Plunging Back In

Arriving in Sydney marks the first time in a western culture in five months. It feels like jumping into a familiar, yet still shocking plunge pool. A kaleidoscope of colour and cultural impressions collide and readjust themselves around me as I try to take it in, but the biggest question is, what am I aiming for? Do I want to slide back into western society as though I never left it? Or are there things, all too familiar and all too unhelpful that I want to hold back and arm my newfound eastern wisdom against? And if, as seems obvious, the answer is the latter, am I not doing Australia a disservice? After all, everywhere else has been characterised by a wholesale leaping in and an attempt to embrace the culture with unbridled enthusiasm, whether I have in fact managed to do so or otherwise. I attended ceremonies in Bali, left the door open in Thailand, and ate only noodle soup for breakfast in Vietnam. So why hold back from some of the more familiar aspects of Australian culture purely because they are that  burgeoning pejorative 'western'?

We land in Sydney in a minor panic because we have had to tick really quite a lot of the boxes on our customs declaration form. We are carrying wood, seeds and shells and have recently tramped in our walking boots in rainforests. It is quite possible that the wooden mask alone could completely destroy the Australian ecosystem, or that in the tiny amount of remaining mud on our shoes there are concealed deadly organisms which will rush out to lay eggs and single handedly destroy Australia's population of tarantulas. Or so it seems. I am scared we will have precious memorabilia such as M's hand carved turtle taken away from us. I want to hide everything away from the prying eyes of the customs officer, which in turn makes me feel horrendously guilty. By the time we tentatively emerge into the declarations queue I am convinced I am a hardened criminal. 

As it turns out, it's fine. We are allowed to keep nearly everything, surrendering only a few of the spice samples we have bought in Indonesia to cook with in rather more expensive New Zealand. What's more, the customs man is capable of smiling. This for me, is a first. I am not quite sure why absolute sullenness seems to be necessary in order to police airport security. I am particularly hung up on this because in Denpasar airport the security man did not laugh at my funny joke. (The detector beeped so he scanned me and said 'it's your bra.' Having had to remove my watch previously I noted, hilariously that I 'hoped I wouldn't have to remove that as well'. It was met with the stony silence it rightly deserved.)

I will fast forward past the little furore of getting on and checking into Sydney, including the bag breakage (later to be sewed up rather ineptly) and the moment when M responded to a knock on our hotel door which he assumed would be me having forgotten something on my way to the shower with the words "oooooh. Is it housekeeping?" Before opening the door to the po faced male receptionist who said,

"No. It isn't housekeeping." With a most disapproving tone he reserves, presumably, for people he assumes are mid some sort of sexual fantasy role playing game and are thus lowering the tone of his hotel.

Fast forwarding past all that, we find ourselves newly freshened and cleaned and walking with a sense of wonder through the wide, leafy expanses of Hyde Park, Australia.

The roads are quiet, both in terms of the volume of traffic and the volume of the engines, being largely cars rather than motorbike. following Bali, this is a welcome relief. There is order. There are pavements. On separate occasions each of us hesitates with unnecessary fearfulness before crossing at the lights, expecting someone to accelerate through them, or be driving contraflow, or on the pavement. We have to remind ourselves that there are crossings at all. Given that this aspect in particular has been the source for both of us of the majority of travel related tensions, there is a notable sense of release. Though we still do it out of habit, we are both enjoying the fact that we need not be ultra aware of our steps, avoiding cars or drains, and that the ground beneath our feet is spacious and even. And reserved for pedestrians. In theory AND practice.

There is something strangely shameful in our luxuriating in this new found security. I feel a little disloyal to South East Asia, which has for so long been my favourite part of the world.

At the same time I realise something else. I am simply not smart enough. It turns out that elephant trousers with holes in, t shirts and now rather pungent sandals are not quite what the modern Sydneyite is wearing. I watch girls clip past, full of purpose and efficiency in shiny high heels and I remember, vaguely, that I own some back home. I am not sure I recall how you're meant to balance in them. 

People jog past us, through the parks, as if a fast pace were necessary to negotiate all this beautiful, clean space.  They are fit and gleaming, trim and confident and they wear tops and shorts that actually match and don't have holes in.

I find myself fingering my hair, up until now so happy to be bleached unevenly in the places the sun reaches, washed without drying, slept on and then piled hastily up into what just about passes for a bun. I note that there is a button missing from my top. My face, scrubbed and sun tan lotioned and make up free feels exposed, somehow.

I am amazed and a little appalled at how quickly the western concept of beauty and the importance it puts on it, can alter my thinking. I find myself wandering past adverts for eye shadow and face powder, and making silly, uninvited daydream plans about getting a big powder puff and one of those little compact cases that contain a miniature everything so I can touch up on the move. 

