Travelling a Different Way

I’ve been on this planet for almost six decades now, and I’ve been fortunate to see a fair portion of it. I’ve been able to travel widely, not just in the country where I was born but elsewhere, too.

My penchant for travelling started early, in childhood itself. My parents took us children on numerous trips during our school vacations. Later, the sort of work that I took up was such that for me it often seemed like a paid holiday—I got to travel widely for a job that I then just loved, and was paid to do so! It was rare for me to be in one place for very long, for soon enough I would head off on another work-cum-vacation trip, sometimes to another continent!

There’s an odd thing that stands out now when I think of my hectic travelling days—while I do remember some things I saw in some of the places I got to visit, I can recall very few of the people I got to meet on my many journeys. I think this owes in large measure to what I then considered a principal, if not the central, purpose of going to new places: to visit tourist attractions there, rather than to interact with and learn about and from local people. This was also basically what tourism was then widely made out to be: seeing the ‘must-see’ sites of tourist interest that a place had to offer, such as museums, palaces, forts, wildlife parks, beaches, forests, shopping districts, and so on. Mingling with local people wasn’t something high on the agenda of the tourist literature I consulted while visiting new places.

Many of my travels were done in this same mode, and so, it isn’t surprising that while I did the rounds of some of the major tourist spots my guidebooks recommended in many places that I got to I travel to, I hardly interacted with the local people (beyond what was necessary to get things done, like booking a room in a lodge or buying food in a store). While travelling on work, of course I did talk to people I needed to meet about work-related matters but perhaps we spoke of little else. I can’t recall engaging in many intimate, truly meaningful and memorable heart-to-heart conversations of a deep, personal sort in the course of my many journeys.

If I were to be able to travel now, I might like to do it very differently. I might like to put people before things, instead of as before, so that in a new place, I’d rather spend an afternoon chatting with someone interesting (and not necessarily famous) than visit a museum, or drop in at an NGO doing good work and interacting with volunteers there instead of gawking at the opulence of a medieval palace. That, I think, might make travel a much more meaningful and satisfying experience!