On Saturday Jennifer and I had what is turning out to be an annual pre-Christmas lunch with our Three Camino Angels – Britta, Janet, and Jenny.

We started our lunch at 1pm, and we finished at 7pm.
That is what’s officially known as a “long lunch.”

Britta and Janet came with us on the Indian tour. Jenny was not able to come, because she’d committed to being a hospitalero on the Frances. So the lunch was, in part, a chance for us all to debrief after the tour, and to tell Jenny what she missed out on, and for Jenny to tell us what we missed out on!

She said that while it would have been wonderful to have come to India, her work as a hospitalero had been incredible, and very rewarding. She said she got back way more than she gave out. And she’s planning to do it again next year.

We spent the entire time swapping stories, catching up, chatting, laughing, drinking, eating, laughing some more, and generally having a great time.

It was interesting for Jennifer and me to find out what kind of impact the Indian tour had on Britta and Janet. They were both still buzzing from the experience. They found it at times profoundly moving, but also a lot of fun.

At some point in the hazy afternoon we talked about the power of the Camino, of how we were together because of that ancient way to Santiago, and how strong those bonds can be – even from just a fairly cursory meeting while walking.

Friendships can be made that will last a lifetime.

The Camino Angels are friends because of their meeting on the Camino. Jennifer and I are friends with them because we met on this blog, which of course came about because of the Camino. Each of us now has very strong friendships all over the world –

We spoke about other walks we could do – and we agreed that none of us are in any way interested in walking just for the sake of walking. The Pacific Crest Trail is not for us – nor the Appalachian Trail. Magnificent walks that they are, and of course supremely challenging, but they are not the Camino.

I’ve spoken before of the soul imprint that’s there on the Camino – the energetic residue of all those who have gone before. It’s the reason sick people can walk the Camino and get better. It’s the reason frail old people can walk 800kms. It’s the reason those with questions find those questions answered. They are all imbued with the accumulated energetic residues that lie within that sacred way.

At 6:30pm our waiter informed us that regrettably, our luncheon table had been reserved for dinner. We grumbled, and shifted to another table so that we could have coffee and dessert. There was still much more to talk about – more to laugh about.

At 7pm we finally left the restaurant, because there were people lining up outside wanting a table. On the street outside I suggested we sashay through to dinner at a great Greek place further up the street, but common sense ultimately prevailed.

But we didn’t want to say goodbye. There was still such a lot to talk about. That’s the power of the Camino.

I’ve been off the grid, as they say, for the last little while.

Been very busy. In particular I’ve started reviewing the mountains of footage that we’ve shot over the past 14 months on the intuition film.

I’ve had to spend a little while skilling myself on Final Cut Pro 10, which is a Non Linear Editing software programme. I’ve sat in editing rooms for God knows how many hours these past thirty five years, and as a director I feel I know editing pretty damn well. But actually operating the software, and understanding how it works, and learning all the shortcuts, is a whole other ball of wax.

Not that I’m editing the film. I’m not. The very talented young Indian fellow who has edited the two sizzle reels will be the editor. His name is Rishi, and I will enjoy working with him.

Here is the production update reel Rishi cut –
PRODUCTION UPDATE REEL

Basically what I’m doing at the moment, as I wait for more funding to come in, is I’m going through all the interviews and selecting the “grabs” that I’d like to use in the film. Those are all the soundbites that interest me, and that I feel could have a place in the movie.

I’m then binning those grabs, and later I will put them into a rough structure, so that when Rishi kicks in, he’ll have something very rough to get his teeth into.

I’m a very lucky man. I was lucking getting to interview these extraordinary people in the first place. Now I’m lucky because I can play back those interviews at my leisure, and in selecting my grabs I play back certain sections again and again, so I get the opportunity to really take in what they’re saying.

From time to time on this blog I’ll post up some interesting things that I’m discovering in reviewing these interviews. But I just wanted to post here a section that may not even make it into the film, but which I’ve been thinking about since I reviewed it.

The interview is with the head of the Bombay Yoga Institute, a venerable woman named Hansaji. She talks about how we create pain because of our doubts. Our likes and dislikes, our desires. Our ego creates these doubts, desires, she says.

