How to Travel Read online

  How to Travel

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  Contents

  1. How to Choose a Destination

  2. What Is ‘Exotic’?

  3. The Suspicion of Happiness

  4. Anxiety

  5. Small Pleasures

  6. Water Towers

  7. The Importance of the Sun

  8. Travel as a Cure for Shyness

  9. The Pleasure of the Airport

  10. The Pleasure of the Flight

  11. Pretty Cities

  12. The Pleasure of Otherness

  13. The Longing to Talk to Strangers

  14. The Vulnerability of Perfection to Emotional Troubles

  15. The Importance of Family Holidays

  16. The Pleasure of the Romantic Minibreak

  17. The Little Restaurant

  18. In Defence of Crowds

  19. The Pleasure of Room Service

  20. The Pleasures of Nature

  21. Drawing Rather than Taking Photographs

  22. Holiday Fling

  23. Travelling for Perspective

  24. Travel and Pilgrimages

  25. How to Spend a Few Days in Paris

  26. How to Come Home

  27. The Advantages of Staying at Home

  28. Cherishing Memories

  29. The Shortest Trip: Going for a Walk

  30. The Shortest Travel Quiz

  1.

  How to Choose a Destination

  Our societies are not shy about presenting us with options, of course, but they are also content to leave us alone with the many deeper complexities beneath the business of choosing.

  A satisfying answer is less simple than it seems, for it requires us to have a deep understanding of ourselves, a good grasp of the nature of the world and an implicit philosophy of happiness.

  Every destination has a character: that is, it emphasises and promotes a particular aspect of human nature. Some, like the long, empty beaches of South Australia, invite us to serenity; others, like the suburbs of Amsterdam, reinforce the pleasures of bourgeois sobriety. Los Angeles speaks to our dormant worldly ambitions and foregrounds a less squeamish attitude to money; Miami or Rio de Janeiro can loosen inhibition and reserve and tug us towards a relaxed sensuality.

  The destination we find ourselves drawn to reflects an underlying sense of what is currently missing or under-supported in our lives. We are seeking, through our travels, not just to see new places, but also to become fuller, more complete beings. The destination promises to correct imbalances in our psyches, for we are all inevitably a little lacking or excessive in one area or another. The place we go to should, ideally, help to teach us certain lessons that we know we need to hear. Our destinations are a guide to, and a goad for, who we are trying to become.

  To make a wise choice about where to travel, therefore, we should look first not so much at the outer world but at the inner one. We need to ask ourselves what is missing or presently too weak within us, and on that basis, set about identifying a location somewhere on the planet – in the wilderness or a city, in the tropics or by a glacier – with the power to help us develop into the sort of people we need to become.

  Travel accedes to its true nobility when we ensure that the physical journey can support a well-defined inner journey towards maturity and emotional health.

  2.

  What Is ‘Exotic’?

  Our societies have a strong sense of what makes a destination ‘exotic’. Normally, the word is associated with palm trees, temples to unfamiliar gods, humid heat and unknown animals.

  But, stripped to its essence, ‘exotic’ has nothing to do with the prescriptive list of places with which it is typically associated. It merely means anywhere we yearn to go which we suspect has something important to teach us. Each of us is likely to have a private atlas of destinations that sound exotic to our ears, and which we need the courage and patience to unearth and bring into focus. The exotic is evidence of what is missing in ourselves.

  We might be inspired to follow our own definitions of exoticism by the example of the nineteenth-century politician and writer Benjamin Disraeli. In one of his novels, Coningsby, the central character – a thinly disguised version of the author – develops a fascination for the factories and heavy industry of northern England. Though he and his friends have been used to holidaying in the countryside, the narrator admits that what would be truly exotic for him would be to go and spend two weeks investigating steel mills, cotton factories and coal mines. He does so, and the experience transforms him into a more serious and resolute person.

  The modern equivalent would be someone cancelling a break in southern Spain to take a life-expanding trip to the appliance factories of the Ruhr valley or the data-storage centres of Montana.

  Sadly, too often, we’re shy about investigating what might really be exotic to us. We may end up in more clichéd ‘exotic’ places from a shyness about locating and declaring our true interests. We’re often still at the dawn of properly knowing ourselves. At least we can be assured that no one will mock or say we’re weird if we reveal we’re off to Phuket or Barbados. But what is properly exotic to us might lie somewhere quite different, in the suburbs of Yokohama, a hilltop retreat in Bavaria or the Norwegian hamlet of Sveagruva.

  We should dare to ask ourselves what feels properly exotic to us – even if it has no palm tree anywhere in the vicinity and occupies no space in any brochure – and ensure we have the resolve to pay proper homage to it in our next itinerary.

  3.

  The Suspicion of Happiness

  Enjoying life is, in theory, deeply desirable, but we’d be wise to note how challenging it can be in reality – a fact with which our travels tend to confront us starkly. Suddenly, for a little while, by the pool or in the mountains, we may have nothing to do other than to be happy. The prospect can be truly alarming.

