Orizzontintorno - di Carlo Paschetto & Emanuela Gris

	*FACES*	by Emanuela, December 1st, 2003
	When we came back from Central Asia a friend, living on the other side of my world, wrote me: "Spare me pictures, texts and video, I wouldn't take a look at them. You can call it bad manners or the way you like, but I wouldn't consider them anyway. It's the way I feel about it ever since I'm a child: you can tell me about your travels, but don't show me pictures and don't make me read anything. Why? I don't know - better - it's probably a matter of diffidence against travel writers, whether they are made up or not. I can be show some indulgence to photographers, especially if they concentrate on faces". My answer: Your consideration has one only and obvious conclusion: if you're getting out of areas where tourist buses arrive and you start to step into side alleys or get into panoramas where, according to the climate, only mud or dust prevails, you can't help taking pictures of faces and details with your 300 lens, but also of a number of wide-angles with your 24 because, unlike Western panoramas, you have no borders, here. And when you get back home, you realize that you got so many faces, really so many, and many clothes, many colours, many hairdos, different footwear, many attitudes, many markets, many children, many old people, many wrinkles, much sun on those faces; but also that there are so many more in your head, all those you didn't take pictures of, smiling at you, helping you, talking to you, looking at you, spitting in front of you, refusing to speak to you, turning their head in front of you, checking your passport, letting you pass, ripping your ticket, releasing your visa, bringing you spicy tea salty tea pepper tea yak butter tea, cutting a watermelon for you and sharing it with you, cooking your kebab, understanding your mei yuo mogu and telling you not to eat that dish because of mushrooms inside, transporting you through the mountains on cars with no suspensions, continuing their activities on the side of the street while your bus was moving dust around them, chasing each other in mud and straw alleys, giving you onion bread right out of the oven, uncovering shining white teeth underneath their Saladin black moustache, recognizing you at a crossroads because the earlier day you'd given them something they're already wearing, sharing with you the emotion of being at five thousand meter altitude at an eight-thousand meter basecamp where there's only a stone with something written in Chinese on it and only yak and two shepherds in sight. Faces contorting in a laugh when you try to speak their Turkish language, never whining faces, silent children, children with all Mongolia they can step on as a playground, goat muzzle rubbing like a cat against the skirt of an old woman with ice-blue, almond-shaped eyes, muzzles of dogs barking like mad, chasing you for kilometers at thirty kilometers per hour while your Land Rover hardly proceeds on a torrent bed at four thousand meters, scared yak muzzle looking at you, proud and dominating camel muzzle, lazy dromedary muzzle, muzzles of monkeys looking at an Indian road traffic, muzzles of cats royally lying on mouldy roofs of old Nepali towns, muzzle of a water buffalo emerging from mud, muzzle of a half-sleeping cow in the middle of a road, among coloured rumbling snorting trucks, faces of people on the back of a blue Chinese truck in front of you, faces of Chinese wearing a grey suit shovelling at the side of the road, faces of curled-up Chinese people eating under the shadow of a plastic tent, faces of half-sleeping Uyghurs moving through the oasis on their donkey or camel carts, never-changing profile of Aagii always smoking the same cigarette while scanning the horizon in search of a special point, black sunglasses of Aagii looking for the sun, guttural sound of Aagii launching in chase of running gazelles, irregular sound of our UAZ, which has its own face too, bouncing on the high planes, coughing sound of its left gas pump when we switch from the write pump, face of Aagii once again spitting out 76-octane gas sucked from the engine, face of Toroo exhausted on the dune behind me, face of a reptile still on a stone that looks the same but different from all other stones, my face in front of the news of the second attack to a Christian target in Pakistan two days before our planned departure for the Pakistani border, my feverish face at 39 ½ degrees of temperature while the outside temperature is 43°C and the fan is turning, Carlo's face when we decide to catch a plane thus interrupting our overland trip, my face in front of China which, seen for the second time, looks beautiful and familiar, Chinese faces crowding around the luggage in a desert airport in the middle of the desert, my face while I'm sucking condensed milk right out of its tube, face of Tsering sucking his soup, face of Pasang making a ball of tsampa with his hands and then eating it avidly, the face of the mountaineer I've married in front of Qomolongma, the face of a singing monk, of a monk playing the gong, of a Buddhist mask, of all Buddha Lama and Boddhisatva statues, golden face of President Nyiazov looking at me from his golden profile on TV, on paper money which is worth half a dollar and nobody wants, on the thousand golden statues of his person spread among the fountains draining Aral Sea, on the twelve-meter statue on an eighty-meter concrete pedestal that no nine-Richter earthquake can tear down, face of the smiling and benedicting Saint Three Mao-Deng-Jiang, face of the big Mao in a concrete coat in the large Chinese square of Kashgar, the face of a Mao who's taller than the Uyghur representative on the statue of the first village coming out of five hundred kilometres of Taklamakan sand, the hat-covered faces of thirty Tajik moving their looks from the TV to us when we take a sit in Tashkurgan inn for dinner, the face of a twenty-year old shepherd of Karakul lake who lives underneath Muztagh Ata while he explains me, sit on his horse, about camel yak goat breeding, face of a woman inviting us during a thunderstorm in her Kyrgyz yurt, the aspect of Kyrgyz yurt, different from the aspect of Mongolian ger, the face of double-arch rainbow in the middle of Siberia, in the middle of Pamir, in the middle of Kyrgyzstan, the light, an incredible light everywhere but over China and India, that light lighting up all these faces in a clean, cutting, clear way, strengthening colours, abstracting every outline from the surrounding scenery, the light which gives us a wonderful goodbye to Istanbul, and all those faces of women inside their chador held with their teeth in Mashhad, faces of Khatami and faces of veiled students in Tehran, Iranian faces crossing Kurdistan and changing when we pass lake Van and an out-of-logic border, face of Romanian on a TurkishBulgarianCroatianYugoslavRomanian train, face of a Bulgarian train station, face of the Romanian McDonald's in a station, faces waiting for us at our station. I was just making it up, of course, it's what I'm good at.
	05:30pm

