THE ART OF TRAVEL
Christmas is a time for giving, and January is about giving things up. But wellness travel doesn’t need to be about deprivation, writes ANNA HART.
Self help and wellness.
Never mind December, it’s January that’s the month of excess. An excess of resolutionmaking, an excess of carb-denying and an excess of gym-joining. This annual frenzy of health faddism and self-flagellation invariably taints the travel pages of magazines, with words like “detox”, “diet” and “retreat” dominating headlines.
“New year, new you!” the travel industry declares, a seemingly casual offer which, frankly, I’ve always felt we should regard with suspicion. What exactly will the “new me” be like? What evidence do they have that she’s an upgrade? What if it’s like that time Apple released a new iPhone but it was glitchy and widely derided as worse than the previous model? I definitely require more clarification before I sign up.
It’s not that I don’t believe in wellness travel; far from it. I absolutely believe that travel is one of the most effective self-help interventions around. I’ve hiked through the Bavarian Alps to recover from a breakup, roadtripped around New Zealand to help me find my way when I was at a career crossroads, and been revived by Italian wine and the company of dear friends in Amalfi during a bout of depression.
Travel certainly has the ability to fix us. But no travel plans should be built on guilt. Much like sex, holidays should arise from positive motivations, like adventure, curiosity, a desire to bond – certainly not seasonal self-loathing.
The glorious thing about travel is that it offers us hundreds of ways to reboot ourselves, whether it’s eating a feast of street food in Penang, learning to sail in the Adriatic, touring vineyards with friends in Provence or doing a craft-cocktail bar crawl in Tokyo. Don’t let anyone tell you that a cocktail bar crawl isn’t a “detox”. It’s a detox from boredom.
I’m entirely serious about the art of using travel to fix oneself; I consider it to be a form of stealth self-help. After all, travel is all about trying on new habits and ways of life for size, seeing which ones fit us, and hopefully taking a few home. And if we have a bad habit we want to kick, this is best done by squeezing out the loser habit with some new ones.
“One nail drives out another”, is how my Swedish housemate would cheerily describe her strategy of rapidly filling her mind (and bed) with a new lover after any breakup. I’m Irish, and much more boring, so here I am applying her words to holidays. But you get the idea.
When we focus on bringing some fabulous new habit in, rather than trying to shoo an old one out, travel becomes about discovery, not deprivation.
A friend, an overworked TV producer, used to drag himself away on juice fasts whenever filming wrapped, to try and shed the excess stress kilos he’d gained during the season. One year, his resolve snapped and he booked a cookery course in Tuscany instead. “Really relishing cooking for myself was the thing that sorted out my nutrition habits,” he says. “I’m not tempted to mainline Tim
Tams any more, now that I know I can cook something absolutely delicious for myself at home.”
The trip that he thought would be a guilty pleasure, an indulgent orgy of pasta and ragù, filled his life with a healthy preoccupation with food that squeezed out his bad habits. During his old detox breaks, his binge-eating took centrestage, a flaw he felt he had to fix. Choose the right trip for you, and your habits will hopefully reshuffle themselves naturally.
This art of self-help is something I’ve mastered slowly.
For years, my knee-jerk response to feeling bad about something was to give something up: sugar, wine, caffeine, late nights. Instead, I’ve come to realise the secret is to invite something new in.