  We tend to have three big fears:

  i) If I settle back, throw away my cares for a time and enjoy what I have, I will lose the will to strive – which has been responsible for everything I have achieved to date.

  ii) Enjoying beauty and comfort is selfish. There is, after all, simply so much suffering around.

  iii) Enjoying life is not serious.

  In Aesop’s famous fable, ‘The Grasshopper and the Ant’, all summer long, the ant labours away and when winter comes, she has enough food to survive. All summer long, the grasshopper enjoys herself – and is starving the next winter. The moral of the story is likely to have burnt itself into our consciousness from a young age. Relaxation can be dangerous.

  But none of our three fears stand up to closer examination:

  i) We can retain a sure hold on our striving-inducing dissatisfactions and, at the same time, occasionally savour the fragile harmony and beauty of a moment. In any case, unless we learn how to appreciate what we have, there is no point striving for more. Further gains are only worthwhile if our appreciative capacities are already functioning properly.

  ii) Appreciation does not rule out compassion. Indeed, the more satisfied and rested we are, the more strength we have to bring to bear on the troubles of others. Being personally happy generates the best possible basis for helping to alleviate the griefs of strangers and friends.

  iii) We don’t have to enjoy life the way the adverts tell us: we can carve out our own vision of pleasure, every bit as serious and dignified as we wish it to be.

  We should go easy on ourselves for needing a little encouragement to accept a very unfamiliar situation: a few moments of happiness.

  4.

  Anxiety

  A huge motive for travelling is the search for calm. But we should be modest about how calm we can ever be. We are, after all, human beings – creatures for whom serenity is n
ot a native state.

  A degree of anxiety is fundamental to our nature for well-founded reasons:

  • Because we are intensely vulnerable physical beings, a complicated network of fragile organs deeply affected by the vagaries of our outer and inner worlds.

  • Because we can imagine so much more than we can ever have and live in mobile-driven, mediatised societies where envy and restlessness are constants.

  • Because we are the descendants of the great worriers of the species (the others having been trampled and torn apart by wild animals) and because we still carry in our bones – into the calm of the jasmine-scented holiday resort – the terrors of the savannah.

  • Because we rely for our self-esteem and sense of comfort on the love of people we cannot control and whose needs and hopes will never align seamlessly with our own.

  We should gently laugh at the challenges of relaxation. There is no need – on top of everything else – to be anxious that we are anxious. The mood is no sign that our lives have gone wrong, merely that we are alive.

  We should be more careful when heading for destinations that we imagine will spare us every anxiety. We can go, but with a little more scepticism about our likely mood. It is rare to be uncomplicatedly happy for longer than fifteen minutes.

  5.

  Small Pleasures

  To generalise, our age believes in Big Pleasures. We’ve inherited a romantic suspicion of the ordinary (which is taken to be mediocre, dull and uninspiring) and work with a corresponding assumption that things that are unique, hard to find or deeply unfamiliar are naturally fitted to delight us more. We subtly like high prices. If something is cheap or free, it’s a little harder to appreciate.

  The approach isn’t wholly wrong, but unwittingly it exhibits a vicious and unhelpful bias against the cheap, the easily available, the ordinary and the small-scale.

  Yet the paradoxical aspect of pleasure is how promiscuous it can prove to be. It doesn’t neatly collect in expensive boutiques. It can refuse to stick with us in the big museum. It is remarkably vulnerable to emotional trouble, sulks and casual bad moods.

  Travels are often filled with small pleasures. Perhaps it was the rye bread on the terrace of the hotel, the field of dandelions near the canal, a conversation with someone washing clothes at a fountain, the sound of the city heard on a walk through the park at night…

  Such things can lack prestige or social support. They sound rather minor. They wouldn’t be what one would ordinarily pick out as highlights of a journey.

  Yet a pleasure may look very minor – eating a fig, saying a word in a new language, browsing in a spice shop – and yet be anything but. If properly grasped and elaborated upon, these sorts of activities may be among the most moving and satisfying we can ever hope to have.

  Travels are often filled with small pleasures …the field of dandelions near the canal.

  A pleasure may look very minor… and yet be anything but.

  Bernd and Hilla Becher, Water Towers,1972 –2009

  6.

  Water Towers

  Our societies are constantly sending out signals about what is potentially fascinating, impressive or beautiful to visit. They have been very good at getting us to see the charms of dolphins, mountains, little villages in rural France and art deco hotels from the 1920s. These are all very worthy objects of delight, but the list could be so much wider.

  In 1972, a German couple – Bernd and Hilla Becher – started to photograph water towers across Germany and the United States. These industrial structures were amongst the least admired of all buildings; they were deemed hulking and brutish and people would get predictably furious if ever one was planned near where they lived.

