Wherever you go, there you are

ILIVE in the thirdcloudiest city in the States,” the young man said to his travel companions, sparking a lengthy debate about which city was, in fact, America’s cloudiest.

It would have been an innocuous, even entertaining conversation in, say, a New York apartment on a gloomy day. We, however, were all in the middle of a glorious African sunset and nobody seemed to be looking.

The conversation lingered over dinner, while the new moon and the Milky Way, the scents of potato bush and woodsmoke and earth went unremarked. A hyena may have laughed at the absurdity of it all.

I wanted to take them by the shoulders and shake them all into the moment and shout: “Look at what you’re missing!”

Of course, that would have been unfair, taking into account the thousands of “great moments” lost on my travels because my head was somewhere else.

There was a time when travellers met and talked about where they had been and where they were going because it was important. That was how you learnt what awaited you on the road — the friendly welcome at that village or the well with the sweet water. Perhaps it was the bandits or a safe place to cross the river whose bridge was now broken. Stories were information that could save you.

Now the conversations around campfires and in backpackers and on trains are too often tiresome games of one-upmanship: “You crossed the Karakoram by horse liberated from your Pashtun captors? Well, let me tell you about the time I swam the Amazon. Naked ...”

Meanwhile, the country outside sits and breathes and waits for you to see it.

It is axiomatic that the internet and globalisation would flatten our experience of the world and there are many good things to be said for it, for example checking online to find out whether those pesky bandits still — 1 000 years later — infest that road. But I despair when I find myself spending hours in a dodgy internet cafe, reading stuff that has nothing to do with my journey, and all around me seeing people doing the same.

It is a habit I am trying hard to break. That’s the easy one. The hard one will be avoiding everyone else’s war stories.

I went and stood away from the Americans and listened to the night. “Watcha doin’?” asked cloudy-city guy. “Trying to be here now,” I said. “Yeah.” He sighed. “You know, when I was in the West Bank …”