I

N Bhutan, I pulled back the door to my terrace and stepped out into the morning light. The sun had just shown up above the mountains and kids were scuffling their way through the muddy streets to school.

Their mothers were banging the dust out of carpets, hanging laundry out to dry; from a radio somewhere, a scratchy folk song tricked along. I set down the novel I was reading next to my cup of tea, felt the sun wash over me — and realised that I didn’t need to see another thing in the Land of the Thunder Dragon to feel complete.

What made this so surprising was that the city all around me, Thimphu, wasn’t so astonishing. I’d spent three magical, silent weeks in Bhutan 28 winters before, at a time when there were almost no cars in the entire country, not a single television set and very few visitors. It had felt then like stepping into a chapter from the world’s youth. Now, the jampacked streets were crammed with iPhone stores, Japanese restaurants, hotels and bars.

Pure joy to most of the Bhutanese — but not, perhaps, to someone who’d flown thousands of miles to get away from all of that. And yet none of the clamour could take me away from the simple feeling of joy, sitting out on a quiet terrace, and the realisation that I didn’t need to be anywhere but here.

We all know that happiness is not a function of exoticism; you can find it, if you’re in your right mind, at home. I’ve seldom felt happier than in a Catholic hermitage — though I’m no Catholic — just three hours from my longtime home in California, or just turning off the lights in my living room and putting on some music.

Travel for me is really just a kind of conversation with an interesting stranger (who happens to be a place), and that new acquaintance doesn’t have to be a millionaire or a supermodel to engage me. Indeed, I’ve often felt most unsettled in a poster-perfect Bali or Hawaii.

But these days, more than ever, part of the joy of travel comes not from where you’re going, but from what you’re leaving behind. In an age when the boss can reach you round-theclock, the phone is buzzing at 1.16am and there’s scarcely a moment when you’re not reminded of Brad Pitt’s divorce or your friend’s Instagram photos of her dinner, travel offers a chance to be liberated from all that, and to remember who you are.

One of the blessings of the hermitage I keep returning to is that, for 72 hours, I know no e-mail can find me, no phone will ring and I won’t see a single traffic jam.

Most of us are most happy when we’re most absorbed in something, and forget the time; and most of us are least happy when we’re all over the place, scattered and distracted.

Travel offers all kinds of commotion and panic — in the airport, on the 11-hour bus ride around hairpin bends. But, freed of the distractions of home, it often reminds you of what you with his seventh marriage and upset because the second-richest man in the world is catching up with him.

There’s one set of values by which we measure our livelihoods, another by which we gauge our lives. That’s often the aspect of travel that’s most startling, in fact. We walk through the rubble of a street in Port-au-Prince, grow dizzy from the honking commotion of Calcutta, and then notice that the locals around us seem more full of life and even delight than the people we know at home who seem to have all the comfort and peace in the world.

March 20 was International Day of Happiness, created by the United Nations in conjunction with the World Happiness Report. For me it could as easily be called the International Day of Travel.

Both happiness and travel are ultimately about transport: get the chance to step outside yourself — if only away from breakfast, the wallpaper, the to-do list you know too well — and a quiet morning on a terrace can seem at least as dramatic as any rollercoaster ride at Disneyland. —© The Daily Telegraph, London

Pico Iyer is the author of many books about travel, from Video Night in Kathmandu and The Global Soul to, most recently, The Man Within My Head.