If something goes wrong, that you believe has gone wrong, you think about it all the time – while you’re working, relaxing, eating. This is not life, she says. Learn from it, then forget about it and move ahead.

It’s just a chattering box, she says. Your mind. If you can learn to quieten your chattering box, then you will experience intuition. Your inner voice. You can avoid pain, you can avoid suffering, she says, if you listen to your intuition.

But, she says, you can’t experience intuition with a rational mind.

What I found most interesting though is what she said about results. She talked about work – that we should just get on with our work and not worry about results.

She said that if in your work you have a good result, then your ego will take the credit and will run rampant and you will be very happy. If you have a bad result you will blame yourself and others, your ego will be shattered, and you will be very unhappy.

In each instance it’s your ego that’s ruling you. Controlling you, and your emotional body.

But Hansaji says, if you don’t worry about the result, and trust that your guidance is directing you in the right way, then you won’t be a slave to your ego – good or bad. But she says for this to work effectively, you have to have trust in that guidance.

We are such a goal orientated society. We’re taught to be competitive, aggressive, to be winners. But what if we chose not to play that game?

What if we just put our effort into the quality and substance of what we do each day, and trust that the result of those efforts is in the hands of our universal guidance.

That’s what I’m doing with this making of this film…

I noticed a story in my local paper this morning – The Sydney Morning Herald.

It had to do with research on the mortality rate of sedentary versus walking people in their late fifties.

Evidently if you walk 10,000 steps a day, then you can lower your chance of dying by up to 46%.

Here’s what the article said:

Increasing daily steps from 1000 to 10,000 a day can lower a sedentary person’s chance of dying by 46 per cent, new research has found. The Australian research proved a direct link between exercise and popular devices like pedometers and Fitbits.

Even increasing steps a little to about 3000 a day, five days a week, reduced the mortality rate by 12 per cent, the landmark study by the George Institute for Global Health found.

The research monitored the use of pedometers among 3000 previously sedentary middle-aged Australian men and women, with an average age of 58. The participants were given pedometers and data was collected at the beginning and again approximately five years later to measure the number of steps they took each day.

A spokesman for the George Institute said that these results gave the public greater confidence that death could be delayed, and major diseases prevented, by being more active.  

The research also predicted that the results might even be greater in healthy individuals who increase their daily steps.

So I told this to Jennifer, and she said that you if you embrace your electronic body and the I AM Presence within you, then you can live for eternity without taking even one step.

I wonder if wearing a FitBit is part of your electronic body…

Jennifer in Bhutan

I received this email from Mr George Hay, whom I’m getting acquainted with on this blog.

I post it here in full… 

Edited with BlogPad Pro

Apologies to those of you who are subscribed to the Gone Tours website –

I’m doing some much-needed  tidy-up work on that site, and so have shifted pages to blog posts etc – and some of you might be receiving old posts as though they’re new.

In fact they’ve just been repositioned – and I’m not that much of a Word Press guru that I can figure out how to do this without actually publishing these posts – hence, you get bothered with info you probably already know.

But just on that – at the moment we’re planning three tours next year:

• The Wild Atlantic Way Tour of the West Coast of Ireland – in April.
• The Portuguese Camino – in May
• The Mother Ganga Tour of India – in September.

The Irish tour is already filling up – and the Portuguese Camino, which will involve our beloved Catarina again, is two thirds full.

We also already have some commitments for the Indian tour. And we’ve been approached to mount another couple of tours in India next year as well, so we’re in discussion on that.

It’s pleasing that this tour stuff is going gang-busters. I’m discovering though that we don’t really run regular tours like other companies – we create itineraries that offer the kind of experiences Jennifer and I would like to have, and that often means going to places and doing things that only travellers get to experience, not tourists.

There’s a big difference between a traveller and a tourist.

Anyway, let me know if you’re interested in any of these –
bill@gonetours.com

Once again, Steve McCurry stuns me with his breathtaking images, and his unremitting sense of humanity.

I was impatient.

I had to drive 400kms. And I wanted to get in early to watch a friend’s movie which has just recently opened.

So I wanted to leave.

But Jennifer was sitting on the motel bed, reading a book. It was the Ascended Masters Instruction Guide, part of the Saint Germain “I AM” Discourses series.

This was the fourth time she’d read this book.

It was 9am.

