37. Pooly and Polly

37.

Sharing my adobe room in San Augustin are Pooly, an Englishman and Polly, an Australian.

Pooly is an architect/traveler from Great Tew, England; Polly is an athletic, clear-headed young woman from an outback sheep ranch.

Pooly’s father, an Anglican Vicar, is finishing a book in which he defends his theory that prehistoric cosmonauts from somewhere beside earth, “the Sons of God” mentioned in the Bible, had intercourse with the “Daughters of Man”, which he claims were some apelike earth animal, some 6,000 generations ago, producing Homo Sapiens. He suggests that we are the fruit of this event and are still in the testing stage of a cosmic genetic experiment.

Pooly is on a globe-encircling cruise. His boat is moored in the harbor at Cartagena while he investigates some of the most interesting places ashore in Columbia. San Augustin is his last stop before returning to his boat. He tells me that: “The master traveler masters traveling.” By this me means that he thinks it is not necessary to travel all the time. He works at his trade for several years and then travels for several years gathering experience.

Polly has been on the road for four years. She says that making a “walkabout” is considered normal for young people from her part of Australia and since the Australian continent is so isolated, these youthful adventurers are expected to be gone for several years. I don’t think I have ever met a more alert or clever young woman. She shares a lot of useful travel lore with me and lets me read her diary, which is a fascinating “treklog” of her journey through Asia and Europe—she is going around the world in the opposite direction from me. She has a lot of literary talent and illustrates her diary with funny or serious felt tip pen cartoon drawings. It is especially interesting for me to read her descriptions of the days we are together while she reads my diary of the same adventures. We may describe the same basic experience but we write from very different points of view.

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