Globe-Trotters Unite - 56ers Arise

Those who travel the most tend to be older, wealthier, more educated, and more global-minded, better luck next time preemie babies in incubators.

Travel opens one’s mind pores to how no matter where you go everything it is the same and different. Cab and ‘Uber’ drivers will tell you both how what they left was worse and better than where they are now and why they want to go to America. International travelers love top label clothing brands and Chuck Taylor shoes and big cities. McDonald’s and Coke own the world and 7-Eleven is on every corner in Hong Kong.

When I asked an Aussie why everyone is always eating McDonald’s everywhere all the time, he said “because it is cheap.” When I asked a New Zealand cab driver from Pakistan, he said that custom burger places charge $15 NZ dollars per burger. So, in the land of beef and dairy, even McDonald’s has the cheapest patties. I ate at a McD’s, also called Macca’s, in Sydney where the cars all go around the building clockwise, and I got an orange Fanta, Big Mac, and large fries, with ketchup from a local brand, for the equivalent to $10 US.

The hardest thing about driving always on the left side is dealing with the turn signal being on your right hand. Your mind can flip the paradigm and get used to escalators on the left, walking on the left, and slow lanes on the left fairly quickly.

Sydney and Auckland (which I believe is pronounced ‘Oakland’) are build on water ‘inlets’ galore, so they have bridges everywhere and ferries from their central quays (pronounced ‘kees’)/ports. With the trains, ports, and bridges converging, they make travel easy. Auckland is suffering from an older (90 years) train system that is sinking, so they are painstakingly lifting and strengthening it up — but on a weak tax collection system built on dairy sales to China.

Travel is the spacetime, or time and space, that makes ‘living’ more real. A change in one enlivens an awareness of changes in the other. Aborigines/indigenous people used Dreamtime singalongs to explore their time and space in meaningful ways, but always on the lefthand side. Goddesses seem to start all of the good stuff ‘down under’ and the tattooing too.

Everyone may soon die in New Zealand for it is a very active volcanic place, but that seems OK to them. This is one of the last places that humans made it to on planet Earth. Humans, in barely-seaworthy-boats, always seemed to be looking for the ‘next’ island. It is a wonder of how many of them were lost at sea looking.

New Zealand (NZ) feels like the other end of the world — opposite Santiago de Compostela in Spain. NZ has all of the environments of planet Earth and a love of jade that they call pounamu, “greenstone.”

We all do live on the ‘green-stone-of-the-Earth’ and New Zealand has the most beautiful trees you will see anywhere, and many of the oldest.

A 56er is a person who has been to all 50 US states and the 6 ‘peopled’ continents. Let your journey(s) begin.

Travel well babies. :)