What moves us to go?
DO we learn to love travel or are some people just born to it? Perhaps it starts when we are children. Almost every autobiography contains childhood memories of family holidays, experiences etched into the writer’s concept of self, of what it meant to be happy when they were young.
Mine are of Christmases spent in Durban, where my grandparents lived. For a young boy in the Free State, Durban seemed like a massive, sophisticated city. There was the aquarium, now demolished; the museum in the ornate city hall; movies in the Tudor splendour of the Playhouse; and the Indian market with its mountains of fragrant spices.
Then there were the harbour cruises on the Sarie Marais, which left me with the abiding memory of the whaling station and the sight of the huge animals being gutted.
Home is always boring for kids, hence my Durban cousins were equally excited to come to the Free State, swim in a muddy farm dam or a windmill’s reservoir and climb koppies. These things I took for granted.
If some travel memories are rooted in our childhood, others hang on dates. I recall an Easter weekend when I lived in London. I took a train to Devon to visit a cousin I had never met and to visit my mother’s home county of Cornwall. Not a single Easter has passed since without my remembering that trip and how I tried my cousin’s patience with my desire to see the West Country of England … all in one weekend.
On Maundy Thursday, I bought clotted cream fudge in Polperro, ate a Cornish pasty in Mevagissey and visited Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor. On Good Friday, we ate hot cross buns in Dartmouth. On Saturday I hitchhiked back into Cornwall and ended up lost in the suburbs of Plymouth at 11pm. On Sunday my cousin saved me and we drove to King Arthur’s castle at Tintagel on the north coast, which I decided looked just like Cape Point. I’ve left out the half of it.
“Just to be sure, dear,” my exhausted cousin said as she dropped me at the station in more than good time for my train back to London on Monday afternoon.
Everyone has such travel memories linked to dates. Most can never be repeated but perhaps that desire to re-experience special times drives us to travel again and again. Is travel, then, just an exercise in nostalgia? After all, today you can experience anything from the pyramids of Giza to the iguanas of the Galapagos close up on TV. It’s the search for magic moments that makes us go there.