Is it that people are smart in Sydney and I feel an outsider? I should be used to that at this stage,

I've been an outsider for five whole months. Or was I expecting not to be on the outside, despite not living in Australia? Purely because its a western culture?

Or is it simply that suddenly I can read the advertisements? I understand the language the cultural propaganda is written in?

It's such a quick turn around, this new reaching out for the familiar masks of foundation and hair dryers. Only yesterday I was eulogising to M about how confident I now felt about my appearance.

Walking through the airport I had been struck by the juxtaposition of a huge billboard advertising eye shadow and a Muslim lady in full burkha strolling below it. I recall someone telling me that the burka does not necessarily free one from face and body image hang ups, and that Muslim women together without the men or the burka are every bit as careful with and as tortured by their appearance as I am. Was. Am.

So many religious teachings across the whole world of faiths agree that the outward body is far less important than the inner person. Even non religious philosophers, teachers or ordinary people tend to agree on this. We are all reaching for a genuine belief that this is true, for freedom from the physical ideals which, somehow continue to dog us. But I am not aware of any movement which has so far truly managed to embody it, other than those in which nuns and monks secrete themselves entirely away from society and thus, perhaps, achieve it.

Would it be easier if we were simply always naked? If there were no artifice, clothing or cosmetics to tilt our impressions of each other. If everybody's celulite was on show, everybody's face was natural and everybody relaxed because, as it turns out, no one is perfect. Perhaps after a while we would stop looking at each other on the surface level at all. And there would be less to think about, less preparation in the morning as though one's natural self would be somehow offensive if exposed to the world without a mask.

The cosmetics, hair and clothing industries would collapse. Along, I suppose with the economy.

We pause in the park to visit the war memorial, which is honorably naked in so far as it focuses on the waste of human life rather than glamorising war. 

We catch our first glimpse of what we will find to be a recurring theme in Australian sensibilities, when we learn that Aboriginals were, initially, not permitted to fight, but that many did in the hope of gaining credibility and acceptance by the prevailing, still heavily white, culture. In fact they were largely ignored, and far from finding credibility and equality on their return, both they and the white soldiers they fought alongside, were not welcomed with quite the fervour and quite the practical care they might have hoped for and, similar to British soldiers, ended up rather disenfranchised and misunderstood. Victory in war seems always to be hollow.

Emerging, blinking a little, into the present day and the sunshine, we stroll through Sydney. The clean stonework and paving, and the neat green lawns would almost convince us we were back in an, albeit cleaner and more spacious, England if it wasn't for the palm trees. Around them fly huge white birds with curved black beaks, calling and wheeling as if to remind us that we have not, after all, quite left the tropics.

Probably the oddest mental adjustment we have to make, through our sleep deprived post flight haze, is the realisation that here, we no longer look like tourists. That unless we are snapping photos or actively pursuing tourist maps, we look, in facial features and hair colour, if not in dress, pretty much like anyone else. When we stop to have dinner, a group of people on the table behind us launch into an enthusiastic debate about the English drinking culture. As we are, rather virtuously, drinking tea at the time we feel rather exempted from this assessment (which is actually quite fair), but it surprises me still that they can't tell we are British from our faces. I have grown used to being openly stared at in the street, to being an object of giggly amusement to school children. It seems difficult to believe that nobody has noticed us. Despite this, watching smartly clad women with carefully coiffured hair and stockings swing past us, I grow increasingly self conscious. Why is nobody else wearing elephant trousers with a hole in the crotch?

We prove the table behind us right by progressing immediately from restaurant to pub, where we, all too easily, order a tasting paddle of craft beer. Having drunk little or no alcohol for months and cone rather to pride myself on it, I am a little shocked by how little thought I give this. There is craft beer and so we should drink it. Of course.

Will I, I wonder as I sip beer and consider buying more face powder, hold onto anything I have learned in South East Asia?

Clearly some things are more important than others. Perhaps drinking again is not a serious problem, given that I am not (officially) suffering from alcoholism. Perhaps being freed from the variously changing constraints of vanity is rather more worthwhile. 

I sip my beer and resolve not to purchase the face powder.

Really, the secret to holding onto your various accumulated learnings such as they are, is simply not to try to be something you are not. 

It's the most vomit inducing 'travel wisdom' there is. And I didn't learn it by travelling. I probably knew that in theory years before I left.

But the fact is, I reflect, as I coil my dead straight hair into a bun with a quick prayer that it might turn it full and bouncy and curly, its hard to just be what you are, without camouflage. 

It's not so easy to be naked.