How to Travel Read online

  9.

  The Pleasure of the Airport

  The problem with the airport is that we tend to go there when we have a plane to catch. As a result, we are panicked, argumentative, stressed and entirely unable to notice that we’re passing through one of the most rewarding and interesting zones of the modern world. We should make it a destination in its own right.

  There are the beginnings of a thousand novels all around the departure lounge. Some of the trips commencing here will have been decided upon only in the previous few days, booked in response to a swiftly developing situation in the Munich or Milan office; others will be the fruit of three years of painful anticipation of a return to a village in northern Kashmir, with six dark-green suitcases filled with gifts for young relatives whom one has not yet met.

  Nowhere is the airport’s appeal more concentrated than in the television screens placed at intervals across terminals, which announce, in unromantic fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. The screens imply a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggest the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rings out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understand nothing of the language and where no one knows our identities. The lack of detail about the destinations serves only to stir unfocused images of nostalgia and longing: Rome, Tripoli, Nice, St Petersburg, Miami, Muscat via Abu Dhabi, Algiers, Kiev, Grand Cayman via Nassau – all of these destinations are like enemies of despair, to which we might appeal at moments of claustrophobia and stagnation, when home has become too much.

  We forget how extraordinary and peculiar air travel can be. Yesterday we had chicken inasal for lunch at a crowded open air stall in the humid heat by the Guimaras Strait, and later this morning we’ll be sat at gate 42 at Heathrow eating a bacon and egg roll while we wait for our connecting flight to Glasgow, where it’s currently -2°C.

  Arrivals can be hellish, of course, but despite the exhaustion, your senses are on fire, registering everything – the light, the signage, the skin tones, the metallic sounds, the advertisements – as if you were on drugs or a newborn baby – or Tolstoy. It is like being reborn. How peculiar this morning light seems against the memory of dawn in the Obudu hills. How unusual the recorded announcements after the wind in the High Atlas.

  We should never give up this perspective. We should want to keep in mind everything we’ve learnt of alternative realities, as we have seen them in Tunis or Hyderabad, Lima or St Gallen. We should never forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Valletta and Luoyang, that this is only one of many possible worlds.

  Despite its (often well-deserved) appalling reputation, the airport is – in its own way – trying to teach us a range of very important things.

  10.

  The Pleasure of the Flight

  It’s strange, being up here, pressed against the window. To the side, a pair of engines, their immense labours concealed within their gently rounded casing. In modest lettering they announce their limited, but precise demands: that we avoid walking on the wing from which they are suspended and that we do not attempt to pour anything other than oil into their small apertures. Later they will be tended by a team of engineers, currently sleeping, in a service hanger on another continent.

  In the cabin, there is not much talk about the clouds that are visible up here. No one thinks it remarkable that somewhere above an ocean we flew past a vast white candy-floss island which would have made a perfect seat for an angel or even God himself in a painting by Piero della Francesca. No one leaps to their feet to announce with requisite emphasis that, out of the window, we are flying over a cloud, a matter that would have amazed Leonardo and Poussin, Claude and Constable.

  The world feels large and we very small – and the contrast is delightful. On this scale, the actions and concerns of our own lives don’t really count for much. We’re beautifully reminded of our own thorough unimportance.

  Across history, people have imagined their gods living on lofty mountaintops or in the sky, looking down benignly on human life. It’s not a random association: from this height we can smile gently at humanity and perhaps love it a little, too. Even the grimmer areas of urban sprawl look serene and beautifully organised: the eastern suburbs of Glasgow nestle among wide tracts of farmland; microscopic lorries work their way placidly towards the docks of Hamburg along elegant ribbons of autobahn.

  The view helps us to have more kindly thoughts about those left back at home. Their faults drop away against the backdrop of the Southern Alps or the Singapore Strait. We want to be patient and warm around them. We see the broader outlines of their lives. We’d like to tell them in franker, more direct terms how fond we are of them.

  Lunch arrives; we spear a tiny roasted potato or a small piece of fish and prise the foil top off a squat carton of orange juice as we pass over a region where, four miles below on the ground, we would need to travel in an armed convoy. Later we pad along the aisle to explore the lavatory, wearing the shapeless socks the airline has provided. Perhaps at this moment a team of climbers are encamped below the summit of a ferocious mountain, bracing themselves for a final assault on the ice walls and overhangs – while we carefully dry our hands and think of watching a comedy on our seat-back screen.

  The physical world – against which our ancestors struggled – has been tamed; our little tube of alloy and glass slips calmly over the forests, deserts and oceans that thwarted and terrified them.

  As we start the descent, helped by the complex manoeuvres of the plane through the lower atmosphere, we dream of becoming the people we long to be. We’ll be energetic but thoughtful; sensitive but adventurous; we’ll eat modestly, appreciate our circumstances and remain committed to doing our best with the time that remains to us.

  11.

  Pretty Cities

  The majority of our days are spent on ugly streets. Ever since the development of concrete, steel and plastic, monstrosities have become the norm. Most of our cities are furiously ugly.

