Journey to the edge of the world

Its been a while since I have had anything new to write about, and so, like an untrained writer, I simply have chosen not to write. 

But..!

Here we are, in India!

So I am going to use our time in home quarantine as a means to an end, I am going to write and try to update you all on everything that has transpired since we got to Sicily and then some. 

We've been in Sicily since October, just before Sasha's 10th birthday. It wasn't until around Christmas time that I began to consider visiting my parents in India. The problem with any travel plans in a time of Covid is that its complicated beyond what is necessary and one is left with so many what if queries that its almost too anxiety inducing to make that commitment. 

This journey and our commitment to finally taking it has been a real learning experience for us and I think I am no longer going to be fearful about travel in a time of Covid...if there is some place we simply must visit, we will, no matter how hard it is, coz in the end, its all worth it. 

Now, if you asked me how I felt about all this nonsense before we had to travel to my hometown in India all the way from Marina Di Ragusa in Sicily, I would have said the exact opposite! I was a ball of nerves, refused the kids any contact with playdates for a week in the run up to our flight and I actively forced mask wearing back into our lives in the same timeframe!

Being in the marina has been the most wonderful and protected environment for the kids where their "bubble" is the entire marina and everyone in it! In the marina everyone mingles socially and no one gives a hoot to ask about vaccination status or discuss the latest fearful news about the pandemic. Its like...life how it always was before the damnation...until you get out the front gate and you see the masks come on and the crowds make you nervous!

The flight from Catania to Rome was short and easy, then we waited a few hours in Rome before boarding a flight to Dubai. The 5.5 hour flight was at a time that wasn't late enough to warrant sleep, so the kids stayed up watching videos the entire flight. 5.5 hours is a short flight when you consider Europe or America to Asia, but it would be a long flight for an Asia within Asia flight. Still...once we got to Dubai my anxiety levels were above normal as we saw many people wearing their masks with noses hanging out, parents seen dosing their kids with cough syrup and more than a fair share of people coughing or sniffling! I was just..."don't sit next to that person!" or "walk away from that kid before he/she puts a grubby paw on your pant leg!" I mean, I was just trying to keep us virus uninfected until we tested and got the all clear on landing in India. 

We had already tested negative before being permitted to board our flight from Italy, but we were expected to test negative on arrival in India as well! Just needed to not breathe deep until we made it through that final test! 

Four flights, sixteen hours of waiting in airports and a two hour taxi ride was all it took to make it to my hometown. Micah got sick in the car on the final leg of the journey, motion sickness despite the use of medication, and I was glad I had pocketed all the sick bags from our flights, they came in real handy!

By the time we went to bed at 00:30am this morning, we were well and truly shattered. We woke this morning at about 11:30am to find the sunlight streaming into the incredible 3 bedroom apartment my Uncle offered us as refuge. 

Its like...a mansion! I mean, after living on a 52 foot monohull for the last year, its an incredible luxury to be in a place where your voice echoes off the walls, knowing you have it all to yourself for a whole week while you isolate from the rest of the town in the hopes you don't infect them with Covid you likely don't have, but more importantly, to ensure they don't give you the latest strain of Covid while you are run down from a 40 hour door-to-door journey through hell to get to heaven!

I am enjoying being bored. I occasionally hear the kids get into an argument about something and I am actively not interjecting. Its heaven. When you live in extremely close quarters, you interject because its the quickest way to just shut that shit down, but its not the best way to get your kids to manage their own conflicts. Here, I have enough space around me that they are too lazy to walk 30 feet to dob each other in, so they just solve their problems without me having to play judge, jury and executioner! Its truly a life lesson for me. Hong Kong never gave us that opportunity either, being as the apartment we lived in was also small, when you are within earshot of every bloody argument, all you want is peace and quiet, so you are almost always on edge when an argument kicks off between the kids.

Yeah...I think I am having an epiphany about how I can change how I parent! No doubt it will be the first of many as I camp out in India in my sleepy home town, single parenting the kids. 

You read that right, I have made this trip without my trusty wingman, mainly because we couldn't actually get him into the country because he doesn't have an OCI card (overseas citizen of India) or an Indian passport, the only folks actively being granted entry into the country as Omicron ravages the world and makes people cough! Truth is, he also needs time to work on the boat, alone. The jobs that need doing on a boat are so much easier to navigate without a family crowding your space. 

