Travelling

The longer I live on this earth the more I seem to succumb to these inopportune urges to go travelling. Travelling might be a slightly glorified way of putting it; sometimes the travelling amounts to no more than a quick  stroll round the block, a jaunt into London or a day trip to Margate or Snowdonia or a weekend in Bruges, Berlin or Transylvania — I wouldn’t pass up on CenterParcs — but this travelling, as I like to put it, can easily and seamlessly turn in to two years in the Gobi or Patagonia or the three years I have just spent exploring the prairies and tundra of Nunavut and the North Western Territories and there is no saying how or when something as innocent as popping out to stretch my legs can turn into something more fully-fledged and overblown.

I do not remember being beset so frequently by these urges to move, to leave the place I am resting in, to get my blood pumping more than it presently is; it is almost like something has taken me over in the past five years or so, or at the very most ten. 

More than often, the urges come at night. I cannot recall lying in bed so frequently and suddenly just donning my travelling vest and jacket, my all-purpose hiking boots, my little Berghaus rucksack and without having had any inkling that I would be going five minutes before the urge, I’m suddenly out of the door and not in my bed anymore, I am on the street, on the 168, on my way to Dover Priory or Luton airport, on one of my many bicycles, moving, moving, moving, moving. 

I can be one moment under the covers and the next on the Rue de Bellechasse in the 7th or on the Maleçon in Lima, it doesn’t matter where, I can be in these places almost as if it hadn’t taken me all the time it did to get there — don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some form of time-travel trickery, this is genuine — but the feeling is that when I have the moment of realisation that I have arrived, when I turn around and savour the Mediterranean air, the tang of the Sevillan blood oranges, I am totally incredulous that I am actually in one of those places and it is entirely as if I was taken there of someone else’s accord.

Yesterday I was in Istanbul for example, on the European side of course, until it suddenly struck me that I was actually in Istanbul and that I hadn’t really planned to go there at all, that the journey had been somewhat of a blur, too easy almost, that once I had got on the plane — I flew Pegasus again who are shit incidentally — I couldn’t really get off, well certainly not mid-flight and I felt stupid as I stopped by a corner amongst the cheap Chinese tat of the electronics market against all the other people who had obviously chosen to be where they were now versus me, some sort of hostage to a ghost.

That is the thing; once set in motion, it is terribly difficult to stop. There is no mechanism in me, no propensity or power that can help me see that this is happening again, that I am sleepwalking - it’s not really sleepwalking because I know precisely where I’m going, sleepwalking is a lazy comparison - that I am dreaming, that I am taken over that I am under the control of something not me, that I don’t decide where how and when I go anywhere in fact until this thing decides to let me in on the joke by which time it is far too late.

And that’s the other thing. It might sound pleasant all this flouncing about to far-flung places and I am not ungrateful. But the destinations are not always as pleasant as they sound. You are never really even at a destination.  You must always be in motion, always on the go. You must move or the illusion will vanish. The movement prolongs the movement itself. If you stop it’s over and you see that you have been led astray. 

The names trip off the tongue - icons - Bangkok, Bujumbura the fjords of Norway, Nile cruises, Antarctica, I’ve been to all of them in the past three months, but they don’t look anything like you think they look, like they do in magazines and photos, like on Facebook; there can be some awful corners and side streets, places you must go down to reach other places, which places themselves most cruelly end up being even worse than the places you needed to go through to get to them: alleyways, cut-throughs, think of Varanasi or Delhi’s old city, places where you might brush shoulders with hostile crowds, where you’re hemmed in, put upon by breathless faces, whispers, hush-hushes, murmurs, suddenly the sun drops down behind the horizon, the birds are called in, you might escape but then you’re all at once alone and displaced, not quite sure how to get back to where you started until suddenly as if from a dream you realise that you’ve gone travelling again, wandering, and it dawns on you that the reason you feel bad is not of your own making; you’ve been had again and you can return back to home, it shouldn’t take long.

It is not pleasant to go somewhere unbidden, unprepared.  It is a shock when you can’t choose the destination, when you’re practically forced. It is a shock to be cast out of your hearth and home. It is a shock because you can seemingly be somewhere so fast, instantaneously, it is a shock perhaps because it can strike without warning, it can happen any time. It will happen again.

It is not always so much the start of the trip then that can cause problems, it is more where it can lead and how long it can go on for. When I went to the Gobi I thought I was going to the Tate, but then it turned into Southampton, Cunard line, some convoluted passage to Basra, all these just totally random places that have no connection to each other, a freighter across the Caspian from Baku, and even though I knew I was having a real shitty time — I was cold and the ship’s diesel was unbearable —I had no idea I wasn’t there because I’d decided to be, because I needed to be, because I’d chosen. Three years, four months was the time it took before I realised, time that I don’t have to waste, time that I certainly did waste, that I won’t get back, yet time that I know certainly will be wasted in future since there is no way of stopping these involuntary peregrinations.

Travelling for me is less Instagram and Maldives and more like falling down a six-mile laundry chute for aeons. It is like wandering around mazes whose configurations change as you’re in them. It is like being sucked into a hole or a hoover. It is always breathless. It is always shocked. Travelling is like suddenly being the most stupid thick-headed person in the world, being overcome, being a zombie who no one sees or remotely cares about. The incitement to go travelling is the biggest ever trick.

The only consolation about travelling is how quickly it stops. It’s easy to get home. Remarkably easy. This doesn’t make it worth it. The time it takes to get back is precisely the time it took to get there. Yes, it takes time. It is not instantaneous. But it can feel as quick as the quickness you feel when you’re there, it feels like -BANG - you’re suddenly back - BANG - why, how ,when did I go - BANG - what a ridiculous and pointless trip, what frippery and wastefulness, what the fuck was I doing on the beach in Morecambe in 75 mph gales; the speed of the motion away equally matched by the speed of return.

And yet, the more I notice it, the more that it happens,  it makes it somehow easier to spot the urge a bit better, to observe the very first movement when it happens, I might only need to go into Hampstead or St. John’s Wood now before I can put the lid on it. But then you see the dichotomy so clearly. Are you ready to observe how clear the battle lines are? Are you really willing to take sides? If you don’t travel you’ve got to stay where you are, there’s no half measures. If you go, you’re gone practically for good. Because as soon as the half-measures come in, you’re off again on a random Fokker to Brussels, so keep yourself alert, stay vigilant or, up to you, spend your whole goddam life travelling.