Travelling back should be in your future Lorna Thornber
Returning to a destination, particularly one you previously spent a lot of time, inevitably results in feelings of deja vu. Retracing the steps of your younger self through your old stomping grounds, you’re bound to be struck by how much has changed since you were last there – and how much has stayed the same.
It’s particularly evident when you revisit childhood haunts. The ‘‘big’’ backyard you once lost yourself in, imagining you’d crossed into a Narnia-like kingdom where adults couldn’t bother you, suddenly seems like a standard quarter-acre section. The labyrinth populated by giants up your old street such as your average small-town intermediate school. Such experiences are often bittersweet. You’ve made it back to a place that helped shape you as a person, but it’s not quite how you pictured it. You have both moved on – for better and/or for worse.
On a 2018 trip to Sydney, a city I had lived in and loved about a decade beforehand, I visited as many of my old hangouts as I could cram into two days: Manly Beach, where my ex and I once shared a sparsely furnished 1950s flat with a stand-on-yourtiptoes-and-you’ll-see-it sea view; the old-man bar where we discovered a secret upstairs dance floor one absinthe-fuelled evening; the fancy fish and chip place at Watsons Bay we’d walked past a million times but had always been toobroke to eat at; the Bondi to Coogee coastal walk where, in the right light, scenes of friends and families soaking up the sun on pale half-moons of white sand look like sun-bleached snapshots from some golden age.
Sydney was as attractive as I’d remembered it and I felt a little worse for wear by comparison, inducing waves of nostalgia as jolting as anything Bondi has to offer. Still, I was reminded that I’d first arrived in the city as a 20-something recent graduate desperate to experience life beyond New Zealand’s shores. And, having since lived in the UK and United States and spent most of my savings on overseas trips, I’ve certainly done that.
Sipping a cut-price glass of chardonnay in the retro clubhouse hidden behind the posh-and-pricey Icebergs Dining Room & Bar in South Bondi though, I realised that wide-eyed wonder at touching down in foreign territory hasn’t gone away. I’m still an overexcited 6-year-old every time I step out of an airport.
Turn to page 20 to read about Julia Mahony’s experience of returning to Dublin after 20 years away.