Why we travel

Our experiences abroad have led us, in a natural way, to explore the travel writing of Bruce Chatwin, Bill Bryson, Will Ferguson, Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, and most recently, Ryszard Kapuscinski.  A colleague introduced me to Kapuscinski, a Polish journalist who reported from Africa for many years.  His book, The Shadow of the Sun, is an education, as he carefully unravels the complex history, culture and conflict that has shaped the "Dark Continent".

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Kapuscinski writes, “Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces.  A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star ... Often the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens.  The newcomer has a wide angle lens, which gives him a  distant, diminished view, although one with a long horizon line, while the local always employs a telescopic lens that magnifies the slightest detail.”

It's a firm reminder that for the most part, travelling is visiting and we cannot come to know a place just by passing through.  We take away trinkets and only the slimmest awareness of what it means to live in that place.  In his much-quoted essay Why We Travel, Pico Iyer says, "We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed."

When I consider some of the places we've been, including Spain after the death of Franco, the Solomon Islands, Egypt, and Turkey at the start of the Iraq war, we were changed by what we experienced. Now as we travel to East and South Africa, Madagascar and Cambodia, we know these places grapple with the past and the future, and we will be challenged by that.  But that's the point in going.  As Iyer says, "We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow's headline ..."

Lest this all sound too harsh, I would insist that travel also offers many gifts. Iyer goes on to say, "And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” It is while travelling that we may be most free to be our best selves, even newly-invented selves.

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller