6th January - Travel bugbears

Travel bugbears: these are my latest two I’ve noticed. One is this inbuilt paranoia about your belongings. I check my bag position hundreds of times. I do it in London too, after all I’ve endured a few snatches in my time, but it’s exhausting this keeping an eye on your stuff, it all seems pretty tranquil around here, but then there are statistics to pay heed to and with (some of) your money gone, you'd be seriously bummed out. I wish I could just walk around with nothing. Maybe that's why people like those all inclusive enclaves that I hate, because there you never have to have money on you or a phone or a camera.

The other one is that we compare everything to something else. I look out at some landscape from the roof of a hotel and say ‘It’s a bit like Sri Lanka don’t you think?’. He looks at some paddy fields and suggests ‘It’s a bit like Kerala’. It’s a bit like Thailand, it's a bit like Bali probably and so on. It's all on similar equatorial distance lines. And clearly it’s not at all like Iceland or Alaska, but you know what I mean. There are no surprises. If we haven't been there, we've seen it on TV. So I get perhaps worringly excited when looking out from the terrace of this hotel, I see how they do cemeteries here. The tombs are circular plots of various sizes, instead of the usual rectgangular shape, and there’s no apparent plan to how they’re set up near each other. Some large, some small. And as there don’t appear to be any vertical stones, or pictures or flowers and clearly no crosses. And some cows are walking around the field/cemetery. From above especially they look like a strange rock garden. That's why I end up with about a dozen photos. The first unique view I catch. Sick really...