Sometimes I wonder why people choose to travel at all. If you’re travelling for work or visiting people, fair enough, but why would you put yourself through all that hassle without a good reason? If I’m honest, travelling is enormously inconvenient and frequently uncomfortable as well. Unless you’re fabulously wealthy of course, which most of us aren’t. If you dwelt too long on the disadvantages, you’d probably never leave home again. All that hanging around in airports, endless road journeys, useless showers and lumpy pillows – really it’s so much more comfortable at home.
And still we do it. The rewards must outweigh the inconvenience, in your own mind at least. When I think of what motivates me to travel, it’s really quite embarrassing. I look back over years of travel and mostly it’s fleeting images and passing fancies that have caused me to pack my suitcase and head off to new places.
For instance, I went to Vienna largely because of a line in a song. When Billy Joel sang ‘Vienna waits for you’, I felt that if Vienna really was waiting for me, it would be rude not to go. If I’m honest, once I arrived I don’t think Vienna was really that interested, but I still fell in love with it.
I love camels. I know there are detractors, those who think that they’re smelly and bad-tempered, but I’m not one. I think they’re delightful. So, what do you do if you like camels? You don’t go on a day trip to London Zoo, you travel thousands of miles into the Indian desert to the Pushkar Camel Fair, where you can see loads of them all at once. I think they were happier to see me than the Viennese.
Then there was Mexico. The main reason we went to Mexico was because of an animated children’s film. Coco (which is actually a really good film) is all about the Day of the Dead and once I’d watched it I knew immediately that I had to go to Mexico and experience it for myself. If I’m honest, it bore little resemblance to the film, but the reality was truly wonderful.
At the moment, I’m reading a book by Tahir Shah called In Arabian Nights. I read and enjoyed another of his books, The Caliph’s House, which is about moving his family to Casablanca and restoring a tumble-down house. It wasn’t the traditional ‘problems with restoring a house in a foreign land’ book, but more a reflection on the nature of Moroccan people and society. In Arabian Nights continues with his life in Casablanca, but this time it is about how important story-telling was in his own upbringing and how it influences the lives of the people around him. I’m hooked. I’ve dug out my childhood copy of Tales from the Arabian Nights and am researching the fast train to Casablanca right now.