The motel in Goondiwindi was empty now. Everyone else had left. We were the only ones there. The maids were stripping the sheets off the beds of the emptied rooms.

We were the only ones left.

And Jennifer was sitting on the bed, reading a book she’d read three times before.

I said to her: I’d like to go now. 

She said: Give me another ten minutes. 

I said, rather tetchily: Jen, I’d like to go now. I’ve got a long way to drive today, and it’s already late. 

She snapped back: I said, give me ten minutes. 

Jennifer never snaps. She is a calm and gentle person. Buddha-esque. To see Jennifer snap was somewhat shocking. Like the Buddha turning Linda Blair. However I can display personal characteristics that would make even Himalayan monk want to rip my face off.

It became apparent to me that no further conversation would be entered into – she wanted ten minutes – and so I went outside, started up the car to let her know that I was anxious to go, and made some phone calls to LA.

I also left the motel room door open – and as I’d backed into the parking space right outside our room, I was conscious that all those noxious fumes would be heading her way.

If I couldn’t coax her out, I would smoke her out with carbon monoxide.

I try very hard to be a good person.

We were late getting going that morning because I’d woken up at 2am to watch the World Cup Rugby semi-final – Australia beat Argentina in a very exciting game. And of course watching the game in a motel room, I’d kept Jennifer awake.

She never complained.

She never does complain, except when she wants ten minutes extra to read a book she’s read three times before.

Those of you familiar with this blog know that I require only about five hours sleep to be fully functional, while my wife requires ten hours. Anything less and she takes on Walking Dead type tendencies.

The reason she snapped, I surmised, was because she was sleep deprived. It had nothing to do with the fact that she wanted time to read her book, that she’d already read three times, and that I was being a dick.

Finally she came out to the car, coughing, and we headed off.

I was driving to Brisbane – I had a few days work at the University where I’m an Adjunct Professor. Each year I drive up to Brisbane, each year I take the same route. I drive from Mudgee to Goondiwindi, I overnight at the same motel, and I drive from Goondiwindi to Brisbane.

Something happened this time.

Here’s what happened.

As we drove away from the motel, the tension somewhat sweet and ripe in the car, we started chatting as though there had not been a contretemps a few minutes earlier. We resumed normal programming, even though there was some static in the air.

Jennifer made note of a sign to a Botanical Garden, and in my attempt at reconciliation, I looked at the sign and said:

Huh. Fancy Goondiwindi having a Botanical Garden. That’s a must-see next time. 

At the same time I overtook a large semi-trailer so that I could speed off down the long straight road ahead.

And that’s what I did –

However some 30kms down the road, I came to a little settlement that I didn’t recall having gone through on previous trips. And as I kept driving I wondered whether the vegetation, and indeed the road itself, looked a little strange. A little drier, dustier, fewer trees.

It took me one hour and ten minutes, and some 130kms, to realise I’d taken the wrong road. I was heading due west, when I should have been heading due east.

I had to turn around and go back to Goondiwindi. I gunned it. Really gunned it. Because I made it back in less than an hour. You do the math, as they say in America.

So we drove back into Goondiwindi two hours after we left. Ten minutes past eleven.

What happened?

1. In passing the big semi-trailer, I’d missed the sign for the turn-off.
2. In my hubris, and with the static still lingering, I had ignored my unease that I had driven through a settlement that I’d not recalled on previous trips.
3. In my hubris, and with the static still lingering, I had ignored all the signals that I was on the wrong road – like the drier country, the fewer trees etc.
4. I had not followed my Garmin guidance. Even though it had kept directing me another way, I thought I knew better.
5. Because of the little dust-up with Jennifer, I had shut down all my sensory input and over-rode it all.
6. The Universe bitch-slapped me.

Yes, ultimately that’s what happened. I’d been impatient. So impatient I hadn’t wanted to let Jennifer have ten minutes to read a mystical and esoteric book that was very important to her.

I had put my needs ahead of hers.

And so the Universe sent me into the Outback for an hour, in completely the wrong direction, along a route I should have know, and slapped me for being a naughty boy.

I’ve learned my lesson.

And I should have followed my guidance, both inner and outer.

I’ve now posted the itinerary for the Wild Atlantic Way tour, in April next year.

I’ve reduced the price a bit too!

