Remembering health and well-being, a lesson from the road

I woke up early Sunday morning, made my instant coffee, and walked down to the beach.  The air was fresh, the sky nearly cloudless, and the light clear and young.  It felt like it could be a good day, because it hadn’t been for the past few, and I was feeling a bit miserable, for unclear reasons. I was staying at a friend’s family’s holiday house on the northern side of the Cape Naturaliste peninsula in Western Australia, and here, because of the shape of the land, the sun rises over the ocean.  I rounded the bend in my road and crossed the path to the sea.

I came up over the small hillock between road and sand to find a soft sound – the lapping of waves.  It is a sound that does not travel far, but when met, slowly becomes part of the consciousness, as if it is already known:

Oh, what is that sound?

Oh, it is the tides.

Oh, it is gravity incarnate.  The moon in terrestrial form.

The morning was gloriously bright and I saw the women who had been taking photos the morning before.  They had used my profile on a seaside bench to give perspective to the seascape that day, and did so again this morning.  They stopped to show me the pictures.  We got to talking and one of them, Leoni, the older sister, invited me back for breakfast with their third sister and her husband, both of whom had retired to Dunsborough.

As it was Sunday, they were having bacon and eggs, with a stewed tomato (one is often amused at finding the small signs of Australia’s British culinary roots amongst nouveau polyglot culinary culture – mostly earthy organic cafes and the stacks of Vegemite in the supermarkets).

“Not good for the cholesterol,” they said, in reference to the bacon, “but we don’t do it all that often.”

Let’s admit that travel is rarely a “budget” activity, if you think about a backpacker’s “budget” in, say, comparison to the average daily income of the people in most of the places one considers “budget travel” locations.  But I’m not in Cambodia, or Rwanda, or Mongolia: I’m in mineral-rich Australia where waitresses make as much per hour as does the average desk job in the US.  So, I’ll call what I’m trying to do “budget travel,” and, with that said, point out that when engaged in budget travel, one finds oneself making dietary decisions based upon utility and the good will of people more than on some intrinsic desire or taste, and one finds oneself eating a lot of peanut butter on toast when alone.  It was with this gusto that I gobbled up the breakfast before me, hoping, I’m sure, that it would outpower the exhaustion I felt in my body.

Because, despite deep fatigue, I had not been able to fall asleep the previous nights, and I continually woke up early.  That morning I had woken at 5:45am and, funny enough, I only let out a deep sigh of relief that it was not 4am, as it had been the previous two days.  I had laid in bed for a bit, found I wasn’t falling back asleep, then got up to make coffee and go on my blissfully clear walk.  It had been grey and cloudy for the past four days, so when I left the house and found the sky blue as it was, I was overjoyed and hurried to catch the early sun upon the ocean.

The bay is subtle here; the shore plants and grasses reach near to the water and what sand exists is padded in sea grasses, washed ashore and dried out.  When you walk across it, small flies will sometimes swirl up.  Sometimes, but not always.  The birds are playful when they are the only creatures out.  Those at the shoreline flit and dive in pairs.  Those that remain in the bushes provide song and chorus.  I sat cross-legged, tried a few “Om”s, and the refrain from my favorite song.  At that point, Leoni and her sister came up, showed me the photos, and brought me back to breakfast.

The egg yolk was rich and thick, almost orange, and the bacon greasy and satisfying.  I had been making my own food on account of the “budget,” and breakable eggs and spoilable bacon are right up there on the list of foods one doesn’t travel with.  The conversation extended past the meal, until I realized I might just miss the yoga class in town.  I said my thanks and my goodbyes and, having no car, hurried the 4 kilometers to the backpackers’ hostel where I rented a bike (the cheapest in town at $15 to the day) and pedaled the remaining 3 kilometers.

The yoga class, at an organic café-cum-studio-cum-retail space, was my treat to myself for the week.  After all, I wasn’t feeling well.  I wasn’t sure if the lack of sleep was the cause or the symptom.  I thought perhaps it could have been the house – is there rat poop in the attic, mold, asbestos?  These fears would appear during my sleepless nights in lieu of visions of an axe murderer outside my window.

Was it the wine I’d drank two nights ago, or the wine from the wine tasting yesterday?  Maybe it had been the ham and cheese croissant I’d had for breakfast yesterday.  Perhaps, it was that I’d gotten distracted from writing by the girl I’d met on the train, and let her lure me into helping with her art project and join her friends for the wine-tasting.  Maybe it was the layers of Raid (“made with natural pyrethrins, safe for indoors,” read the label) that had been used to combat an invading army of ants.  Or maybe it was emotional – a combined wallop of several days alone, the completion of the 10,000-word outline for my novel and thus the truly gigantic and impending task that lay ahead of me, or the discovery the night before of a miniature scorpion in the bathroom.