MURAT STREET , CENTRAL ASIA

by Carlo, November 7th, 2003

October 16th 2003, 1:15 PM, I was coming out of my office for lunch break. My usual sandwich in the same sad bar in Murat street. I have lunch there every time I am at the headquarters, and I go there alone. One hour on my own. I carefully avoid the self-service restaurant and any other restaurants and pizzerias where my colleagues eat, although I would probably eat better and pay with company tickets. I actually avoid the world around me in general.

That’s always been my choice. I usually eat on my own. I read my newspaper and get out of the world, I “go away”. Often times I put my mobile’s tone on “silent”. For one hour, I don’t belong to the same world. I know that in some other part of Milan Emanuela does more or less the same thing, when she can. But she doesn’t read the newspaper, it’s probably a male habit.

Murat street is a really grey place. Maybe one of these days I will take a picture of it and show it to you on this website. Sometimes sitting in a bar in Murat street and eat a sandwich while reading a newspaper can be quite depressing. Sure enough, it’s a snobbish kind of depression. But the depression capacity of each of us is measured by our own every-day referral system. Mine revolves around Murat street.

October 16th 2003 was one of those days you typically see in Milan, especially in October. Veiled sky, but not too dark, grey day, but not too grey, maybe sunny, maybe not, maybe that’s fog up there, maybe it’s smog, maybe there’s a ray of sun, maybe not. If you get out of Milan for a few kilometers on a day like this, you will find yourself in a typical Po Plane atmosphere: veiled, but not too dark, grey, but not too grey, maybe sunny or maybe not, etc. Except, you will also start to feel melancholic. Which might be even more subtle than the snobbish depression you will feel in front of your salami and cheese sandwich eaten in the small bar of Murat street.

*****

I know it well. On October 16th 2002, at 1:15 PM, a train was bringing me to Milan Central Station, after crossing the kind of Po Plane I just described, in a Milan covered by a sky which was precisely identical to and colored of the exact same non-colors shade I’m seeing exactly 365 days later. On October 16th 2002, on Central Station track 12, our long adventure of Asia Overland 2002 was coming to an end.
Finally at home, that day I wrote on the last page of my travel log (which you will be reading in a few months – I am still transcribing Tibet in this moment…): "I’m looking around myself. Milan is grey. Is that the way I’m writing the word “end” to this story? I’d never thought about it in these months, I understand it only now. What do you write at the end of six months of travel?”
That’s the way my travel log ends - (maybe) some of you has already started to read it through the pages of Asia Overland 2002 in this web site. If this ruined your final surprise, I’m sorry about it.

Now, twelve months have passed since that day and I’ve had enough time to find an answer. Maybe I’ve found some stupid ones and they won’t lead anywhere.
I’ve felt I’ve left many things on that train, things I often miss and that I anxiously try to get back at night, before sleep comes to me. How far those things are already, so far back from me.

Indios say about the flow of time: future arrives at our shoulders, we don’t know it and we cannot see it arrive, while past runs away in front of us and we cannot see its face. Isn’t this extraordinary? Think about it: it’s the exact contrary of our interpretation of time, with the future in front of us, coming nearer, and the past at our shoulders, escaping from us. Still, the indio perception is much truer than ours. At least, for me, it’s quite clearer. Today I can see distinctly my recent past running away rapidly, and my remote past losing focus. I’m trying to grab it, also by copying my travel log on this website. But I already know it’s just an illusion.

