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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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Travel
memories When Sheila and I married in January 1982 - after a brief courtship - we realized that we shared a great passion for travel. We were both students then - I was in the process of submitting my doctoral dissertation and she was due to complete her Masters in the following summer. One evening about five months later, with our student days finally at an end, Sheila sat cross-legged on the bed looking into the pages of a dog-eared copy of Hammond's World Atlas. Spreading out a map, she said: "Let's go to Sri Lanka, we will have our honeymoon there. We didn't have a proper honeymoon after the wedding, so let's go now." Turning the pages of the Atlas, she continued: "Later this year we'll go on a three-week journey across northern India. I want to see the Taj Mahal, visit the great Hindu pilgrim centres and experience rural Indian life. Okay? Then early next year we will..." "Ha, ha!" I interrupted, "That was a good one. Now can we discuss something more sensible? Travelling costs a packet and we don't have any money." Except a fairly decent sum our parents had contributed as a gift to set us up in life. I did not want to touch it. Sheila was
adamant. "We'll borrow from it," she countered, "Besides,
I shall do everything to minimise our expenses. I won't buy clothes except
the absolute minimum. Just two pairs of shoes. We won't buy a car if that
will save us some money..." Thus began our life of travel. Over the past 26 years we have travelled extensively through 135 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Except for an 18 month hiatus when our son was born - we always left him with our parents during our often reckless travels - we've spent two months every year journeying to the remotest corners of the globe. The face of travel has changed completely in the age of the Internet. Now everything can be pre-arranged and booked in advance from the comfort of your home. In the 1980s it was common to hold confirmed onward flight tickets and to be told at the airline counter that "your name is not on the list". Of course, a small financial transaction always secured the "confirmed" seats but it was sometimes difficult to gauge the size of the gift to be offered. (Once, after a smaller-than-expected donation, our names appeared but "at number 400 in the waiting list", and a further financial inducement was necessary to push them to the top.) Perhaps the biggest change from the early 1980s is the drab uniformity of the urban landscape today. Sheila and I call it the High Street syndrome: Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, New York, Toronto... all now look the same. Culture is walled in for the benefit of tourists in special buildings selling expensive tickets. This is the age of mass tourism. In the 1990s we barely came across foreign tourists in cities like Montevideo, Cape Town, Hanoi and Kiev. And in many of these cities there were hardly any local tourists either. Today all these places are firmly part of the tourist map but I don't believe that this has brought about a greater understanding of foreign cultures. Ask almost anyone who has returned from a holiday abroad and you will be treated to colourful stories about taxi drivers who cheated, of rude locals and beggars, about vendors who tried to sell trinkets at exorbitant prices. In all our travels we have found people amazingly friendly everywhere. There have been occasions where we have found ourselves in extreme danger and have sometimes been 'cheated', but we have accepted this as part of travel. What we always recall is the overwhelming affection of the people we have met. First published in VISA 81 (Oct 2008) |