It’s going to be an amazing tour, exploring three peninsulas, or “rings,” on the wild west coast of Ireland –

• The Ring of Beara
• The Dingle Ring
• The Doolin Rng, the Cliffs of Moher, and the Aran Islands.

Plus we’ll be starting and finishing in Cork, which is one of the coolest cities in all or Ireland!

Here’s the link to the itinerary –

Wild Atlantic Way Tour 2016

Let me know if you’re interested –
bill@gonetours.com

Starting to prepare the itinerary for the Celtic Camino tour next year.

Very excited about it!

It’s going to be called The Wild Atlantic Way Tour – in April – and it will include the amazing Aran Islands… http://www.aranislands.com

It will be both a walking and sightseeing tour.

More to come soon!

Next week I’m doing Prof stuff.

Professorial stuff.

As some of you might know, I’m an Adjunct Professor up at the Queensland University of Technology, in their Creative Industries / Screen Studies faculty. This is my fourth year. It’s a part time gig, and my way of giving something back to the industry – in particular film students.

Each year around this time the film course has their student end of year “pitches,” where the students have to pitch to a panel – myself and two other industry professionals – and we determine what films get made the next year.

For me it’s a fascinating process because I’m able to see what stories young people are playing with – and how they’re attempting to interpret them cinematically.

It keeps me young!

Last year veteran producer Tony Buckley was on the judging panel with me, and like me, he lamented the students’ lack of knowledge of film history and culture. It seemed that most of their knowledge of cinema starts with Tarantino and Pulp Fiction. 

Very few had a knowledge of the cinema classics of the 40’s and 50’s – and even the great films from the golden era of Hollywood in the 70s were largely unknown to them.

We’re talking masterpieces such as The Godfather Pts 1&2, The French Connection Pts 1&2, Chinatown, The Exorcist, Network, Patton, The Conversation, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, and my favourite film from the 70’s, Roman Polanski’s The Tenant…. I could go on and on.

Ask the students about the work of Billy Wilder, John Ford, Joseph Mankiewicz, Vincente Minnelli, John Huston, Howard Hawks, Fred Zinnemann, Hal Ashby – even Alfred Hitchcock – and they’ll stare at you blankly. There’s no point even mentioning Antonioni, Kurosawa, Renoir, Bunuel, Bertolucci, Jean Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller, Bergman, Fellini…

Plus, most of the students won’t watch black and white films. So that excludes them from the classics such as Casablanca, All about Eve, The Apartment, Sunset Boulevard, Paths of Glory, High Noon, Marty, etc…

There’s so much to learn from the work of past masters. And yet a lot of young people feel that what’s current is most important. And so they’ll talk about JJ Abrams and Robert Rodriguez and perhaps Paul Thomas Anderson – and yes their hero, Quentin Tarantino.

Tarantino is a good case in point. He knows his cinema. He’s a walking encyclopaedia on cinema. He knows the classics, plus he knows the most obscure art films and B grade schlock. Talk to him about the French New Wave and he could rattle on for hours about Truffaut and Godard and Breathless, and Jules & Jim, and The 400 Blows, and Contempt … these are films that influenced that great American directors that were to come.

It’s the same with Paul Thomas Anderson, who I believe is currently one of the world’s great auteurs. His films Magnolia and There will be Blood I would put as amongst the best movies of the past twenty five years. 

Tarantino and Anderson are making some movies that will last. So too the bigger names – Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorcese, James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis – these guys know their cinema and have studied the classics over and over. But they love movies. That’s the thing. These great filmmakers love movies. 

Often I’ll ask the students when was the last time they went to the movies – and I’ll find that very few actually go to the cinema to watch films. They might download movies, and watch on their laptops – but most don’t even do that.

If you’re doing a tertiary course on filmmaking and you aren’t really interested in films, then what are your chances of success in a highly competitive industry?

Minimal.

You gotta love it.
And breathe it
And dream it
And live it.

Same with anything really.
If you want to be good at something, it requires complete and utter immersion.

I’m looking forward to seeing the students next week, and hearing their pitches. I’m also looking forward to catching up with old Camino buddies – Greg & Donna, and Angie & Ken.

They did the Camino Portuguese tour with us last year, and we’ve become very good friends. For the occasion, I’m taking up some white port…