If there is one thing I’ve learned in my travels, it’s that I should ask questions before I assume I have answers. A lot of what we think we know about the world is untrue, part true, or out of context. Although the whole truth about anything is beyond our reach, I wanted to know more about Saudi Arabia. So far, the people are warm and friendly, the landscape is dramatic, and the region is full of history.
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Qatar’s desert is mysterious and austere. It’s also home to some incredible art. We spent yesterday with our guide, Abdelziz, seeing some of it in the northern part of the country. We left our hotel early but not early enough to avoid the heat. This turned out to be a good thing because, for me, the heat was an important part of the experience.
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We’re in Doha, the capital of Qatar! In some ways, Doha is like Dubai — a flashy skyline along the waterfront, hot and humid, men in white, women in black (also tank tops and shorts). But Doha feels different, more openly connected to its Bedouin roots than Dubai. There are camels in the center of the city!
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Most of us associate Dubai with grand opulence, and there’s that! But there is more to Dubai than Gucci and crazy architecture. San Miguel friend and co-conspirator, Susan, and I arrived in Dubai two nights ago. Why Dubai? I have wanted to visit the Arabian Peninsula, called “West Asia,” because it’s an important piece of the global human puzzle and the world’s oil-based political economy. Susan said, “not on my to-do list but that sounds fascinating, let’s go!”.
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When I left my job in San Francisco 8 years ago to travel the world, I told my colleagues that I felt like the boy in “The Red Balloon,” sailing into the clouds to an unknown destination. I left, and what started as a six month adventure became an 8-year lifestyle. Houseless, I’ve made the world my home, with unfamiliar rooms and unpredictable rhythms. It has been a romantic time in my life, learning things about the world I never imagined, and freeing myself of a few of my acquired illusions. I’ve lived my longing.
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I’ve been re-reading Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, and it is as mysterious to me now as it was 40 years ago. Morrison always makes you work. She prefers metaphor to clarity — why did Son hide in the closet for three days? She is a little disdainful of me — why is she so obviously withholding clues about why Michael won’t visit his parents? Morrison wants you to consider some hard questions, but she isn’t going to answer them for you or to make it easy for you to answer them yourself. For your effort, however, she offers wisdom — not necessarily hers, which is abundant, but your own. I mention all of this because I think I got a little bit of wisdom from Tar Baby.
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Mural, Coachella, California
I left Santa Barbara on Thursday, heading for the places I’d lived as a child, not exactly intentionally but because those places were on my path anyway. My first stop was more of a drive-by. After buying gas in Pasadena, I made a 2-mile detour south to San Marino, where I lived as a teenager. Rich, conservative San Marino was an unlikely place for us, neither rich nor conservative, but we survived the John Birch Society, the cops who trolled the likes of us in Lacey Park, and being the only family without a gardener.
Yesterday, I had a beautiful but uneventful drive from Cambria to Santa Barbara. Sometimes I need to remind myself that travel is mostly not about events. It’s a lot of feeling the moment and the place, which can mean inspiration, wonder, disgust, reverence, fear or omg even boredom. And, like the rest life, travel is trying things that don’t always work out.
Camino Milagro 