  One (optimistic) view is that this might not matter very much. Perhaps we can be the same sort of people wherever we happen to be; the colour of the bricks or the design of windows surely leave the fundamentals of life unchanged.

  And yet, as our travels show, we crave architectural and civic beauty, because we intuitively appreciate how much we are at the mercy of our architectural environments. We know we aren’t the same people wherever we go. In the middle of Frankfurt, Milton Keynes or Detroit, the ugliness hacks away at our souls. And in Trieste or Portland, Seville or Florence, our benign personalities expand

  It would be a good deal easier if we could remain in much the same mood wherever we happened to be. It is maddening how vulnerable we are to the coded messages that emanate from buildings. In the best cities, the streets whisper of hope, dignity, community and friendship. They invite us to become the noblest versions of ourselves.

  If we better understood the impact that ugly architecture has on our lives, its power to sap our spirits and give assistance to our worst selves, we’d surely legislate against it. But as yet, no politician who announced an intention to make the built environment more beautiful would prosper – or even be deemed sane.

  In utopia, architecture would more fairly be interpreted as a branch of mental health, with a crucial role to play in public contentment. And bad design would – at last – be interpreted as the crime it is to the health of the collective spirit.

  Until then, it is to travel – and the intelligent, soul-stirring streets of San Gimignano or Kyoto, Jaipur or Yangon – that we must direct our longings.

  12.

  The Pleasure of Otherness

  Only a few hours ago, you were at home; now you’re here, in the souk in the Old Medina in Casablanca. There’s a man, who must be a decade older than you, sitting on a worn leather stool in a little booth selling pistachios, preserved lemons and harissa paste. This might have been his life for the last twenty years or so. His radio is playing music by someone you don’t recognise, but who is probably a huge star, with a powerful voice that soars as she repeats a word that sounds like ‘eleh’. You’ve travelled a long way to go and see the Hassan II Mosque. For him, it’s just a typical backdrop to ordinary life – as familiar and unremarkable as your queen’s palace might be to you.

  Or you’re in the German capital, in a small bar in Kreuzberg, around the corner from the hotel you’ve just checked into; it’s quite busy, even though it’s the middle of the afternoon. There are candles lit on all the wonky tables; next to you, a good-looking couple are having an intense conversation in which the words Kultur and Philosophie keep getting stressed; a middle-aged woman is immersed in a thick book (about Schopenhauer) and taking rapid notes; at quiet moments the bartender is skimming through a newspaper – Die Zeit – which, you notice, features a large mathematical equation on the front page.

  What we can feel at such moments is a basic pleasure at encountering ‘otherness’: practices, customs, habits and vocabularies that are strikingly at odds with those we know from home and which give us a welcome reminder of the sheer diversity and complexity of the world. From a settled vantage point, it’s only too easy to picture humanity as homogeneous and, therefore, a little dull and prescriptive. But this isn’t a view which can survive the first few hours in a new country. We’re quickly reminded that, for all the talk of globalisation, places retain a fascinating, welcome distinctiveness. The smells, the sounds, the bread, the light at dawn, people’s shoes, the way of making tea, the arrangements of the taps and sockets, the light at 5pm… everything is satisfyingly ‘other’. This can become an invitation to explore alternative ways of living and thinking. There may be
many more routes to being happy than the ones we’ve explored to date. Perhaps we can make the changes that had felt so impossible before.

  All this the pistachio-seller is subtly helping us to remember. We might buy a packet or two from him to cement the lesson.

  13.

  The Longing to Talk to Strangers

  The tourist industry has been spectacularly successful at opening up foreign countries and introducing us to their most important and worthwhile attractions.

  Except for one extraordinary omission: the people. By some unseen, undiscussed but all-powerful rule, tourism tends to separate us from the inhabitants of the countries we’ve come to visit. They remain shadowy, occasional figures: the guy by the pool, the taxi driver from the airport, the nice lady who took us on the trip through the forest. But the real focus is always elsewhere, on the culture and the monuments, the natural spectacles and the food.

  This is a source of serious sadness. Most of the places we want to travel to are associated with a distinctive way of being: an implicit personality. In New York, it might be confidence and modernity; in Amsterdam, the dignity of daily life; in Melbourne, a welcome directness and warmth. It’s a range of human virtues that draw us to places, but we’re normally only permitted to encounter these via their external, cultural expressions. We don’t really want to shop or see pictures; we want to talk.

  Yet we remain – painfully – outsiders. We pass a big family celebration at a long table on a café terrace. Someone is singing a song to which everyone knows the words. We scan the properties for sale in the windows of estate agents and picture ourselves moving in. We observe people after work catching trains and buses home to areas we know nothing of. We’re continually noticing interesting faces, styles of clothing, the gestures friends use when they greet one another. In the evening, we hear the sounds of a party filtering down from a brightly lit third-floor flat. We may have explored every painting this country made in the eighteenth century and become experts at the late medieval style of its temples, but we’re only scratching the surface of its being. The genius loci – the spirit of the place – is eluding us. We want to know what it would be like – if only for a few days – to join in and belong; and to try out for ourselves the nicest aspects of the attitudes and point of view of the people who live here.