(Chatwin’s words reverberated in my head – “apart from scorpions, snakes and spiders, Australia is exceptionally benign” – and I began to curse Bryson for actually maybe making too light of the natural dangers in this country.  No longer did it seem crazy that I checked inside my shoes before putting them on.)

Perhaps, too, I began to question coming to Australia on the whole, especially as I looked at how much it had cost to really travel here during the first three weeks, and despite all the kind, really amazing new friends who had offered me beds, meals, homes (I am eternally grateful to you all); as I look at plane tickets and find that a one-way to Broome is the same cost as a round trip to Indonesia; and as I sit in yoga class and admit that really where I want to be so often is having a daily pranayama and asana practice, and eating either new foods or my trusty foods: organic greens, dates, raw cacao, quinoa, kale, tahini, ginger, and licorice root.

I almost pass out in yoga class after a simple sun salutation series because I am so locked up and twisted.  I have not breathed in days!  I wonder if there’s something wrong with my blood pressure, but no, I had that checked before I left, my white blood cells too, my cholesterol, all of that.

We twist subtly, we sit in meditation, we move with purpose, slowly and consciously.  The teacher tells us about in institute she studies at, one with a yogic hospital where the primary mode of healing is done through pranayama.  I inquire about this.  I want to go there.  She has spent half an hour of the class guiding us through pranic exercises – breathwork, effectively – that bring clarity in my tangle of body and mind.  It seems to empty my lungs of the peculiar air in the house, and my cells of some of that bacon fat.

I have hardly eaten meat or drank liquor since I’ve been in this country, mainly because of the cost – and I’ve felt good.  I’ve had energy and I haven’t needed to eat a lot of food to achieve that.  Seeking out natural food stores and ingredients to cook with has taken me all over Sydney, Perth, and Fremantle, letting me get to know Australia’s particular brand of alterna-hippie.

I stumbled across the organic co-op in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains, and ate my first custard apple ever and I stocked up for the train ride across the country from a store in Bondi, where right across the way I tried sprouted millet pancakes cooked by the crazy guy in something resembling a loincloth.  I bought a phenomenal gluten-free rye loaf from the Fremantle Markets and at from it for a week and nibble from an organic cheddar made right here in southern WA.

People will say, “You’re on a budget, why buy organic?”  I say, it’s honestly not that much more expensive, so when I can, I do.  Besides, what it really comes down to is that, in Australia, where it is actually possible to buy organic foods and find chi-chi “green smoothies with maca powder,” seeking out the natural food store is a cultural and culinary thing.  Organic food stores stock the flavors I love: the nutty bitter taste of quinoa (try to find that at just any IGA), the salty crunch of tamari almonds, and the distinctive flavor of raw cacao, agave, dates and coconut, sometimes with a smattering of goji or spirulina tossed in.

After the yoga class, I couldn’t imagine immediately cloistering myself away in the cabin, so I went over to the Samudra Café (it’s at 226 Naturaliste Terrace, if you’re in the area), which has a truly delightful, expansive patio of solid wood furniture, and provides both proper tables and cushioned lounge chairs for diners.  The sun peeked in and out of the once again cloudy autumn sky.

Feeling balanced for the first time, honestly, since I got on the Indian Pacific, I decided on my second splurge of the week – a little taste of home, if you will, that didn’t require reading Facebook.   It was a Café Gratitude-esque smoothie (“Just beautiful,” is how the waitress described it when I asked her opinion).  At $9.50 it was an average price for a smoothie but pretty much my food budget for a day.  When it arrived, I finished it in several ravenous gulps.  It was made of pear, banana, lemon, ginger and kale.  The pear was sweet, the kale and ginger tasted of all the right things.

Longing to stay awhile and write, I then ordered a house blended “immunity tea,” which came in a chunky earthenware pot, and tasted of more familiarity: peppermint, rose, echinacea, and holy basil.  I sat and wrote for an hour an a half.  The entire package – yoga plus alterna-hippie organic flavors – was a treat that had the intended tonifying effect.

Sure, one can try alligator in Florida, or kangaroo meat in the Outback, but when that feeling of illness or rootlessness sets in, it’s important to know what to return too.  One can see the world but one must treat oneself well and keep home close at heart.  For me, those two things are one and the same: they are in the food we eat and the air we breathe.  Or, to take a lesson from the metaphorical pranayama book, perhaps I should say, in the way we breathe the air we breathe.