Welcome to Vardo, Mona's travel and culture blog
Vardo is the Romany--or Gypsy--word for a horse-drawn caravan, the ultimate vehicle for slow, meandering travel. When you travel by vardo on the back roads, there is always time to take in the smell of the damp fields and the rustling sounds of wind in the trees. In this fast-paced age of ours, I aim to slow down the voyage, to allow time for the unexpected.
Sometimes I'll be writing about recent trips I've taken or reminiscing about trips I made years ago. Other times I may be riffing about a trip I took to my local grocery store in Morningside Heights, the neighborhood where I live in New York City, or a stroll through Central Park, or a visit to my daughter's school on the Lower East Side. I believe the number of miles you actually travel is less interesting than the distance you go in your head.
Inevitably, Gypsies will be a recurring theme. Ever since my childhood, I've been fascinated by stories about Gypsies. My father used to tell me about the dark women who passed through the town of Nutley, New Jersey every spring, when he was a boy. He described how they walked through the fields, gathering dandelion leaves in their aprons and how they told fortunes for a nickel.
Those New Jersey fields where the Gypsy women gathered dandelion leaves are gone now, paved and turned into the parking lots and factories of Hoffmann-La Roche. But sometimes, when I pass that concrete stretch, I can see the distant silhouettes of the Gypsies, still weaving in and out of the sunlight. Such is the power of my father's stories, told to me more than thirty years ago, and describing a world that existed more than fifty years before that.
I dedicate this blog to my father and to all the storytellers. It is through stories that I have experienced the most profound journeys. There is a Gypsy saying: "Stanki nashti tshi arakenpe manushen shai." (Mountains do not meet but people do.)
Buen viaje.
Mona
Photos - Top: Gypsy encampment of bow-top vardos beside the road near Tewksbury, England, 2003. Bottom: Gypsy vardo at the Appleby Horse Fair, England, 1987. Photos copyright MMFB 1987 & 2003
All blog text copyright MMFB 2008