I know close to nothing about my future. I know that there will be news and new adventures, and many many lunch time sandwiches in that sad bar of Murat street. I don’t know what I will answer to Zuz if he will ever ask me the answer to my question. I know that, if he will want to, I will let him read my logs, and maybe even the ones I wrote in Patagonia over ten years ago, and I will try to transmit him what no travel log page can show: my motivations, my imagination and curiosity which have been the necessary premise of those logs.
Most of all, I wish he will have the capacity of dreaming, further and further, higher and higher than the last target he just achieved. Of going to sleep every night with a thousand questions in mind and look for answers to each of them, and never surrendering until those answers will have arrived and, again, until they’ll have triggered new questions.

I believe there is only one way to convince myself that the sandwich I’m eating in Murat street is really good. Considering it an interval between a dream come true, running far in front of me, and a new, future dream, about to arrive at my shoulders. If you look at it carefully, by bus no. 83 Central Station is only ten minutes from Murat street, even during rush hours..

P.S. Who is Zuz? We’ll talk about him another time; he’s a good subject, talking about travels…

12.10am

HOLIDAY IN CAMBODIA

by Carlo, September 27th, 2003

I believe that travelling is often a good occasion for reflecting. I never thought about a travel as an occasion of holiday - better, I never perfectly related the concept of "holiday" with the idea of emptying my head.

I mostly travel during my holidays because it's the only time that I can dedicate to myself - and I dedicate it travelling. Detaching from my everyday life is the antithesis to the equation holiday=rest=no thoughts.
Holidays are the moment to "think". Yes, I need to switch off my head, but only from the sleepiness of the continuous cycle wake up - work - home - bed - times7 - less the weekend.
On holiday I grow up, I observe, I learn, I gather new ideas. Often I get really tired physically, but if it's true that one should regenerate during holidays, then I need to come back as a different person. My objective is actually to come back slightly different from the way I was upon departure.

*****

Over two years have passed from our travel in Cambodia. It's one of those travels from which I've come back really different. Maybe not visibly, except some mosquito bite.

I believe that one can travel in Cambodia in several different ways. We haven't chosen extreme means of transportation neither had humanitarian purposes; we just traveled through a devastated country, populated by devastated people. It's a country of moving beauty and sticky melancholy, about the same way that the liquid humidity envelops the air and suffocates everything, even during the night.
I remember a famous Italian anchorman asking on TV "...why tourism in countries like Cambodia, when Italy has so many beautiful things; there must be some other purpose, surely sex tourism or easy drugs". Not being able to send him there by kicking his ass, and refusing by principle to write to newspapers, I changed channel.
My possible reason for going to Cambodia sounds like "I was in Saigon and had to go back to Bangkok; and I hate flying". That's it, even though somebody could ask: "Why tourism in Vietnam or Thailand, when Italy…"

We've crossed Cambodia as tourists, there's no other way to put it. We slept in good hotels and, here and there, have been accompanied by some local guide. Nothing adventuresome, nor exceptional, nothing that anybody else could do, at the condition of not being scared of travelling on the roof of a rusted and overloaded boat, barely afloat, running upstream on a South-East Asian river. But, I'm sure: none of the four of us has come out of the western border of Cambodia in the same way we have entered the eastern one.
It's been a holiday, yes. We were tired, dirty and crushed when it was over. Maybe we even felt like small Indiana Jones'. Why deny it?

I'm not sure if it's been for the subtle knowledge that, all around us, everywhere, invisibile and therefore even more alarming, we knew that thousands of landmines were hidden. At least, we'd read so. The truth is that we haven't seen, felt, nothing. As do-it-yourself tourists, but careful ones, the danger of mines wasn't on our travel program. But this hasn't unluckily eliminated the problem from our heads or our eyes. I'm being a provocateur when writing "unluckily".

It's because of all those people around you. It's because of the rehabilitation center in Phnom Penh. It's because, Indiana Jones or not, you know that they're there for real. And it's the sight of Japanese tourists in Angkor doesn't change things. Angkor is beautiful. For how snobbish you are and for how you can detest huge Japanese tourist groups, Angkor is beautiful. But Cambodia, for me, is this:

I haven't felt struck when I found this picture on www.virgilio.it. I haven't seen it as scandalous. For me this is, simply, a piece of Cambodia, a travel from which I haven't come back the same person as I was before. Does this picture let you be the same person as before seeing it?

That's why this has been a travel that I loved, that allowed me to make an unforgettable experience in an extraordinary country. Because I've been "lucky" enough to have my head wake up in front of real images like this one. Could I have asked for more from a holiday?

01.50am