Dream big – it’s holiday time!

After months erring on the safe side, Anna Hart is finally indulging in flamboyant travel fantasies

Since this column was launched in April 2020, I have preached a message of prudence and moderation regarding travel. This isn’t because I am a spoilsport, naturally cautious or frugal. I simply know that we travel lovers are hopeless romantics and I didn’t want us to have our hearts broken when that longed-for road trip around Arizona or South African safari didn’t quite materialise.

Instead I urged travellers to make the most of UK-based, more affordable and less risky travel experiences, putting complicated international itineraries on the backburner for a while.

But now I hereby declare big travel daydreams open.

I have shoved aside the safety parameters erected in my imagination and am revelling in debauched travel plots and plans. It means I am imagining visiting my sister and nephews in California for Christmas; I am fantasising about a long trip to Australia next September; I’m wondering if 2022 is the year I will jump on an icebreaker to Antarctica, or make it to the Galápagos islands, or take a road trip around New Mexico. It’s an absolute riot in my imagination right now: a fiesta of fantasies and a sea of familiar faces around the world that I have missed.

It helps that my travel budget is remarkably healthy. I have explored

England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and any attempts to spend all my money were curtailed by closed or fully booked hotels and restaurants. My carbon footprint, too, is at a ghostly low. So there is nothing holding me back from maximalist, blow-the-budget international plans. It feels wonderful to allow myself to dream big again.

When I mentioned my giddy daydreams to friends, Chaz raised her eyebrow and said: “So no more ‘slow’ travel, then? Whatever happened to Little Miss ‘saving the planet from this fancy Welsh yurt’?” Honestly, I have the best friends.

I’m not abandoning my commitment to responsible travel. I still plan to take several UK holidays every year (Britain is one of the best destinations on the planet, so I’d be daft not to). I’ll still choose independent hotels and restaurants, local tour operators and services by ethical providers (handily enough, they tend to be the best restaurants, hotels, operators and services around, so this is an easy consumer decision). I’ll still try to travel by rail or sea as much as possible (I love trains and boats, so this is not exactly a sacrifice). And when I fly, I will make sure those flights count by choosing a destination that means a lot to me and where I intend to spend some time and a fair bit of money (again, this is not hard: jetlag sucks, flights are

expensive, I’m blessed with flexible working arrangements and I like lingering in places I love).

Applying words like “responsible”, “sustainable” and “mindful” to travel can sound as worthy, joyless and dry as an egg-white omelette, but “slow travel” is the opposite of boring. It means taking inspiration from the way my parents and their generation travelled, which I am now old enough to see the wisdom of and romanticise. And the crucial first step is to think hard about the people and places we want to visit, which is why I believe in letting my travel fantasies run riot. There is plenty of time later to rein them in, with practicalities such as budgets, time constraints and social responsibilities.

If being notable for being humdrum isn’t too much of an oxymoron, there has only been a handful of trips I’ve taken in my lifetime that stick out for not standing out. They all have this in common: I did not daydream about them. They are the trips – business or pleasure – that I accepted in a hurry, either dazzled by a cheap deal or an invitation from a friend, or a work proposition that got me at a weak moment. There was a press trip to Abu Dhabi where we didn’t leave the glitzy and ostentatious, yet fundamentally depressing, hotel for all three days. There was a holiday with friends to an all-inclusive Sharm El Sheikh resort where I could have been anywhere. There was the time I flew to Zurich and back in a single day to interview a musician who, it turned out, would be in London for interviews two days later.

These senseless, joyless and culturally insensitive journeys are the only trips I vaguely regret; the flights I feel guilty about. Calling myself a “mindful traveller” is just a lofty way of saying that I am trying not to be a mindless traveller again. And mindful travel begins with allowing our minds to roam wherever they please.

Now’s the time to dust off scuppered holiday plans and bring them to life