Monotasking

I cannot for the life of me remember the last time I was seriously bored. This is somewhat surprising. For all the romanticism of heading of on African Adventures, if there's one constant to the style of travel I do (low budget, public transport, long stay), it's the amount of time you have on your hands.

Sometimes, you're waiting for something - most often for passengers to fill your bush taxi. I've had 5-minute waits and 36 hour waits, but the average seems to be about 3 hours if headed somewhere smallish (and I often am).

It's not only waiting, though. As a solo traveller, I simply have a lot of time to fill. Take today - or rather, take September 8th, the day I scribbled this blog entry on paper for future typing. I was spending the morning on the porch of my little guest shack at Outamba-Kilimbi National Park in Sierra Leone, waiting for the rain to stop. My expedition there lasted a total of 4 days: a full day to get in from Makeni over rough roads, 2 days in the park, and a day back out to Freetown. In those 4 days, how much time did I spend "doing things" in an organized sense? About 8 hours or so, going out on canoe trips and hikes with the guides. As the only guest (as I so often am in this region in this season), that left plenty of hours to take care of.

The same happens in towns. Although there I can find locals to hang out with over beer or tea, there really is only so much small talk possible (or desirable) in a day. Even after running my town errands - getting money, say, or attending to endless Birkenstock repairs - there are still plenty of hours to pass.

Some of those extra hours I fill with sleep. I get a lot of it. My typical evening goes someting like this: settling in around 5 for a couple of beers, then heading out at 7 or 7:30 to track down dinner. I usually talk to Lauren on the phone each day around 8:30, but after that I'm often quick to bed - my lights are regularly out by 9:30 or 10. When you're out solo, going out clubbing or elsewise filling the late hours doesn't so much appeal, and also has a way of running up your bills. If I have nowhere specific to go the next day, I usually wake up around 7 or 8. This gives me 9 or even 10 hours of glorious sleep! I justify this in a number of ways.

First, I think I can credit a lot of my physical resilience on this trip to taking good care of my body. I'm essentially never sick, not even a sniffle, even though I eat and drink without much attention to clean water or washed and cooked food. I recover quickly from even the most bruising bush taxi ride or brutal hike. In short, I feel like a million bucks most mornings, a far cry from the last 5 years of university when, even though I think I lived much healthier than most, strong cofffee, red wine, and sleep deprivation were major parts of my lifestyle. I still jump out of bed each day instantly awake and ready to go (freakishly so), but now it's purely by choice, not because of the lingering pressure of having too much to do that day and not enough time.

Sleep or not, though, I still have many daylight hours to fill - and many places I am don't have things you would consider "sights". Therein lies the importance of one of the definitive solo-traveller skills: monotasking.

I remember how much I used to marvel, whilst at the laundromat, at the people who would show up alone, pop in their laundry, and just stare for the next hour. Sometimes they weren't watching their laundry, they were just just picking a spot on the wall and looking at it. This boggled my mind - I was never there without a magazine or a book. I think that I understand much better now that I spend a good portion of my day just looking around and thinking, whether it be through a bush-taxi window or while out on a long hike.

When I'm doing things, they are sequential instead of overlapping. I don't read while I eat. I eat, then read. I don't devote a lot of effort to planning out my errands in town; I just wander, often in circles, and let things come to me.

What a luxury this is!

To be able to take a day and savour every experience individually and without distraction is something few of us have much chance to do, and I do it all day, every day. This savouring casts a lot of new light on old pleasures. Take coffee, for example. I certainly don't need it most days on the road, having kicked the addiction early and now getting adequate sleep. I don't need it, and that's what makes it all the more of a joy to drink. Instead of guzzling a big mug of the stuff with my morning paper, trying to WAKE UP FAST! I sit most mornings and just look around me, enjoying the morning sounds and the light and yes, the caffeine buzz. Most mornings, it's simple black instant nescafe, but I savour each cup more than any of the delicious organic brew I used to stock at home. If you gave me a cup of that right now, my pleasure centres might overload.

Broadly speaking, the same goes for alcohol. Although I was never physically addicted in the mode of coffee, I've always drank a fair bit - and rarely would go for a day without at least a glass of wine in the evening, maybe as I cooked dinner or got my class readings done. Once again, though, the pleasure, and the complexity of that pleasure, that I get from a couple local beers (which are nothing spectacular, objectively) is way more than I used to grab from even a good glass of wine. Cheers to a life free of distractions.

Aside from tippling, you also learn to enjoy being free of mental noise, and having as much time as you like to think about whatever you like. For me, the big share of this time is in bush taxis and other such transpoirt. I chose not to bring an MP3 player very deliberately, to not be cut off from the aural texture of the trip. On long journeys, though, this can mean silence. People don't talk much in cars, and music is rarer than you might think, either because the tape deck is broken or (more likely) the driver needs to be able to hear all the strange noises coming from their exceedingly dubious car.

Add to this many hours on long hill trails and you have a ton of time alone with your thoughts. The tiny bits of trip planning and logistics are dealt with fast (though I spend a lot of time on long-range daydreaming) and you are left to think of whatever the hell you want, with no time limits. Once again, luxury!

This doesn't mean it's all profound pondering, by any means. One day, I spend a while playing the whole album "Americana" by the Offspring through in my head, just because I felt like it (it's a classic road album for me). Another couple hours one day was devoted solely to the many pleasures of LEGO. This is my mind on "shuffle".

I am, though, generally of a thoughtful bent, which makes The Big Things pop up pretty often. Life. Love. The Universe. I've spent a lot of time articulating and refining (or discovering) my views on all of itl Similarly, I find myself hashing out positions on all sorts of philosophical and political issues that I had only vague leanings on before. I also write in my head. Whole blog posts are lurking in there, already composed. Some of them will never get typed up, but most will - and drawing them out beforehand means a lot less money spent on internet time, since they then come out as fast as I can type.

It's a pretty rare opportunity to get to know yourself and the world around you so well, but it doesn't always come easy. I've had plenty of practice travelling alone, and it's definitely a learned skill. Without it, it's easy for solo travel, even to the most beautiful and fascinating places, to become a lonely and boring business. Some of it is a matter of temperment, of course, but a lot isn't. I get better at it as the trip goes on.

So what happens to all this when I get home? I'm not about to pretend that I'll choose to stare at a wall when there's a fresh Economist sitting on the table next to me. I think it's more subtle than that. Perhaps simple a better understanding of what we give up, when we speed up. I've never identified with the "slow" movement, such as it is (Read "In Praise of Slow", the most elitist manifesto ever), but I think that being on the road has reinforced something already a pretty important part of how I hold myself together: the art of appreciating the million small beautiful moments that crop up around us each day. It may become clearest as a travel survival strategy, but it's something we all can use.

Peace

Josh