Travels with my Ant
Is it now time to get on a plane here & get off there in some foreign land & all this instant coffee, fast food, instant travel enhances your life somehow?
We all need a break from our routines, but this writer has never had, & probably never will have, a packaged holiday.
I think back to my epic journey as a teenager from Tottenham Court Road, London to New Delhi & I wonder how that time spent on those dusty roads travelling at an understandable pace, helped me measure the distances & the changes in people, cultures, languages ….etc in my own head.
As a youth I enjoyed Laurie Lee’s ‘As I Walked out One Midsummer Morning’ & Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes’ & more recently Christopher Rush’s mirror journey ‘To Travel Hopefully’ (Isn’t that a superb title?).
Also I read Iain Sinclair’s ‘London Orbital’ & all of these books give first hand accounts of travel as it should be. They all move at their own pace & grant the reader great insights into the distance travelled.
In my own case it is a long time since I have gone any distance but drifting off on my hammock in the back garden, takes me back to all those places I have been in my life.
How fortunate I was to hit the ‘hippie trail’ when I did, as wars, politics, insecurity ……etc have closed down many avenues & countries that were once open to the independent traveller.
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