Travels in my head

In spite of the absence of bookshops, traveling in my head has major benefits. The tickets cost nothing, the flights are short and the service is great. More importantly, I can visit places that are unaffordable, impossible to reach or that just aren’t there. With a little bit of effort, I can even imagine smells and sounds. I haven’t yet got textures right.


I am not a great traveler by nature. I don’t enjoy conversing with new people in sign language and Pidgin English or going to interesting places, no matter how much people chatter on about how travel will improve me. My idea of self-improvement is to stay at home, explore a new book and, as I am an early riser, to go to bed early. If I really can’t escape travel I would prefer the destination to be a room with a view and a decent bookshop in the vicinity so that I can still fulfill my desire to lie around, do nothing and read, albeit with great scenery.

My attempts to talk about imagination, and how actually seeing the place will probably ruin the mental image upon which I have lavished so much time and effort, invariably seem to fall on deaf ears. I admit that there are pieces of art and museums that I really want to see, but I plead that I do not want my imaginary Venice or Goa marred by the bright neon of a global fast food franchise. I’ve been to one of those, and the non-standard burgers I get from my local purveyor of cholesterol are better (or far worse, depending on your approach to health).

That being said, I travel from time to time. I find the silence of a lonely desert landscape or the play of light over a western beach at sunset absolutely irresistible. I’d travel a million miles for really great scenery, even if there is no bookshop within credit card reach.

In spite of the absence of bookshops, traveling in my head has major benefits. The tickets cost nothing, the flights are short and the service is great. More importantly, I can visit places that are unaffordable, impossible to reach or that just aren’t there. With a little bit of effort, I can even imagine smells and sounds. I haven’t yet got textures right.

Traveling in my imagination has allowed me to correct many deficiencies that reality imposes on the world. As a child, I was excited by the idea of exploring the Earth’s four corners. Discovering the concept of a globe put a major dent in my ambition to become an explorer: nobody could explain to me precisely where on the ball the ‘four corners of the Earth’ were to be found.

My imagination however has shown them to me, and they aren’t as exciting as I hoped. Like all corners they are nondescript places that collect dust and, on arrival, there is no prospect of going anywhere but back. Instead of visiting them I now visualise small, quiet islands and the wealth that it takes to buy them and live on them. No man is an island, particularly if you don’t have the financial means.

French sociologist and travel philosopher, Jean-Didier Urbain, states that the luxury of travel is not gold taps and presidential suites, so much as it is personal space and freedom. This is especially true of those who travel from crowded societies, where personal freedom is curtailed by the demanding social requirements that ensure that everybody gets on with everyone else, even the neighbours.

Too much travel however may not be personal freedom, so much as a need to escape. Consider America’s founding fathers boarding the Mayflower or the black sheep of the Victorian family heading off towards the ‘Colonies’ under dark clouds of disgrace. In essence, too much travel can represent the loss of a home and a place to belong.

The problem with leaving a place is that if you do return, you may find that it has changed for the worse. Open tracts where you played as a child and the places where you sat and imagined ‘the world out there’, are invariably different, often smaller and less glamorous. Some of the places that I enjoyed most have now sprouted malls and housing developments.

Perhaps the purpose of travel is not so much in learning how to talk with your hands or surviving the local cuisine and global fast food franchises, but a new appreciation of the place from where you originate. Personal freedom might not involve stepping out of a restrictive environment, but could lie in accepting where you naturally belong.