I was on train tracks gliding through the comforting German countryside listening to a mother and her young child talking behind me. I couldn’t understand them, as i’d neglected to learn much German in the previous two and a half months of my stay. I regretted this. The mother was teaching her son to count, ein svei dry feer fooonf! …feer funf he echoed.. Fooonf! she corrected him. It occurred to me that i really needed to be taught like i was three to really get the accent right for German. I’d had a little book but it wasn’t the same.
Anyway i was leaving Germany behind, heading for the border again at Saarbrucken, where i had met S by chance four months before. All my wandering since then, since i’d abandoned my London plans, had been set in motion by that chance event, when S walked over to me with a smile at the breakfast table of the jugendherberge. Now, with our Cologne plans having fallen apart, i was heading south, hoping for warmer weather which would make it easier to tramp. My plan was to hitchhike and walk the whole way to Italy, taking a route through France. Possibly a diversion to Paris, to recreate something like George Orwell’s adventures in Down and out in Paris and London which i had read recently. But the final goal and destination was South Italy – about which i knew nearly nothing, except for the intriguing images of MC Escher of the villages there with lots of stairs and strange rounded roofs fitted together like a puzzle upon a rocky mountainous landscape. I wanted to visit and inhabit an Escher lithograph.
I walked across the border without anyone paying me any attention. I’d bought a silly hat from the market square which i hoped would help to make me stand out as i was hitch hiking. It was pink and green with floppy ear bits and a dangly felt triangle on top.. It made me look unthreatening. But the sky was already turning a darker grey and it was getting towards dusk. A light drizzle was falling. I decided i would have to try and find a place to sleep for the night. This was the beginning of my tramp. I headed up a promising small road into a forested hill and spotted a sheet of tin set back from the road on the slope above. Someone had leant it up against a tree alongside some other bits of rubbish. It didn’t offer a lot of protection from the drizzle but it would have to do. I unrolled my sleeping bag and sat and meditated. One song kept going through my mind, it was the one dad used to sing all the time back at home when i was growing up “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”. I didn’t know that Billy Ocean sang it originally. But i missed dad and his goofy singing voice, ah so far away the comforts of a loving home in Australia. The hot air and the calling birds. What was i doing here sheltering from the drizzle in France?
Well i was conserving money, trying to, for the most part. If i’d had unlimited funds i could have caught a train all the way to Italy. But then what would i do there? I wanted a place to sit and meditate. My meditation in my student accommodation in Cologne had felt like it was making progress, unpuzzling the puzzle of existence. Although touched with a bit of madness, I felt like my path was well trodden by seekers before me. Even George Orwell’s secular trampings were a model and a guide. There was something to be discovered by stripping everything away to the underbelly of life. Things would show up that i couldn’t see if i paid my way like any other traveller. I would meet interesting folks, like those in the squat in Amsterdam. But mostly i placed my fate into the hands of God – or Īśvara – yes into the hands of that great unknowable force that i felt would look benevolently on my honest adventure into myself and into the world. I was 20 and had not yet accumulated the cynicisms and worldliness that i have today as i’m writing this, 28 years later. I really did have a sort of pure heart.
I managed to sleep through some of the night, the rain held off and the bag didn’t get too wet. So i stuffed it all into my shoulder sack and put on my silly hat and walked down into the nearby town and went hitch hiking. My first lift came along very quickly – the hat was working! – or perhaps it was the bright new morning air – my driver was a nice lady who had her child in the car and was going shopping. Unfortunately she could only take me about five minutes in the direction i wanted but she helpfully left me on a good road heading south. I waited there a little while with my hat and was happy to see a car pulling up.. but then noticed that it was a police car.. i had nothing to worry about though right? Hitchiking wasn’t illegal.. the hat might have made me look like i’d escaped an asylum i suppose..
They asked for my passport and i was annoyed to be slung back into the world of officials and rules when i was trying to feel free of all that. I wonder what would happen if i had destroyed my passport. What if i didn’t tell them who i was would i just end up in some prison somewhere? Anyway they looked at my passport and said something about a visa. Did i need a visa? Oh i had heard something about Australians technically needing visas for France.. this wasn’t too many years after relations had been strained over nuclear tests at Mururoa attol. The French ambassador had actually visited our school and talked about it with my year group as part of a political studies class i was in a couple of years ago. Anyway i’d forgotten about the need for visas i’d assumed it was the same as everywhere else i’d been in Europe where no one cared about a visa.
The police kindly gave me a lift but not to Italy instead it was back to the station where they wanted to get a translator. He was going to take an hour or two to arrive so they asked somewhat apologetically if i wouldn’t mind waiting in a cell? I didn’t mind so they locked me in and i had a couple of hours feeling what it’s like to be a prisoner, well i was, sort of. It was a clean room, perfect for meditation. So i sat and had a nice meditation. They gave me a sandwich and seemed amused by my sitting crossed legs on the wooden bench. Eventually the translator came though he wasn’t great with his english either, i had my photo taken and he asked me questions about where i was going and where i slept last night. To this last question i just pointed out the window towards a forested hill that i could see which looked like the hill i was on the night before and said “there”. They explained that i needed a visa and was going to be deported.. back to Saarbrucken..
I was handed over to the German police in Saarbrucken. They were not as friendly as the French police who waved goodbye. I was sat down in a small room in a police station on the border while the Germans explained that i actually needed a visa for Germany too! I didn’t tell them that i’d been living there for nearly three months already. They demanded i purchase one for 300 marks which was quite a lot of money to lose when i was trying to survive on a shoestring. They took me to a cash point and fortunately my dads visa worked, i took out 300 marks and handed it to them, like a bribe. I think the fact that i did have some source of money changed their calculation somewhat. It put me in a different category of person, one who had not completely fallen out of the world. They said that they would give me a special visa that would only last about two weeks and after that i had to leave the whole of the shengen zone.. but it was ok to go to england and east europe.. the details seemed a bit crazy to me. I had to then stay away for three months. Even now i have no idea what this arrangement was all about but i had to leave by an official port like an airport and get something stamped there. So i decided i would head to Frankfurt airport and fly out from there. They said that was ok. I really got a flash of war movies as the rather tall and stern German in his uniform sat at a little table in front of me cursing the small typewriter he was using to manually hammer out the details on a little form for me to take to the airport. Then i was let free back into the square at Saarbrucken, where i had bought my hat.
So this was how my plan to head south through France was scuppered after less than a day. But i wasn’t disappointed, this was all part of the lila, the play of god, and things were working out just as they should. I walked through the town, beginning to make a plan in my head to hitchhike and walk to Frankfurt, when i saw a man with a shaved head wearing saffron robes standing on a street corner handing out books. I hadn’t really heard much about the Hare Krishnas.. maybe a couple of things from listening to Beatles songs. But it seemed like a fated encounter to meet someone handing out Hindu texts on this street corner in Germany. I had that strange feeling when its like your focus of attention is drawn to someone with a magnetic force and everything around them goes swimmy. Here clearly was a lifeline. I asked him where he was from and he said he came from a farm called Krisha valley in Hungary. Did they need people to work the farm? Yes he said! Aha.. this could be a plan.. he gave me the address of the farm near the village of Somogyvámos, and a book “chant and be happy”. Well how interesting was that. You see, the mystery was well alive, it only took a certain state of mind and you could align with it..