What is travel?’ is an interesting question, but more for what it tells you about the people doing the asking. The meaning of travel, despite ‘definitive’ articles to the contrary, is pretty subjective. And your relationship to it changes as you get older and begin to spend your weekends doing things like browsing health insurance policies. Reasons and motivations begin to wrinkle, just like us, revealing character.

Because when you’re young travel is sensory and simple. It’s that white-knuckle feeling of a plane taking off for the first time, when your stomach drops and your ears pop. The sustained hyper-real sensation when everything is new and brightly coloured. Ice-creams taste sweeter, smells are stranger. You can almost feel the synapses firing, taking it all in.

By middle age the motivations behind travel get more complicated, like your tax returns. It becomes an escape from cubical drudgery, a sun-soaked interlude from Real Life, or an existential change of perspective: the cultural equivalent of surfacing for breath. There’s more awareness about where you’re going, and what’s waiting for you when you get back home.

Have you ever known train travel to be luxurious before? If you have ever been upgraded to first class on a flight after moving from economy, you will know exactly what we are talking about when we say luxury. If you are booking a long train journey, such as the Trans-Siberian, you may want to […]

How Train Travel Can Be Stylish — simple Ula

‘What is travel?’ is an interesting question, but more for what it tells you about the people doing the asking. The meaning of travel, despite ‘definitive’ articles to the contrary, is pretty subjective. And your relationship to it changes as you get older and begin to spend your weekends doing things like browsing health insurance policies. Reasons and motivations begin to wrinkle, just like us, revealing character.

Because when you’re young travel is sensory and simple. It’s that white-knuckle feeling of a plane taking off for the first time, when your stomach drops and your ears pop. The sustained hyper-real sensation when everything is new and brightly coloured. Ice-creams taste sweeter, smells are stranger. You can almost feel the synapses firing, taking it all in.

But travel isn’t like that. When travelling, discomfort finds you. The whole thing is unpredictable at a fundamental level. That’s kind of the point. When you order chargrilled gizzards in Tokyo’s Memory Lane or fight for seat space with chickens on a bus in Ecuador, you don’t know what’s going to happen next. And isn’t that incredibly liberating in a way? It’s like a search for something that can’t be Googled. Something that has to be earned through effort, not given by chance.

There’s a great quote from Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that goes: ‘It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.’ Which is a pretty apt description of travel, all things considered. Life occurs in the hard uncomfortable bits, not the breezy view from the summit. And sometimes the old chestnut is true after all: the destination doesn’t matter, all we want is somewhere to get lost on the climb.

https://www.intrepidtravel.com/adventures/what-travel-is/

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton