What follows is a subjective account in more or less a diary format of my subjective experiences
during my first trip around the globe taking me from the Emerald Isle to Australia and Western USA by way of Bali. It's a
funny quirky kind of story about what happened to the missus and meself along the way e.g. what kind of reaction we had to
strange animals and people and even stranger sights and heights. You might say it's a kind of experiencing circumnavigation
travel and all round about on the outside from the inside.
Inevitably my particular reflections of the world are filtered through the lens of my own
native cultural and national background, and being of the Green Irish tribe gives me a very particular view of past and present
power structures, especially of the imperial kind. Hence, for example, I can readily understand and empathise with the Republican
viewpoint Down Under expressed once in somewhat typical Aussie sentiments by your man Paul Keating as "having the flag of
a different bloody country as part of my own really gets up my nose". With our collective "mind marking" Irish history of
having been dispossessed in many senses at the behest of those (local and otherwise) who felt an obligation to civilise the
"wild savage", I feel a ready understanding and sympathy with the plight (past and present) of the indigenous peoples of both
Australia and USA. I am well aware also of the bloody history of Bali, but for all the ills of the past, "what's done is done
and what's won is won and what's lost is lost and gone forever", as an Irish song of modern vintage says. In this life I think
there's no going back for anyone to change the past and all we really have to influence is the present and the hope of the
future. And maybe this is what open minded travelling is all about?
And so, with the lecture now out of the way, I invite you into my mind for a while in the
hope that you will enjoy the trip (a little at least) and find yourself still awake at the end of my story.
(You'll probably be glad to know at this point that most of the "seriosity" has been put
to bed on this page).
