Popagandhi

After a long hiatus, we’re (finally) back with new Fortylove.tv videos.

This week: we go to Belgium in search of some of the best beers in the world at Brouwerij Westvleteren, where Trappist monks still produce beer according to ancient recipes.

Next week: we circle back to Dubai to feature Hiba Rasheed, the Sudanese spoken word poet (and sometimes rapper) about life in Dubai, displacement, and music.

For now, check out May Yee’s beer road trip across Belgium (with her hot blonde beer historian friend in tow)!

And if you haven’t heard, we’re giving away Creative Vados, Mandarina Duck bags and Wallpaper City Guides in our travel photo contest! You have two more weeks to hit us with your best shot.

a lifetime ago in Darjeeling

Leading a life on the road can make your vision hazy. This globetrotting lifestyle of the past years, particularly the last one, has been rewarding, challenging, and fulfilling as far as my proclivities for adventure and excitement go. When your backpack is left half-packed, and you have pillows, clothes, shoes and toothbrushes strewn all over from Dubai to London, home is just a state of mind.

Singapore was always home. It was here where I was born, here where I endured an education I disliked, here where I learned, loved, lived, and came into my own. Singapore was home because home meant the same neighbourhood from the day I was born; the same home, one filled with laughter, love, and conversations in three languages across three generations, often in the same sentence. It was here where I sat plucking beansprouts and white hair for ah ma, not at the same time, threaded her needles, and grimaced at the Teochew opera they listened to on the radio every day.

When you live your life on the road, and you pack up and leave every five days, never staying in one place for more than three weeks, life elsewhere moves on often without you. Now home is the same one, but in a neighbourhood I don’t recognize. I can’t sleep from the endless construction noises, and the house is shockingly empty. Dad, mum, me. And the birds. Things have moved on without me, and people too. My old haunts are no longer the same. My friends are mostly abroad. Or gotten married, given birth, migrated, mourning their recently deceased parents, no longer really here. The more I stay the more restless I get; I feel like I don’t belong. Like I don’t know this place anymore.

I don’t even really live here. I’ve moved back ‘here’ from the Middle East, but ‘here’ means Kuala Lumpur, where I now rent a house and am setting up a base for myself, no matter how temporary. Friends, love, soon, dog and home office. Some semblance of sanity, some semblance of a home.

In the midst of the ups and downs of the past month, and the struggle to move on with my life, the way everybody else seems to have, the only thing that seemed to be able to make it all better was to run back to India, into the welcoming embrace of the motherland that’s adopted me. It’s hard to describe how, but it has something to do with how the moment I touch down in that country everything makes sense to me and is immediately warm, fuzzy, and lovely. I’m in Madras tonight, then going to float about in a boat somewhere in Kerala, then Bombay, where ‘home’ will be the same the way I left it, with the same people and the same places. Life doesn’t go on and on, but India does.

Triplicane and Arcot Road, Colaba and Victoria Terminus. Chowrasta and Park Street. Singapore may have given me life, but India is love.

Enough said. Never again.

Or if you prefer, the YouTube version.

If you’ve enjoyed this, please think about heading over to watch more episodes of the DIY travel show that I do for fun and absolutely no profit. Whenever I update, it’s a video about the Middle East/India. Whenever May does, it’s about London or other European cities. Simple as that.

Goreme, Cappadocia, Turkey, was stunning at any time of the day, especially at the witching hour.

I came to the Middle East to do just one thing: see a part of the world that I felt I needed to learn more about. Its language was alien, but familiar – many Malay and Hindi words have roots in Arabic. Its customs and food strange, but not dissimilar – much of the Indian subcontinent that I love and call home was influenced, for the better and the worse, by centuries of Mughal rule. Dubai and Singapore had many things in common, and then not at all.

My months through the region are coming to an end. As I travelled through Dubai I fell hard for the United Arab Emirates, but not for its most famous, brashest city. I loved Abu Dhabi and I loved Al Ain. I loved the weekend drives into the desert, and camping trips to Oman. I discovered the lengths people will go to for bootleg alcohol, when liquor licenses and hotel drinking start to dry up (driving to Ajman to get bootleg supplies etc).

And as I embarked on my quest to see the real middle east, after giving up on Dubai – I was in for a treat. Yemen, bombs and all, shook me; it was like nothing I had seen before. Then my ambitious overland journey, beginning with Beirut. That’s now drawing to an end.

The last month or so that i’ve been properly on the road, I’ve navigated my way around Lebanon through Syria through Turkey, without once knowing how to drive a car. I’ve met ridiculously awesome people. I’ve had countless cups of tea with strangers. I’ve seen some sights.

And the sights I’ve seen, I’m amazed by the opportunity – and good luck I’ve had in seeing some of these wonders. From a castle built by one man, still alive, in Beiteddine, to the phenomenal Kraks des Chevaliers in Syria (the embodiment of all childhood castle jousting fantasies, says Theroux, and he’s right – again). The ancient cities of Damascus and Sana’a. The friends I’ve made all through Beirut, Damascus, Palmyra, Aleppo, Antalya, Cappadocia and Istanbul.

The long bus rides. I left Damascus last week and 36 hours later arrived in Antalya, but not before being stranded in Adana with too many Syrian pounds but no Turkish lira – and no money changer or warm clothes in the freezing cold of an eastern Turkish morning.

Done with my last bus ride (12 hours from Goreme to Istanbul), I now sleepwalk through Taksim Square at 7 in the morning, pleased to be back to one of my favourite cities in the world. One that makes me thankful for the beautiful people I call my friends, who last shared this city with me
- Alp, Z and gang. It was the city where Fortylove.tv was conceived, at the start of this tremendous journey.

But journeys never end, only their chapters do. It strikes me now that for all my complaints and grievances about the middle east, this region is truly special and needs to be seen to be understood. And I’m glad I had the chance to see it while I could.

If I could do it again, I would do a few weeks in Iran. But that will have to wait.

For now, long Turkish bus rides and what’s left of my Istanbul days – one filled with lots of ‘midye dolma’, wet hamburgers, fish sandwiches, Bosphorous views and raki when the sun goes down, I’m sure.

Then London. Then moving into my new pad in Kuala Lumpur. Then a new chapter in life, love, and adulthood. I think I have airtickets booked or planned for every month from now through January, though, so the adventure doesn’t end – it’ll be the last of the middle east and Europe for some time, but more awaits.

Time to finish breakfast, put on my heavy backpack, and walk the last 1km to my hostel. It shall be the last hostel in awhile – I’m not giving up backpacking, I’m just… Upgrading. Life, travel, trading in my hobo life for the chance of getting to own things beyond my baggage allowance for the first time in a while.

I’m happy.