This might be one of the hardest post to write. Its duty is to fill you in on the reason for what has been the longest absence I have taken from Aluna’s Travel the World blog since we started this amazing journey almost exactly eight years ago. Change is in the air! Big change!
Almost to the date eight years ago Aluna set out to sea under the Golden Gate Bridge that connects the city of San Francisco with the Marine County headlands to the north. It was with a deep disdain for the global corporate culture of consumption that this daredevil adventure had been set in motion and a good six of those eight years have been spent away from it all, or at least so we tried to kid ourselves. We have seen, lived and learned an unmeasurable lot and the most pertinent conclusion of it all is that there is no away from it all anymore. The culture of plastic wrapped and artificially and exaggeratedly sweetened goods has reached the gloomy eyes of every lone inhabitant of even the most remote little spec of land on our aching planet Earth. There is no sense anymore in running away!
There are reasons of personal finances too, but those are not the actual mover of things as we like to conclude with ever suspicious haste. Our batteries are charged, our vision is clear, it’s time to go in and work the system from the inside. I have accepted a teaching position at a Waldorf School in Switzerland, and we will be living in Langnau im Emmental for the next couple of years, far far away from the soothing swashing of the surf, hoping to instill some of the much-needed love of life in the next generation, who will have to find ways to deal with the big mess ours has created.
But this is by no means the end of Aluna’s travel. We were amongst the many options toying with the idea of outright selling her, but her uniqueness does not make that an easy undertaking. Storing her here in Australia for such an extended period also does not make any sense at all. We would pay an outrageous amount of money pretty much to have her slowly rot away under the tropical sun. By fortunate coincidence some German sailing friends we have met a couple of years ago in Tonga and then again in New Zealand, ever since they sold their small sailboat and returned to Stuttgart, had voiced interest in Aluna in sporadic spurts of electronic communication. Sophie and her Trinidadian partner Junior, in the meantime proud parents of two beautiful kids, have just last week booked a long haul flight this coming September from Germany to Brisbane. They will be taking Aluna on a run to New Caledonia and Vanuatu to celebrate their very own escape from the lands of consumption and along the way provide their offspring with the perfect opportunity to see a good bit of the real world out there, where fear can be embraced as the vociferous pointer it is towards the very lands of freedom.
I might sporadically continue to babble on here on this blog for a good bit more. There are many open ends to be tied up here, about the meaning of it all when looking back, about the spurts of continuous upgrades to Aluna’s fitness for aquatic life done here between those two concrete piles in the Brisbane river, about our half year spent in Australia without sighting a single koala bear nor kangaroo, and of course about the strongly resonating echoes of our extensive travelling that will most certainly illuminate our temporary return amongst the settlers of houses, those badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them.
Aluna's Travel the World Blog 