  In the travel industry of the future, we’ll regard booking a local friend as no different from booking a hotel room or a flight: just another essential, normal part of organising a successful trip.

  Until then, we must develop our skills at courageously going up to strangers and sharing a thought on the weather or the state of local politics. Or else we can remain in our shy cocoon, but should at least interpret our melancholy feelings as symptoms of an industry-wide failure, not a personal curse.

  14.

  The Vulnerability of Perfection to Emotional Troubles

  The tourist industry spends a lot of time assuring us that the more money we spend, the happier we will be.

  The equation often seems deeply convincing – and, sometimes, if resources allow, we do as we’ve been told. We select a truly stunning location right on the ocean or in a fashionable district that used to be full of factories and is now dotted with stylish boutiques. The hotel has very nice bedside lamps, fine art on the walls and a luxurious marble bathroom. The service is impeccable. We secure a succession of tables at well-reviewed restaurants. We arrange a sleek car to meet us at the airport. There are endless attractions for the children. We pay for a tennis teacher. We feel deeply fortunate: we are going to have the holiday of a lifetime.

  But amidst all this expenditure, we’re liable to have neglected a crucial component of human contentment. All capacity for satisfaction depends first and foremost upon emotional well-being. The slightest psychological disturbance can destroy the benefits of a multi-billion-dollar hotel and chauffeured automobile. If our partner makes a snide comment, it won’t matter how celebrated the homard au champagne happens to be; the delicate richness of its flavour will count for very little when we’ve been the victim of a sarcastic remark about our career potential. A grumpy thirteen-year-old child can single-handedly negate the efforts of an entire team of gardeners or museum curators. Or if the person we are with won’t have sex with us in the way we really want, it will be no consolation that some small tubes of conditioner in the vicinity have been personally selected by Donatella Versace or that a handmade Belgian chocolate truffle was placed on the pillow into which we now feel like weeping deeply.

  Regarded from an immense, impersonal distance, these are comic eventualities; close up they feel more like tragedies. This isn’t an argument against luxury – just an analysis of its limitations. The same sorrows might easily come our way on a shoestring budget. We’re not encountering the irrelevance of spending a great deal of money on travel: only the centrality and primacy of emotional satisfaction within the total economy of happiness.

  15.

  The Importance of Family Holidays

  It’s because we’re all such intuitive experts in knowing how they can go wrong that it’s worth remembering what – at their best – family holidays can achieve. The point has little to do with the destination or the thrills of the itinerary: it lies in the capacity of a trip to cement the bonds of affection between family members; in the power of a trip to make a family.

  For a start, trips erase the normal hierarchy between generations. A child gets to see their parents in unfamiliar – and often usefully less than impressive – situations. A father looks awkward in swimming trunks, a bulging stomach no longer disguised by a carefully fitted suit; or a mother – who is normally effortlessly in charge – is revealed as rather shy when it comes to trying to order from a foreign menu. With their frailties and limitations more on show, parents are humanised. A father turns out to be very nervous about being splashed in the pool, a mother is useless at building sandcastles. A child has a chance to be a parental equal or superior. When it comes to manoeuvring a rowing boat into the jetty or buying tomatoes at the market, a ten-year-old might be as adept as – or more skilled than – a parent; there’s a new, welcome experience of equality.

  There are associated benefits in experiencing danger together: in being caught out in a rainstorm after the museum, in getting lost in the bazaar, in needing to sort out a stolen wallet, in having to find somewhere to sleep at 11pm. At the time, these discomforts feel like an interruption of the real point of the trip. Only later do we realise that they are what helped us to get to know one another properly and overcome the egocentricity and reserve of home.

  A trip is helpful, too, in allowing parents to see the world through the unjaded eyes of their children. The normal hierarchies of pleasure are upturned and new delights unearthed. The breakfast buffet at the hotel becomes thrilling in a way it otherwise never would, because for a five-year-old child, few things are as delightful as being allowed to carry a small plate around and choose freely from three kinds of bread and explore strange combinations of cheese and strawberries or a sausage and smoked salmon. The museum of art has nothing to rival this. In the company of children, we notice how conservative our adult sensibilities have become. We realise we have forgotten how enchanting a small lizard can be or how much fun is available from timing jumps over a succession of small waves.

  When adolescence arrives, the family holiday often loses its sweetness; the child wants to remain at home or go out with their friends; it would be horrible to go for a walk along the beach with parents or join them on the tennis court. The death of the family holiday in adolescence is – ironically – quite probably the very earliest move towards a new epoch of family holidays, due to start in two decades’ time or so. The rejection of the parents, which seems so harsh right now, is what will allow children, in turn, to have a family of their own one day – and eventually to end up doing all the things they currently most disdain. They’ll be singing in the paddling pool and pretending their ice cream is too hot; they’ll make unfunny jokes with the best will in the world and won’t care very much that there’s a coffee stain on their ill-fitting T-shirt. They too will come to learn the invaluable benefits of a family trip away.