? 

Or just a total lack of a better idea?

I honestly don’t know. 

All I know is that ‘elsewhere’ still has a riveting, restless allure.

Books, movies, documentaries, and mere daydreaming only cut the mustard for so long. Besides, what does sitting on your ass and imagining ‘elsewhere’ do for your presence there and then? What sort of company are you offering in those moments? 

Cole gets it. “To have merely thought of here would not have revealed its subtle peculiarities. Only direct observation can reveal those.” 

So we’re off again. Prowling for peculiarities, perhaps. Hunting for something or other in the ‘elsewhere’ like bat-blind treasure hunters.

And I welcome all rebuttals from the ‘grass isn’t always greener’ brigade. Indeed it isn’t. Just the other week, a Kiwi chap sipped his wine, turned to the window, and muttered with a twitching chin: "You might think the grass is greener, but after a while you'll realise it's just the same grass."

And I recognise how privileged all this is. I’m lucky enough to satisfy ‘fernweh’ and itch my feet by way of a one-way plane ticket. Not everyone can. Nor does everyone feel the need to. 

But Good Gosh and Christ Alive it’s been a strange decade to date.

These damned 2020s. 

Cole published Known and Strange Things in 2016. Before Trump’s first term in office. Before geopolitical power grabs and proxy wars spread like chicken pox across the atlas. Before the pandemic rendered us all inert.

For a while, ‘elsewhere’ was so distant as to be unreachable. 

The bounce back’s been pretty wild. Since that spiky little blighter descended to common cold status, travel of all varieties has absolutely boomed. Domestic stays. Weekends away. Record-breaking stats for global soirées. 

My point is… elsewhere is back, baby. 

As a civilisation, we’ve seemingly thrown off the shackles with glee.

But just how gleeful is it? 

If ‘fernweh’ was strong in 2016, how magnetic must it be now? How vital?

Is it any bloody wonder we’re off again – to the farthest corners of this orb? 

Are we chasing something… or trying to escape something else? 

Back to that melancholy tinge.

Madame de Staël wrote that ‘travelling is one of the saddest pleasures of life’. In my 30 years thus far I’ve been fortunate enough to explore our green and pleasant land, to flee far further afield, to wander cities, deserts, jungles, beaches, and all forms of baffling biomes in between. The chief findings of my ‘fernweh’:

1. This is an astonishing chunk of rock floating through the impossible chasm of space.

2. We may well have irrevocably fucked it. 

Call me a romantic, a cynic, a myopic mess of a man. That’s just my take. We’re remarkable, we’re ravaged, we’re…

Off again. 

This time to New Zealand.

For wildness, water, and awe. For fleeting friendships, endless logistics, snoring, swankles, and smiles. But also, clearly, for something else…

A faint hope or just a different feeling.