“Wen I am Older I will going too bee a travler like Postman Pat. He taked his bag to the village and summertimes he wents father and wents to town. With his cat. I like his cat too. I think Post Man Pat is very brayve for going travelling by hims self and with his Jessi cat too. I like his cat and one time my mummy said I drawed his cat very well. I dont no what is in pats bags but I think he has got a lot of socks and biscuits. He mite have a picture of his cat too in case he loseds him. I losed my cat and this maked me sad. Pat also has a van to keep his socks in, I think his van has a tractor engin because it goes past fields on the way but I thingk I will go by tank engine and a red bus.”
Two great passions of mine are writing and travel, as you’ll see if these tender strips of word saté entice you further into the sizzling world of the Trail of Ants. I’m your author, Ant, an unpublished, unorganised, unprejudiced, unloved Englishman of under-twenty-seven. I left my beloved homeland, England in June 2007 and let fate forge a route to some of the most exceptional corners of Asia, a continent I’d painted in the canvas’ of my mind a thousand times; washed with sunshine, speckled with saris and infested with tourists. It turned out, to be much richer than this.
There are stranger’s eyes, in Asia that I’ll see in my dying dreams for the rest of my days; smells I will fail to forget; sounds, those clangs and clashes, those melodies of rural silence and crescendos of goofy urban essentials that made a marriage with my heartbeat and flavours that smothered and seduced my skeleton with sublime slaps of sharpness and subtle nudges. I’ve spent more than a year in Asia, observing their curious combinations of life and death, work and play, hide and seek and found its crumbs of colour are drizzled with indelible indiscretions, sticky sins and glorious, gooey goodness. Sometimes, it’s a hard place to be and is never an easy place to leave, however The Trail is a round the world trip and Asia has already lapped up six months extra so, one day soon, I’ll edge backwards to elsewhere.
It was a convenient twist in my life that hurled me into my adolescent dream, to travel the world. Trail of Ants is my travel blog, my pathetic narrative of a relentless, instinct driven journey through foreign lands of locals. A fault-filled journey of friends and foes, monkeys and monks, starlight and scars. It’s a continuous work-in-progress, it’s as freestyle as these opening paragraphs but ultimately it is what it is, and I am who I am.
Ant
Ps. the site is under international copyright, and those foolish enough to plagiarise my work are routed out, and ultimately will fund my onward journey through prosecution fines aplenty.
