Looking back I’m so grateful that I travelled at the age of 18 to 22. I had a naivety and innocence that everything would always work out well that only comes with youth and having no responsibilities and no real hard life experiences. I fully trusted in the kindness of strangers. I’m also so thankful that it was before social media and phones. If I needed directions, I had to ask someone! Usually in my best attempt of a foreign language and lots of miming. I’m a visual person so having to learn by listening and speaking was hard but rewarding.
I also never stayed in a hostel and travelled on regional trains or hitchhiked. I slept on beaches, in olive groves and high up in the Dolomite mountains. At one stage I splashed out and bought a 2m x 2m silver tarpaulin which I would set up as a tent in remote mountain clearings or by deserted rivers. I slept on my rope laid out on the ground and budgeted for 5 euros a day. On another hitchhiking excursion with a friend we bought a very flimsy tent and woke up one morning on a crowded wharf in Dubrovnik. I thought I was living the high life, that this was the best way to travel and see new places.
I was always with a friend and this style of travel allowed us to meet locals, be invited into their homes and see different ways of life. We visited places we would never otherwise see and learnt more about each place than a tour or guide book could ever teach us. My trust in the kindness of strangers paid off and I often felt like I could never repay the people that shared their lives with us. I vowed that once back in New Zealand I would pay it forward so now I always pick up hitchhikers and hope that the tradition continues.
I thought that art and painting wasn’t present at this time in my life however I recently opened my box of “stuff” from that time. It’s been buried deep in a cupboard for years. I discovered that I wrote a diary for each of those years and what I find so brilliant is that every day is accounted for. Every single day is eventful and worth writing about. Along with my stories are pictures. At camp America I was the ‘trip leader’ and there’s copies of all the posters I made advertising sea kayaking and hiking trips I was going on. There’s doodles and quick landscapes and a huge collection of postcards. A few are beautiful photographs, but most are artists’ depictions of the places that I wanted to remember. I also bought paints and a few canvases during my first winter in the Alps and painted the area where I loved to ski. The valley below often filled with cloud, it felt like you were on top of the world. One winter I croqueted vibrant striped beanies to get my creative fix.
I also sought out galleries and artists’ studios whenever we were in a town or village. At markets I would stand and marvel at the colours of the produce and the artisans and their wares. One place that I felt so fortunate to visit was Spello. It was the neighboring village to where I worked in Italy and we happened to visit during their flower festival. Another great advantage of not having phones during this time was stumbling across something like this with no idea what you were about to see and feeling such awe at the beauty, the craftmanship and the utter difference to anything I had encountered before.
“The normally peaceful town of Spello is transformed into wonderland of flowers like none other. The streets are literally carpeted with flower petals of every imaginable color both found in nature and dyed. Teams of workers — both social and church groups — work for months planning the event that each year celebrates the feast. The day before the feast, the groups layout their designs (line drawings on large paper sheets) in the center of major streets and, within their tarp-covered tunnels, work throughout the night creating the most elaborate designs. Some are purely geometrical and others are wonderful depictions of Biblical themes (think Noah’s Arc, doves, Popes, and Jesus in lots of positions.) All are amazingly detailed and the result of an extraordinary amount of time and talent.”
Then of course there was seeing the statues, and paintings of the masters like Michelangelo and Monet in real life. I could stare in wonder at the open-air gallery in Florence and went back multiple times. The architecture and mosaics and attention to detail of that long-gone era is remarkable. There was a lot I loved in Rome and that’s it’s own story but one thing that amazed me was the fountains. Every single one is a masterpiece. Almost every corner has one as unique and intricate as the last and the water comes from far away in the mountains travelling along aqueducts built hundreds of years ago.