Today is a total rest day. We have chanced upon a magical place so are just drinking it all in, listening to the bird song and walking by the lake surrounded by snow capped mountains. We are feeling slightly bemused that we had no idea Slovenia was so beautiful. The country seems to fly under the tourist and Instagram radar yet the place where we chanced upon is truly more spectacular than anywhere I have seen in New Zealand.  We also like the fact that the forests are mainly deciduous trees and also a lot of spruce. It makes for gorgeous varied colour in Spring. We have not seen a lot of Slovenia but our impression is of quite a prosperous rural country. The houses are well built and the land well husbanded. What perplexes us is the amount of meadows but seemingly invisible livestock. Where are all the cattle and sheep? We may see more on our travels.

 

My favourite travel quote is from Herman Melville. "It's not down on any map ; true places never are". I'm thinking about this as I sit and contemplate the mountains around me. It's not the place so much as the effect it has on me. I had a similar experience in Finland when I stood outside our little log house  in the blue twilight and heard the sound of snowflakes falling on my jacket in a profound enveloping silence.  When we travel it is the way in which we are affected by place rather than the place itself that we savour and remember. 

 

It's not that every travel experience has to have an emotional or spiritual component but rather that we can often be surprised by how we are affected by places or objects or people we encounter as we drag our suitcases around us. Places have no meaning if we are unable to respond to them. The same is true of art. Art without affect is nothing more than visual  

 

Andrés Gide wrote about a concept which he called 'disponibilité". I'm not sure I can give an exact translation for this word but the closest approximation is 'availability' or 'openess' to experience. When I see the hoatds of loathsome 'Instagrammers' scuttling around  like cockroaches going to a fancy dress ball in places like the Hagia Sofia in Instanbul it saddens me. Granted they are just out of their teens but their obstinate fervor in marking the territory like incontinent dogs  makes it clear they see travel as a means of imposing themselves on everything that is beautiful or sacred. If they were open to their surroundings they would realise they were in a sacred place with centuries of history. 

 

Maybe our planet is dying simply because we see it as a place to exploit not as a 'true place' in Melville's use of the term.