Fueling those feelings of anticipation

The anticipation of travel can sometimes be as pleasurable as the journey itself. Okay, well not quite. But for some of us, it comes close. And you've got to admit it can be fun, getting excited about the thought of going away, selecting the destinations, planning an itinerary, and making your bookings. If you read my blog you know I'm an admirer of Alain de Botton's writing and have posted about his thoughts on travel and anticipation before, about how a simple image of palm trees on a holiday brochure can have us longing to be on a beach. Australian travel writer Kim Wildman is also a fan and is currently preparing for a round-the-world-trip taking her to South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, London, Jamaica, Cuba, New Mexico, and Fiji! It's work, obviously - she's writing some guidebooks among other projects - but I love seeing people (even professional travel writers who do it for a living) getting so excited about the prospect of travelling. On a recent post, The Anticipation of Travel, on her blog Wild About Travel + Writing, Kim wrote a list of ways to fuel that sense of anticipation: buy a calendar (circle the departure date and countdown to take-off!), make a list (of must-do's, things to pack, what to buy etc), buy a guidebook (or two or three!), learn the lingo (the ten language basics are enough for starters), get cultural (immerse yourself in the place through books and movies), and read the local papers (It's something I do when I'm researching a book, but what a great idea to get us curious about a place for a holiday too). Take a look at Kim's blog out for the full list. I'm going to come up with a few more ideas in the meantime...

Spots of time and memory making

I’ve experienced so many ‘spots in time’ as we’ve travelled around Crete and Cyprus these last couple of months that my spirit if visible would appear polka-dotted. According to the poet William Wordsworth, ‘spots in time', discrete critical moments that we experience, such as a few minutes in the countryside taking in a bucolic scene, can number among some of the most significant moments in our lives. I'm more conscious of these 'spots of time' now than I used to be so when we have a "stop the car!" moment, I make an effort to fix the image in my memory. I gaze as long and hard as I can, I take a photo (or two or three) and I make notes about the light, smells and sounds around me.

Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude:
There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

The film ‘Spots of Time’ explores Wordsworth’s ideas and attempts to translate his poetry into film while the ‘Spots of Time’ photography project captures images of the Lake District at night, when all the tourists have gone home, as it would have been in Wordsworth's time. Alain de Botton reflects upon Wordsworth and his 'spots of time' in The Art of Travel, and you can download Wordsworth’s poems at Project Gutenberg.

Reasons to be alive: spots in time

I’ve been dipping into Alain De Botton’s The Art of Travel, as I do when I travel and reflect upon the nature of travel. De Botton tells us that the poet William Wordsworth believed that certain scenes stay with us throughout our lives and each time they enter our consciousness they offer a contrast to and relief from the present. De Botton writes about his own ‘spot of time’ during a visit to the Lake District, when, sitting on a bench in the late afternoon, he looks at a clump of trees by a stream and suddenly appreciates their “sharp gradations of green, as if someone had fanned out samples from a colour chart”. He wants to bury his face in the trees and be restored by their smell, and it strikes him as extraordinary that nature could “have come up with a scene so utterly suited to a human sense of beauty and proportion.” De Botton admits to being unaware of having fixed the scene to memory until one afternoon when he’s stuck in a traffic jam in London, “… the trees came back to me, pushing aside a raft of meetings and unanswered correspondence and asserting themselves in my consciousness. I was carried away from the traffic and the crowds and returned to trees whose names I didn’t know but which I could see as clearly as if they were standing before me. These trees provided a ledge against which I could rest my thoughts; they protected me from the eddies of anxiety and, in a small way that afternoon, contributed a reason to be alive.”

Slow travel: train-dreaming

"Journeys are the mid-wives of thought", writes Alain de Botton in my favorite book, Art of Travel. But of all the modes of transport that are most conducive to "internal conversation", to thinking and to dreaming, the best, he believes, is the train. He writes "On a journey across flat country, I think with a rare lack of inhibition about the death of my father, about an essay I am writing on Stendahl and about a mistrust that has arisen between two friends. Every time my mind goes blank, having hit on a difficult idea, the flow of consciousness is assisted by the possibility of looking out the window, locking on to an object and following it for a few seconds, until a new coil of thought is ready to form and can unravel without pressure. At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves." I also appreciate road trips for those reasons, but on road trips you have to worry about who or what else is on the road, about petrol, signs and navigation, whereas on a train someone else is at the wheel and your mind is more free to wander. While the car gives the body freedom to move across a country, the train allows the mind to travel anywhere.

If you want to travel slowly by train and are looking for inspiration, check out The Man in Seat 61, which is not only the best resource for train travel on the web, with links to railway all over the world, train schedules and ticket-sellers, it's also incredibly inspiring with descriptions and photos from train journeys, from the Venice Simplon Orient Express to the Swiss Glacier Express.

The travelling mind-set: mundane journeys and the banality of travel, part 1

Do you take pleasure in the prosaic aspects of everyday life? Do you get just as much of a kick out of the commonplace and the ordinariness of your surroundings as you do the exotic and atmospheric? Alain de Botton writes in The Art of Travel about the travelling mind-set and its main characteristic: receptivity. He says what really defines us as travellers is our receptiveness, how we approach new places: "We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting. We irritate locals because we stand in traffic islands and narrow streets and admire what they take to be unremarkable small details. We risk getting run over because we are intrigued by the roof of a government building or an inscription on a wall. We find a supermarket or a hairdresser's shop unusually fascinating. We dwell at length on the layout of a menu or the clothes of the presenters on the evening news. We are alive to the layers of history beneath the present and take notes and photographs." Is that you? That's me all over. This, for instance, is a pic I took in Brussels of some abandoned furniture and trash with this amazing mural as a backdrop. I love it and all that it tells me. I remember my husband and I spending ages taking our snaps and the locals looking at us curiously as they passed by. Why is that?

Travelling: anticipation

So, do you want to come to Thailand? I'm travelling on Sunday for a month of work, writing hotel and restaurant reviews and a spas spread for DK, and stories for magazines. You're welcome to join me on my journey. I'm busy planning the trip now and as tedious as elements of organizing trips can be (I must have planned hundreds of these), it's still a little exciting. Trawling through the Thai tourism websites, hotel sites, online airline schedules, comparing reviews, considering trekking itineraries, and calculating road distances, are all working together to create a sense of anticipation. Already I'm imagining tucking into some spicy Thai food at a table within splashing distance of the sea, climbing endless steps to see a colossal reclining gold Buddha, learning to 'drive' and ride an enormous elephant, and feeling the sand squeak beneath my feet on a pristine white sand beach. Alain de Botton writes in The Art of Travel of the anticipation created from seeing a tourist brochure that: "... displayed a row of palm trees, many of them growing at an angle, on a sandy beach fringed by a turquoise sea, set against a backdrop of hills where I imagined there to be waterfalls and relief from the heat in the shade of sweet-smelling fruit trees." The longing provoked by the brochure is evidence of the power and influence of "simple images of happiness", he writes, "how a lengthy and ruinously expensive journey might be set into motion by nothing more than the sight of a photograph of a palm tree gently reclining in a tropical breeze." de Botton immediately resolved to travel to Barbados. It was there that he explored the anticipation of travel and the actual reality. I'm going to do the same in Thailand. So, do you want to join me?