Hints

Why do we travel?

Pico Iyer, in his famous essay of the same title, says, "...the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle". Close to my heart, this Mr. Iyer, for he often says what I mean, and puts just the right words to what I think and live by.

You have no doubt noticed my absence here for the last couple of months. I traveled to Portugal in March and soon thereafter I went on a bit of a journey - quite a fantastic one at that for all its ups and downs and lefts and rights and wrongs - and having done what I needed to do, I'm back, armed with  a bunch of hints.

Hints of what is to come here in the following months. Something incredibly special, something very unlike everything you've seen on this blog so far is just getting dressed backstage, waiting to happen. It has been in the making for a couple of months now and involves a bunch of very special people....and that's all that I can say at the moment! I promise you that when it happens, it will be worth all the curiousness!

Meanwhile, I brought you a bunch of hints from Portugal. Hints, not a story, because I could barely weave one in six days of a whirlwind trip. Hints, because I couldn't possibly pretend to have scratched beneath the surface, though I'd love to go back at leisure and do that one day. Hints, because that's what these are.

The hint of history embedded in the layers of Lisbon..

Hints of the ups and downs that Lisbon is all about (atleast for a stairway lover like me)..







A brief hint of yellow as the famous 28 tram rattles past...





Or the suddenness of a warm yellow village house in pristine white Sagres...





Perhaps the burst of yellow succulents defying the concrete of the Sagres pier and the deep azure of the ocean?









...as suddenly interrupted by red








... or orange, when you least expect it

A hint of a packet of weed, offered to me by a roadside tramp in a dirty suit and a stumbling gait, quickly returned to the secrecy of the pocket when I shake my head..

Just metres away, hints of a better life, in a better suit, but nevertheless a stumbling gait...






Blue tiled walls, hinting at patterns, and sameness and decay...








While in Sintra, a past that continues to thrive and bedazzle















Pico says in the same essay: "Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is -- and has to be -- an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what's really there and what's only in him."

I brought you back these hints. I wonder what, if at all, they tell you about me?

~

Back in London, opening a new chapter, for myself and for this blog, and perhaps for you. See you soon.