Sanding down wooden tables and walls is hell, but doing so when you need to clean up just so lunch can be served to the kids is way more stressful than you'd think. So yeah, I think he's going to love and hate us being away. He's going to love being able to make a mess without having to clean it up in a hurry, which should give him the luxury to work at his own pace. He's going to hate being away from us, no doubt, as the boat to himself will feel like a very empty place. That said...I would really relish the alone time if I was in his shoes. I always miss the kids and him when I am away from them, but I also genuinely appreciate and even thrive in my time alone. Its important to have those opportunities to reconnect with who you are as an individual, not defined by the structure of your role within a family. 

I have had many of those opportunities during our marriage, solo trips home or to other countries, my husband has had those opportunities too, to go on trips with friends, the last for him was a trail riding trip with the boys somewhere in Cambodia where they rode dirt bikes and shot guns! That was a while ago though. Of course, I am not in anyway saying him being left behind in Sicily is a chance to rejoice in anything, but if approached with the right mindset, it can be a chance to revel in the solitude! I know I would. 

Me on the other hand, I think taking this journey back to my childhood home is a chance for my sons to truly connect with my parents at a point in life where I am unsure of when the next big opportunity will be. The other thing is, and this is only just becoming clear to me now, instead of me seeing this visit as a last great dance, it could be the beginning of a pilgrimage that we make annually to reconnect with family. Why does it have to always feel so final to me? Is it just me? Am I so lacking in optimism? Or is it this whole damn pandemic that has made every journey feel like it might be ones last?

I was thinking to myself just yesterday, you know what? Its been a while since I have felt truly terrible about life. I was struggling hard with depression and brain fog when we first set off from Holland. Life felt so up in the air, so lacking in boundaries, so unpredictable, it made me feel like...like I didn't know where the end was and where the beginning truly was. Now when people ask us where we are from...we have to answer with "well, technically Hong Kong...but really, we set off from Holland...but we've been sailing for about 4 years...first in Hong Kong and then the last year in Europe..." it feels kinda unreal to be honest. 

Unreal to say we've been sailing as long as we have owned boats. Hong Kong feels like this distant memory to me now. I know we sailed, sometimes we would go away for a weekend, sometimes for a week or two...but it just felt like a part of our life, not an active awareness of being sailors. What we have done so far, since leaving Holland, now that feels like we have been sailing! Emptying bilges, changing oil, cleaning fuel tanks and water tanks...that feels like sailing. Rolling up sails, sewing your own sail bags, darning old clothes and socks, that feels like a sailing life. What we had in Hong Kong with the Lagoon 450F catamaran, weekend jaunts with the mates, fancy plates and catered food with wine...that feels like a luxury holiday in comparison to what we are living everyday of our current lives. 

Still...that was our life as much as this is our life! 

And what an incredible life it is, right?

When I was leaving Sicily I was thinking, my parents are getting old, we are travelling the world and neither my husband nor I have jobs at the moment, so who knows when I will get to make such a long journey back home with the kids again. Truth be told, its not only possible, its also not phenomenally unaffordable. Coming home to India, to a country where the cost of living is low, we are not likely to spend any more than what it would normally cost us to live in the EU. Its a valuable experience, a lesson in itself, just taking this journey and figuring the cost of it all. Time is something we have a lot of, at the moment, my parents less of, my siblings even less of because they both work a lot...so really, what is it to make the effort to take a 40 hour journey if it means spending 2 months with family each year? Damn, the more I think about it, the more I am liking the sound of my own words! It is a completely doable enterprise! Maybe next time Jeroen can even join us while we put the boat up on the hard. If we plan ahead, we can get him a partner visa of some kind so that we all remain together in India for the duration of the stay!

Lovin' the idea almost as much as I would love the food!

My parents are getting older, I want nothing more than to spend more time with them while they are still strong and full of life, I want my kids to remember them like that. I remember seeing my own grandparents so rarely, my memory of them was all condensed into a short visit of a week or ten days, it was never quite enough to stick. My kids are not 8 & 10, they are old enough to build lasting memories with my folks. Unlike many other families that live in the same town or the same country, the expat life kind of robs children of the experience of a close knit family, but if you can view it through a different lens, a more optimistic one, you could say that the time spent together matters even more and is less likely to be taken for granted. Yeah, that is what I am hoping my children will take away from this journey. 

This will be the longest I have been home since I was a child! I mean...we moved to Hong Kong when I was 13, so we'd come back to Coonoor, my home town in India, once a year, usually in the summer, for about a month at best. So me coming back for 2 months, with the kids, its like, "Woah!"

