By way of an explanation....
We're not entirely spring chickens any more. Me and Herself. Young in heart and spirit but old in bones and sinews. Which is why we recently decided, after thirty-odd years, to pack away our passports and stick to wandering about in places a little closer to home. Places that don't require ten hour stopovers in Changi and twelve hour stints in cattle class. We got home after the last one and knew. Knew it was time, sad but true.
But, seeing as I'm totally dependant on writing to stay alive I decided - okay, it's an exaggeration - I have four novels and a collection of short stories out in the market place but never going to get rich on them. It's just that I need to be writing to stay breathing. If I couldn't sit here at the old Hewlett Packard on a regular basis and pick away I'd wither up and turn to dust. So, last stamps on the passports, I decided to put all the words we've accumulated somewhere. And this is it.Just to put the record straight from the get-go, we're not Tourists. Never been on a packaged bus or a packaged boat or a packaged anything. We've always made up our own, because we love to get close to the beating heart of the landscape and the locals, do each day as the mood takes us. And we're not Adventurers, won't be competing with all the Travel Blogs about hot air ballooning over Kathmandu or cliff diving off Machu Picchu.
I'm not sure what category we are really, as we didn't actually like the travelling bit much, all that endless moving through time and space that's needed to get from Aus to anywhere else. It's bloody tedious! It's more that we're sort of - Pilgrims! - even though that sounds a touch pretentious. But it's the best we can come up with. We've spent our time poking about in corners, taking side roads, by-ways, back streets, mountain trails, looking for - for - geez, I dunno, for the "heart" of it. The stuff that seeps into your insides slowly, and never goes away. That stuff. The stuff that the pilgrims were looking for. The stuff that Geoffrey Chaucer was looking for. Enlightenment? As a habitual writer I should have the words, and in a way I do, but you'll only find what I mean in these stories. Hopefully.I'll put each new bit up in the main body for a week or so and then shovel it off to the side. Something like that. But there's nothing flashy, just our observations on people being themselves (including us), the stories they told us, and the brilliant chunks of landscape we found it all in.
Cheers...