Why travel is no holiday

There are times when I think the inherent interest of travel is less in the doing than in the having done, that it is more appealing in the past and future tenses than in the present continuous. 'I'm going travelling' sounds brave, intrepid and exciting. They were the words that most motivated me as I struggled to meet deadlines, survived on stodgy canteen fare and stared out of my window at the grey, English sky. 'I've been travelling' has a noble, satisfying ring to it. Perhaps, when I get back to family and friends, Sunday morning fry-ups, Doctor Who and my own bed, those words, and the licence to say them, will be my ultimate reward.

'I am travelling' has entirely different implications. It lacks the finality and the sense of purpose of the previous two. 'Right now' or 'at the moment' might be tacked on the end to emphasise the temporariness, not only of the act of travel itself, but of every single experience that that act encompasses. Travel is a limbo state, when you do not quite belong, when you are not entirely Here but not yet There either. Sometimes, the words 'I am travelling' exhaust me. They make me crave stability and stasis. When you add the word 'alone', as I often do, they take on a subtle hint of sadness.

Sadness is a recurring theme of travel writing, as I am learning. Paul Theroux's anthology The Tao of Travel is full of gobbits from melancholy nomads bemoaning their chosen way of life. In 1807 the Swiss novelist and essayist Madame de Stael described travel as 'one of the saddest pleasures of life'; Theroux himself calls it 'a sad and partly masochistic pleasure.' During the road trip recounted in 'Travels With Charley', John Steinbeck suffered bouts of loneliness, taking solace in occasional visits from his wife Elaine, to whom he subsequently wrote 'I'm glad you came out and it was a good time, wasn't it? It took the blankness off a lot.' And just the other day, on a blog whose name I've forgotten, I came upon a quote from an author whose name I've also forgotten: 'It's not an adventure if you're not miserable.'

When this trip was only an idea, it didn't occur to me that travel might make one sad. I thought it would consist of moment after moment of unbridled joy, wonder and awe - until the week before my departure, when I was convinced it was going to be hellish. The reality, of course, is somewhere in the middle. It follows the emotional trajectory of most other lifestyles: a reasonably smooth continuum of being okay or being fine, peppered here and there with moments of delight, inspiration, excitement, misery, weariness and dissatisfaction. Before this trip, travel was one of the purest forms of happiness I knew. But I realise now that when I thought I was travelling, I was really just going on holiday; novelty and foreignness were a source of delight primarily because they were thrown into relief by the impending return to familiarity and routine. When you adopt travel as a way of life rather than a break from it, you realise that it is not and cannot be immune to the ups and downs and moments of blankness that life invariably presents us with, however happy we consider ourselves.

I recently had a conversation with an American who was on a brief trip to Montreal. It soon came up that I was on an extended backpacking trip, and he expressed his approval.

'But it's hard sometimes, you know?' I said.

'Haha!' he cried. 'First world problems!'

He's right, of course. Part of me is irritated by my inability to appreciate my own immense privilege. I feel I should be grateful for every waking second. But then I cut myself some slack, and tell myself it's okay not to be delighted and amazed and awestruck all the time. It's okay to be just okay. If anything, this experience is a reminder that our tendency to look back fondly on our best-loved memories - and to forget the neutral, uneventful, neither-happy-nor-sad moments that make up the bulk of existence - tricks us into believing that a lasting state of pure happiness is a conceivable and attainable thing. But even the things we idealise and dream about have rough edges when you see them close up.

This doesn't mean I don't like travelling, or that I wish I wasn't doing it. It just means that it is a different experience to the one I was expecting. And quite frankly, so much the better. After all, if I were only happy when travelling and travelling only ever made me happy, how on earth would I be able to go home?


PS. I realise my blog entries of late have been a) few and far between and b) not particularly informative as to what I'm doing and when I'm doing it, and that consequently this blog is less an account of my travels than a mish mash of random anecdotes and not-very-deep reflection. However, I have come to realise that there's really not much point in me describing things for the sake of describing them, because it bores me, and I'm rubbish at it. For the record, I'm in Quebec City, in a nice, friendly hostel in the old town, and I'm about to go exploring. Apologies to those who would like more details, but for now, that's all you're getting.

Going back

I'm not quite sure where the time went, but the first leg of my journey is over. Well over, in fact. It's been nearly two weeks since I hugged my seventh and final American host goodbye, got on a train that crawled through the Adirondacks, crossed another border and arrived in Montreal tired, excited, and alone. The part of my trip that consisted in large part of me staying with friends in a country I had visited before, during which I had some knowledge of what to expect, and where English was everyone's first language, is behind me.

Here's what I did in America. I traipsed through the big city and did nothing in the deep countryside. I explored towns I didn't know and revisited ones I did. I rode in cars, trucks, trains, buses and boats; slept in dormitories and cabins, on sofas and on airbeds. I had conversations with strangers; made new friends and caught up with old ones; met their families, pets, partners and roommates. I swam in the sea, ate al fresco, saw fireworks; I chopped wood, picked blueberries, learned to arrange flowers, and developed an obsessive fear of ticks. I played board games, went to a drive-in, ate my own weight in pancakes, rode a segway, saw live music, went swing dancing, failed at zumba; I read things, wrote things, thought about things, talked about things, listened to things, and learned things. 

Birthday breakfast

Wilder Hill Gardens, Conway, MA: my home for a week

One of many country walks

And yet I was plagued, from time to time, by a nagging feeling that I was somehow cheating by staying with people I knew in places I had already been - that however fulfilling and challenging the trip, I wasn't really travelling at all. A recent purchase - Paul Theroux's anthology of travel writing, The Tao of Travel - would seem to confirm this. Theroux's kind of travel is valuable precisely in that it forces you away from the comforts of the familiar and into the position of an outsider. It is, he writes, 'a leap in the dark. If the destination were familiar and friendly, what would be the point of going there?'

But I happen to think a lot of familiar, friendly destinations. Going onwards is important, of course, but going back is important too. What, after all, is the point of falling in love with a place if you never return to it, or of making happy memories with people if you never get the chance to make any more? My trip to America was about finding a series of temporary stopping places rather than, as Theroux writes, 'being always on the move towards an uncertain destination'. It was less about forging fleeting connections with people and places than about revitalising connections that had been dulled by work, responsibility, and distance. I was not a traveller à la Theroux: always peripheral, always a stranger, in a perpetual state of passing through. Instead, I became a temporary member of successive households and communities. I returned. I retraced my steps. I remembered why I wanted to return at all, why these people and these places mattered to me to begin with.

Now the adventure continues, into the unknown.