I have usually found coming home too overwhelming. When I was younger, there was always too many memories, not all of them happy, that would come flooding back to me and I would get to a point where I just wanted to leave early. This time my Mum has set up a separate space, a three bedroom apartment in the large building that houses her Spa business and my fathers private office, so its on the same property I grew up on but its removed enough from it to be a separate space. She set up the apartment, fully furnished, when she knew Jeroen had lost his job. She had offered it to me as a choice, if ever there was no place else to go after I closed the restaurant as well. 

 

India, for both of us, was a last resort, because we have no real idea how we would support ourselves financially, as in, how the hell would we get jobs here, but also...at that time, too much was uncertain and Europe seemed like a place we knew how to navigate. In retrospect, I reckon India would have been a great place to quietly hide from the world, even if its in a small town where everyone gossips about everyone and two jobless loners homeschooling their kids would be all the rage on the gossip circuit! I kid, but yeah, thinking about it makes me chuckle!

So much has changed, for me...I haven't actually taken time to take stock, but I feel like I am a lot more self-aware, willing to be happy, more patient with other peoples setbacks as much as I am with my own...and maybe the last year has really given me a chance to be myself, unapologetically, because I haven't had much of an opportunity to be social and so I have had the chance to just be me without worrying about whether or not others like me. I will be honest, I tried to make friends within the marina but somehow I don't like how I feel about the prospect of building those friendships. Its one thing for your kids to play together, its a whole different thing to try to meet on equal footing as the adults in need of new friends. Everyone is in their 40's and 50's, some in their 60's...the one thing we all have in common is sailing, but we are all so different as individuals, different upbringings, different histories, different cultures, different approaches to parenting and so sometimes it only takes one little misstep to set someone off and choose to just sail alone. 

Sailors are a very self-reliant lot. I feel I have become a sailor. I am more confident in enjoying my own company and I am no longer searching for the opportunity to make friends. Its nothing a good happy hour won't cure. I am not saying that friendship is overrated, I am just saying that my life as is happens to be full enough. I am grateful my husband is my best friend, we get along, we don't fight, we laugh together and we tend to avoid annoying the hell out of each other too often...and we have these kids we love and who love us back...what more do you need? 

I have managed to avoid getting stressed out or depressed in quite a while now. Not sure whether being in one spot has helped but its also because I now know that this is our life. I don't feel like the future is that uncertain. I don't worry about where we are going next or how soon we will get there. Every day just comes and goes at just the pace it was meant to and we achieve the homeschooling at the pace we are meant to...it just is. Sure, sometimes I go to bed wildly speculating about the state of the world thanks to Covid, but those days can be rationalized away. 

As we close in on our second night in isolation of home quarantine, I can say that the next few days are going to fly by and before we know it, we will be spending time with my parents, taking long walks and generally enjoying a quiet life in a sleepy mountain town. Two months may well whizz by if we aren't mindful of how special it all truly is to have this opportunity to connect with family and loved ones. 

My younger brother has promised to try to come to India sometime in February. I have convinced my older sister to also make an effort to come visit around the same time, which would mean that it will be the first time in almost 7 years since the three of us have united under one roof. 7 years is a long time. I don't think I have seen my sister in a long time, really, probably 5 years, since before I started the restaurant! Long time. 

Anyway...the time will come. For now I am just happy, relaxed, comfortable and rested. I am going to use the time here to get back into a daily meditation practice, something I have been keeping up with sort of sporadically, mainly coz I haven't really felt like I needed to practice daily or more truthfully, have just been too lazy to! Here I have so much time that it would be criminal not to!

So for now I sign off, wishing you all a wonderful week ahead. Another six days and we get out of quarantine. I hope to be able to share more of our exploits while we are here. 

In the meantime, Jeroen will work on the list of boat jobs he has set for himself and he will be the sole caregiver to the newest member of our posse, a dumpster diving stray cat who has really stolen our hearts and moved into our home, Christmas the cat! We were so sure we wouldn't go through the heartbreak of pets again, but after seeing this little one fighting off a stray dog at the dumpsters, we decided to rescue her and have zero regrets. She's taken to living on a boat like a true pro, so much so that the other day she hopped off the boat (her first time doing so since we adopted her at Christmas) and then climbed back on to the boat using the ladder! Yeah, she's crazy, crazy cute! Its been a journey just trying to show her that every meal she gets won't be her last, and also, to get rid of any trash bags as soon as they are full, coz she's kinda that kind of cat!

That is all for now.