Return of the Backpack
I walk the river trail most mornings, yoga mat over my shoulder, treading the cobbles to the sound of the gulls. Sometimes the tide is high and the river ripples and rucks like polished cotton. Fat brown Canada geese push against the current, then drop back and slide with the flow. Other times the tide is out, and the weed-draped bones of sunken boats rise from the dark, sticky mud. I love this river now. It’s become a friend—the houseboats bobbing against the wooden jetties, the ever-changing shape of the water, and the birds kicking and gliding along this watery, brown trail.
But in a week I’m leaving! A new voyage beckons, replete with mud throwing and mountains, train journeys and new countries, Adriatic islands and Eastern European cities. The excitement hums in my chest like waves pulsing over the skin of the river. I can’t believe it. I’m finally plonked in the future I began dreaming of a year ago. My barn is hardly six months behind me. It feels like years.
The Return of Joy
Yes…I’m excited to be here. And yet I’m excited to leave. This month as I cast my rod into the river of life, I’ve reeled in a glittering catch of pure Joy. The Joyfish swam up to me the moment I landed in my pad, and as the weeks (only four of them) passed and I began plotting train journeys across Europe, she grew fatter and fatter, flapping delightedly inside my ribcage. Today, with travel around the corner, that emotion is the size of a koi carp. Oh Joy, you have been sorely missed! I thought I’d lost you in the heavy undertow of the past years.
I don’t quite know when Joy vacated my off-grid world in Spain, or indeed why. She had everything in her favour: peace, creativity, freedom, and a formidable natural beauty that could steal the most phlegmatic of breaths. But Joy doesn’t hang herself on plausible conditions, nor adhere to particular lifestyle choices. We humans have somehow got Joy all tangled up. We think we have to do things or have things to feel her. We think she lives in certain places, and not in others. Yet like some magical shapeshifter, Joy can hunker down on a lone mountain one minute, and swim in a river the next. She can live in towns, in jungles, on beaches, and in mud huts.
Joy is more than just a happy feeling though. She is intimately entwined with our life force, and experienced when we are living and being our true selves—not the self other people want us to be, and not some image or ideal we think we have to live up to. No one else can tell us where to find her. Even those with the best intentions are clueless in their advice, because they are not experiencing our body and soul, and are therefore ignorant as to where Joy lives within us, or where indeed she might have moved to.
The Pack is Back
I grab my rucksack out from under my bed. It’s the first time I’ve considered backpacking in years. As I zip open the compartments, a bevy of memories are unleashed from a version of myself I thought I’d buried nine feet under a stone barn. Journeys to India, dive trips, ashrams, rickshaws, beach huts, hostels, and immense cross-continent train rides. Dragon temples in Taipei, dreamy Ko Phangan beaches, altitude sickness in Ladakh, dramatic Himalayan bus rides where the bus would teeter over ravines and the driver would leap out with a shovel to dig out the road, the pyramids rising from the sands of Giza, a haunted hotel room in Phnom Penh, drifting through coral gardens in the Philippines, and that unforgettable overland odyssey from the Golden Temple in Amritsar through Pakistan and Iran to the iconic Mount Ararat in Turkey.
The Day It All Began
As I finger the straps of the backpack and reach into the belly of the bag, I’m pulled further down into the rabbit hole of my past. I find myself right back at the beginning of it all, at that primary life-changing moment. The memory stands there as brassy and bold as the day it was formed.
It was the mid-1980s and I was perched on a boat in the Adriatic with my family. I was fifteen years old at the time and tetchy, as most teenagers are. My ears were doubtless hidden by a couple of Walkman earphones, and I was probably thinking about some boy. Then it all changed. As the boat pulled into the harbour, I blinked. The sea was the purest aquamarine, and it encircled the small Croatian island like blue glass. I was entranced.
“I thought seas like this were only on postcards!” I said to my dad, gazing at the water while we staggered off the gangplank with our suitcases. You see, I’d never seen a sea other than the muddy brown cold thing that churned about our windy British coastline. You couldn’t even find your toes in that, never mind spot the seabed. And beaches? They were noisy, candyfloss-infested places where very white people huddled in deckchairs behind windbreakers and quickly turned the colour of tandoori chicken. On the three days a year it was hot enough, children would splash into the water. Mostly they emerged crying because they’d been stung by a jellyfish.
This Croatian sea didn’t look anything like the British one. The water was so clear you could see the very bottom, and the sun was piercing it like a golden lance. My reality exploded. Boom! “Whoa! there are places with seas like this in the world?” There and then I decided I’d explore this wonder-filled planet and discover what was lurking around all these hidden corners. Who knew what other gems I’d been missing, eh? I’d learn languages. I’d escape England and search out the most magnificient lifestyle I could.
Thus I studied French and German, bought a backpack or two, and began hitting the road.
Back here in 2024, with my latest backpack leaning nonchalantly against the wall like it’s about to light a cigarette, I consider my upcoming workshop in Romania. In the old days, we’d have pulled out a map and flattened it out on the floor to plot our journey. Today I’m using an app on a phone, which is so much less romantic. Nevertheless, dreary tech aside, the phone map did what it was supposed to. I squinted at the screen. Romania was a fat pentagon of a country hunkering down between Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldova and Serbia. Hmm…
My finger began dragging the map this way and that. Hungary was next to Croatia, and I knew there was a night train from Transylvania to Budapest. Ooh trains...Yes, Europe has some excellent railways, doesn’t it? Hmm...The locomotive in my brain began whirring along a brand new track. The Joyfish in my heart did a little flip. Could I rail it all the way to Zagreb? And from there to the Adriatic coast?
That night I plotted a voyage. Joy was the compass indicating I was on the right path. As my finger hovered over this town and that, and I began searching for train connections over the Balkans, I could feel that compass needle moving. How would Croatia look almost 40 years on? What would I find in that plethora of Adriatic islands? Well, I guess we’ll all find that out in a month’s time.
Sounds wonderful, Kerry! Time to find my Joyfish … ❤️
Oh yes! This sounds good.
Get some paper maps too.
I understand the joyfish!