  Yet the Bechers’ photographs – arranged in serene and elegant frames, and hung in sequences along gallery walls – showed just how beautiful these towers actually were. One could appreciate their patterns of rust and their rugged authenticity; their legs had a distinct dignity and playfulness. They were like curious monuments in the landscape.

  The real point of the Bechers’ exercise wasn’t specifically about water-storage facilities. The towers provided an example for a much wider point: that there is a great deal more that is lovely and interesting in the world than we have yet been encouraged to suspect.

  The example of these photographs teaches us something else. To gain access to the full range of what is valuable, we need to suspect that the current list of what is worth seeing is radically incomplete – and we should be ready to start expanding it by ourselves, one tower at a time.

  7.

  The Importance of the Sun

  We’re supposed to be serious people with important things on our minds. But we can admit it without guilt: seeking sun is one of the central, and most important, motives behind going travelling.

  We have, after all, been cold for so long. For months, we have been fending off wind, rain and despair. Through the impossibly long winter and freezing spring, we have been swaddling ourselves in layers. We hardly ever see our own legs – beyond a reluctant glance at their pallor in the bath. We have eaten for comfort. And it shows, a bit. But deep within us, we know we are essentially made for sunny mornings, hot lazy afternoons and warm nights that echo to the sound of cicadas.

  On the beach, there are recliners under big straw sunshades. The water is warm. The heat envelops us and warms us to the core. Every day, the sky is perfectly blue and unclouded. From the hotel balcony, we can look out onto a succession of arid and scrubby hills; we love the sight of the baked and cracked earth because it speaks of weeks upon weeks of hot, dry weather.

  It can suddenly seem inhuman that our species has so cleverly managed to sustain itself in places that are windswept, wet and dreary for almost the whole year. We have made good lives for ourselves up there – in Wiesbaden, Trondheim, Hyvinkää and Calgary. But at such a cost.

  Sunshine isn’t merely ‘nice’. It has a profound role in our lives. It is an agent of moral qualities: generosity, courage, the appreciation of the present moment and a confidence in our surroundings. We can feel our character changing in the sun: becoming something we like a lot more. When the world seems bountiful and easy (as it does in the heat), material accumulation looks less impressive or necessary. When we can have so much pleasure from sitting in a T-shirt and shorts and feasting on a feta and tomato salad, competing wildly for promotion loses its point. When it is so hot, there is no point even trying to read – or think too much.

  The sun can correct our usual vices. The ways of the north are liable to be overly dominant and entrenched in our lives. We need to lie on the beach not because we are light-minded or indolent, but because we can be so dangerously dutiful, serious, hard-working, disconnected from our body, over-cerebral and cautious.

  It is a deeply noble search for wisdom and balance (which are the ideal goals of art, civilisation and travel) that has led us here – to an enchanting world of sun cream, dark glasses, recliners and vividly coloured cocktails by the pool.

  8.

  Travel as a Cure for Shyness

  On the first day in Japan, it was truly difficult. You went into the corner shop just off the main Motomachi shopping street to buy a prepaid mobile card. You pointed at your phone, said ‘Hello, it’s me’, and mimed the actions of someone making a call. But it was useless. Mr Nishimura couldn’t understand you at all. You were hot and flustered (it was 30°C and pretty humid) and felt very young again and an unusually big idiot.

  It evoked the time at school when you were supposed to make a speech and your mind went blank, and the painful evenings at college when everybody else seemed to be heading off somewhere and you weren’t sure if you could ask to join in.

  Over the years, in your life back home, you have learned how to avoid situations of awkwardness. You have become an expert at working around your diffidence and your fear of being the unwelcome focus of attention. But, of course, there’s been a price to pay for your expertise at defensiveness. Whenever som
ething feels alien or in any way threatening, your instinct has been to retreat, and you’ve missed out on a lot.

  But now, in Japan, fitting in is no longer an option. You are the stupid foreigner. Of course you can’t know what you are supposed to do. Everyone stares at you wherever you go.

  It sounds bad but, surprisingly, such extremity starts to offer you a certain sort of liberation. Maybe fitting in is overrated. Maybe not looking like a fool is simply not an option in any rich and interesting life, wherever it may unfold.

  So you steel your nerves. You go back to the shop. You buy some wasabi-flavoured crisps and give the guy at the till a big smile. He grins back. You’re learning. You opt to rent an apartment near the elegant Sankeien Gardens from a really nice guy called Kazutaka. A few days after, you drop in on the shop again and buy a packet of Chokobi mini star-shaped chocolate biscuits (they look fun). You make a joke about the rain. You say ‘ame desu’ – which you’d practised after breakfast and hopefully means something like ‘it’s raining’ – and gesture drolly at your wet hair. Mr Nishimura beams at you.

  Through travel, you’re freeing yourself from your inhibitions. You’re growing up – and into yourself. Our journeys can teach us a vital skill: that of not minding so much if we occasionally look a fool. They may be the best conduits for developing into the more confident, less self-conscious people we crave to be.