Ramblings about 2024, hitchhikers, travel writing, and a return to Italy · 9:52pm Dec 31st, 2024
Despite starting this year with a new story which ran to over 12,000 words, I’ve not been so active writing in 2024. It feels like this blog is fizzling out like G5. We will see if I manage to turn that around in 2025. This year has been disappointing in some ways. Not least how G5 ended. The New Generation started with so much potential, but we are now left in a strange sort of limbo. We know neither ponies nor the fandom are going to disappear, but it’s not clear what to do next.
Anyway, what else have I done in 2024 other than debugging code, saying a lot of impolite things about database protocols, and educating people about particle physics when given the chance?
Back in September, I did another back-packing trip across Italy, so here are the obligatory holiday snaps with Twilight Sparkle, and some rambling about travel writing.
Twilight in Matera, Basilicata (where James Bond practiced his motorcycle stunt riding while dodging bullets in No Time To Die). This is a city built for pegasi. Houses carved into caves on the steep cliff side. A truly three-dimensional city, where you can easily see where you want to go, but getting there means a complicated climb down and up steep flights of steps. Unless you have wings.
Twilight Urbino, Marche. Great place to nerd out about Renaissance culture without getting distracted by the huge tourist crowds you get in Florence. A hill town where, again, wings are useful. The entrance to the old city is ten stories above the bus station, but fortunately there is a public elevator.
Let’s now go back to where I started 2024, with Hitch Hikers…
According to the book introduction story told by Douglas Adams, the idea for the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy came to him in 1971 when he was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, having hitched his way across Europe with the original Hitch Hiker’s Guide to Europe, and lay on the ground looking up at the stars. We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are dreaming of hitching a ride on a flying saucer to the stars.
While some details may have been exaggerated, it is a story that resonates with many of us who have tried solo travel and writing. You set off with a backpack and dreams of immersing yourself in a new culture; touring the best museums and art galleries. You imagine sitting a café on a piazza in Rome, watching people walk by, while sipping an espresso and scribbling story ideas in a notebook.
The reality, when you’re on a budget, involves rather more hanging around dirty bus stations wondering if the timetable you have studied has any relation to the actual schedule. Or sitting in city parks waiting until you can check into the youth hostel. And occasionally waking up in a field wondering where you are and how you came to be there. Happens to the best of us. Yet in these random uncomfortable moments, you do often get random, unexpected, and occasionally good, ideas for stories. Having done the student-backpacker trips when I was younger and poorer, and now being older and sufficiently richer to be able to enjoy drinking overpriced coffee in tourist-zone cafes, I can report that the latter is more fun, but doesn’t necessarily lead to any better ideas. Although I think I should really do a few more trips to collect more statistics.
I still have an old copy of the Hitch-Hikers Guide to Europe. As a travel guide, it is almost entirely useless these days, but as a social history source, it gives a fascinating insight into a form of budget travel from a past era, a time when international train tickets cost a much larger fraction of a typical students’ summer allowance, and thumbing lifts was sometimes the only affordable way to travel. The guide quotes many letters from readers giving advice on the best spots to sleep rough in big cities (sleeping under the Eiffel Tower was okay, but the Villa Borghese in Rome is best avoided). There is something admirable about the determination these backpackers had to see the marvels of France, Italy, and Greece, despite having next to no money. In the nineteenth century, the Grand Tour of Europe was just for privileged rich kids, but by the 1960s, anyone could do it, just as long as you were willing to rough it.
These days, you can probably get the necessary level of savings, inconvenience, and discomfort by flying with the likes of easyjet and Ryanair. But it’s not so romantic. We can look back to the travellers of the 1960s and 70s, just as they envied the experiences of the travel writers of the 1920s and 1930s, when the likes of Laurie Lee and Patrick Leigh Fermor could just set out to walk across the continent. Although there are advantages of the present age. The significantly lower risk of getting beaten up by the police, or gangs of thieves, is a big plus.
Anyway, Happy New Year to you all. Let's see the random places we end up in 2025 and what story ideas they will provide.
Significantly lower, but sadly not absent entirely. George Floyd could attest to that, if they hadn't murdered him.
Always fun to dip into bits of history like this. n_n
You should definitely do a few more trips to collect more statistics!
Great shot of Twilight in Matera! It's so hard to get a half-way balanced focus between a small figure and a distant view.
I am of an age to sigh when I catch sight of steep stairs and turnstiles, but I still love hill towns.
Twilight would nerd out over the Renaissance, I'm sure.
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And he wasn't even trying to see Europe on $5 a day.
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Yes, I need to relearn how to take good photos. I could do it with my old camera, but my smart phone is not so cooperative.
Sometimes the best way to enjoy an Italian hill town is by sitting, with a glass of wine, on a terrace on the opposite hill.
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Exactly!
i.ibb.co/GcmkHxc/u10rt-1.jpg