New Friends

I love this pic I took in a bar, after lessons from Ignasi...

One of the best things about travelling alone is the need to meet people, to make friends. After leaving Charles in Mysore and travelling for two days on a train it hit me that I was on my own.

Someone said to me that you need to love yourself to travel around on your own, so I guess I have been desperate to find new friends.

Nonetheless, I have met some good companions. Some approach you to save money on accommodation, some to kill the boredom that their friends or partners' company brings, and others simply because they are friendly good hearted souls.

Laurent, Alexandra., Melanie, Arnod, Alexandre, Sage and Olf...

I am so glad I met Alexandra and Laurent, so kind and caring. Alexandra was worried about me travelling alone, as I am as dizzy as she is, but she had her own personal bodyguard. Laurent was big and beary, and his heart was just as big as he was.

As I travelled up north I met Arnod and Melanie, my Frenchies, they were so stereotypical, I loved them, with their love of wine and food, we even discussed chicken a la Dijonaise while eating buffalo in one of the villages.

My favourite, but also most hated, was Sage, the 19 year old Canadian girl that approached me at a bus station to share a room. As much as she irritated me sometimes I admired her natural demeanor, her ability to relate to the locals, even though she then killed it all by screaming 'this is so coooool'...

And I also met Roberto. He asked me, on a bus, if I knew any cheap guest houses and if I wanted to share with him and his friend. Alexandro, his friend, was a nice guy, but something about Roberto was disarming. He had worked as a builder in Parma to pay for his degree in economics and once finished, close to a breakdown, he went travelling. He is what I used to love about myself, but braver. I would have never, at 23, spent a month in Borneo on my own. Kind and witty, he is probably one of the most fascinating people I have ever met. So Italian and so not Italian. At 6'1”, with ginger afro and a strong muscely body he didn't fit the stereotype.

The worse thing of all about travelling is that you leave all these people behind. Cristel, Carles, Ignasi, Roberto, Alexandra, Laurent, Melanie, Arnod, Alexandre, Sage...but I will probably come across them somewhere again....