Closing Argument, For The Time Being!

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.

Advertisement

Gearing up for leaving the USA

Unfortunately for those of you who look to the adventurous world of cruising and sailing as a means to escape the boredom and mind boggling complexities of normal terrestrial live, I have to burden you for just a bit with exactly that, the latter I mean, this thing we so easily call the “system”, this phenomenon we are so hardly ever willing to have a cold and hard look at, this culprit of everything holding me back from realizing my real potential, this eternal shadow that is always over there, never here, always them, never me, and above all so intrinsically tied to a can’t do nothing about it attitude. But I’m getting off track here. The fact is that our preparations for going cruising decided to take on a life on its own, leading us quite far astray from where we thought things should go. So over the next couple of days we will provide you with brief insights into this weird looking afterglow that decided to emanate from the wake of our extended stay within the comforts of that corner of the world, which so lovingly calls itself the First.

It looks like before being allowed to go and explore exotic people and places we needed to have a thorough and honestly quite painful look at possibly the least exotic country on the face of the earth. This anthropological research project designed to study the presence of any truly human qualities within the United States of America, or the lack thereof, should we find ourselves searching for them in vain, was done definitely against our will. We would have very much preferred to leave this place that was generous enough to let us live and learn inside it’s ever tightening borders for the last 14 years, with nothing but sweet memories.

The United States of America have certainly driven the principle of trading freedom for comfort to a level rarely seen before in human history. And I suspect that whenever we use the term exotic we do imply a certain degree of discomfort in form of more or less painful differences with us reasonable beings, acknowledging that our so jealously guarded civilization is really quite limited when it comes to the actual celebration of life. We therefore suffer great thirst for excitement, this profound and boundless excitement we sense in those other or, for lack of a better word, primitive folks.