TO WANDER...

Travel is what makes me happy and always has done. That sounds trite and perhaps happy is the wrong word. Travel is the thing that keeps me going; it's like fuel. Getting on a plane, arriving somewhere and roaming, discovering new things, just sitting and feeling the atmosphere of a place. Once you know what a place is like, no one can take that away from you. Whatever kind of life slump I've ever been in travelling has pulled me out of it.

When I flew home from India I met some English travellers at Mumbai airport. They were the first non Indians I'd seen apart from our group of friends since boarding the plane at Heathrow on the way over, so that removed my usual social reserve and I got chatting to them. I learned that some of them had been roaming the world for two years.

Classic remark: "I've been wearing these shorts for two years, I just wash 'em in the sea about once a month. You gotta skank 'em out."

Apart from being incredibly deeply tanned and incredibly chilled out, they had a sense of ease not just with each other, but with everyone. I wondered what the boy with the shorts had been like before he left on his two year trip. Another guy had been in the Himalayas for 6 months, staying in villagers' homes. The usual barriers between two English people were dissolved and we passed the time on the plane together like old friends.



Some good friends have also been roaming the world lately. One, I will see next week and I intend to wring out as much as I can glean and vicariously live every story he has to tell about all the places he's been in the last 6 months or so. Another friend is about two months into the most amazing adventure and she's even managed to regularly update a travel blog with beautiful pictures and posts from remote islands and mountains. I have found myself searching "aesthetically pleasing backpacks" a few times after checking in there. It really makes me think, when I'm so excited about others' travels whether I could do it. I travel: I go and visit friends in Europe, spend time in Paris, I love doing that but you can't do it constantly (well I can't). But to put everything you need for a year into a backpack and just go - not knowing how long for or even exactly where - just to discover the parts of the world you haven't yet seen...

Where would you start?

{photo: Greg Kadel}