WEBZINE ACC

It’s vacation season, but also rainy season, keeping us indoors.
However, there are many ways to travel.
Reading a travel book
could be travel itself
and a way to awaken the senses of travel.

As Alain de Botton said in <The Art of Travel>,
traveling depends on “the mindset with which we travel rather than the destination we travel to.”
What matters is not the destination
but to have the senses of travel to completely embrace unfamiliar territory.

1. A journey to my room

A journey around my room:
For the sake of the most valuable and meaningful trip

A traveler has the sense
to discover the fading boundary
between the space and oneself who gets used to the same space.
It is also about an attitude to humbly embrace
a newly found space beyond that boundary.

With this sense, you can go on a journey
around your room as a stranger.
Once becoming a traveler to my own room, my sofa, my bed,
and small photos hanging on the wall are
no longer daily objects I see everyday but a strange, new destination.
Then, I follow my steps to cross over the boundary
between my ordinary self and these objects,
and my mind travels far away, as far as space.

My room is situated in latitude 48° east, according to the measurement of Father Beccaria.
It lies east and west, and,
if you keep very close to the wall,
forms a parallelogram of 36 steps round.
My journey will, however, be longer than this;
for I shall traverse my room up and down and across,
without rule or plan.

A trip around one’s own room is a journey
to find out new from the ordinary,
cultivating our senses of travel by being immersed in the landscape
beyond just looking around the landscape.
It is a journey worth of going, without spending a penny.

2. A journey beyond borders

<A Border Diary: Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia>

A border is a line drawn between countries,
but it’s more than just a line.
It’s the accumulation of the past history
and the precarious and intense situations of the present.
Traveling along the jagged borders
not only makes you see two countries sharing the border,
but also see the hidden side behind the tourism.

There are people and villages even on the border.
Ethnic minorities living in the mountains
around the borders of Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia
sustain their precarious lives on the jagged borders
because they do not belong to either side of the border.

A sublime, untouched world of nature
is the perfect phrase to describe this village.
“God, jealous of the beauty of nature,
created conflicts.”
How can every conflict region all over the world
have so much beauty!

The Mekong River travels through the borders of these
six countries: Laos, Thailand, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Myanmar.
The river is where these people were born, ran about,
found food, and learned how to live.
They have cultivated their culture for a long time within
the lines which were drawn by the mountains, valleys,
and the river and the borders between the lands.

When the line was drawn on different land,
their way of living changed
just like the changed nature that surrounded them.
With every step of travelers who find stubborn boundaries in their lives,
despite changing borders,
will meet a new, colorful view that no one has ever seen before.

The same destinations can be felt differently depending on the traveler.
Travel books displayed at the library of the ACC
not only tell travel destinations all around the world
but also show the ways to become a true traveler.

You can meet the colorful traditional cultures of ethnic minorities in Thailand and Laos at the Asia Cultural Museum Archive Collection.
Clothing of ethnic minorities of Greater Mekong [GO]