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Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Often when thinking about this thing called “travel”, we imagine the look of the land, the taste of the food, and/or the culture of those who call a place home. And this is all good.
But what may sometimes be missed is the extent to which, through travel, we also venture into a vast auditory landscape. If you are like me, your peripheral vision doesn’t quite reach to your ears, and so sometimes you forgot you have them. But they’re powerful appendages, funneling all sorts of sound into our heads, where the brain then goes to work to make sense of what is around us. As I type these words now I can hear the sound of Buddhist chanting at the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa; the serene call to prayer in Medan, Indonesia; the shutting doors of a commuter train in Kuala Lumpur as it whisks a silent horde of dawn commuters into the Malaysian metropolis (above).
And one of my sweetest auditory travel moments of all: walking through a Sumatran village at midnight, in complete darkness, and hearing a young Indonesian woman sitting on her roof with a guitar. Strumming the chords just right, she was singing John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” I paused, my ears perked wide, and nearly melted at the sound of her voice and the words.
And so when I make a things-to-do-list for my days on the road, it includes: Shut your mouth at times, maybe even close your eyes. And listen.
October 15th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Beautiful post. I haven’t begun my vagabonding yet, but I still just enjoy lying on my bed and listening to all the sounds from the streets outside – the cars, the birds, the footsteps of school students. It’s amazingly calming.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:06 am
Beautiful post, Rolf. I, too, find listening to be one of the more pleasurable experiences while traveling — boots scraping snow, stoves igniting, bursting laughter in low-lit, glowing tents …
October 16th, 2009 at 8:18 am
Cheers, Sam — but Joel Carillet wrote this post!
October 16th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
After becoming mostly deaf in one ear, from a plane flight-It has caused me to become keen to sound I still had the ability to capture. Often I’ll record people laughing as I travel with my little voice recorder.
October 17th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
In similar, though less poetic, fashion…one of many of my favorite travel memories is of walking down a residential London street in the middle of the day on my way to the train and passing a row house out of whose open door some unseen person suddenly and exuberantly belted out, “Ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog…” It made my Tennessee-roots heart chuckle and feel right at home.
October 18th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
One among the many things I love about Mongolia is the utter quiet in the countryside (other than the occasional intermittent barking of a herder’s dog), especially after a few days in Ulaanbaatar ;0). The loudest sound is the blood circulating in one’s head. Miss it.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Great to hear form each of you, particularly the descriptive sounds (or quiet!) you’ve shared.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:31 am
I agree, beautiful post and very true. I go to a hebridean island every year and nothing beats standing on the shore, shutting your eyes and hearing the roar of the sea against the silent nothingness of a place where ‘cities’ simply don’t exist.