The puzzle of travel

Why do we travel?

Why go through all the heartache and guesswork of trawling the internet to find the right accommodation, the cheapest flights? Travel insurance, medical cover, foreign phone and web-access without having to mortgage your house again. Making sure your home is being looked after, the papers are cancelled, the rubbish is taken out, the plants watered.

The packing. Too many clothes or not enough? Adaptors, chargers, cords, phones, tablets, laptops. You need an extra bag just for the electronics.

Then the nightmare of the airport… just as you are bubbling over with excitement to get going: checking in your own bags, confronting the queues, worrying whether you need to show your laptop, take off your shoes and belt.

Australia is truly a long way from anywhere. Even with a flat-bed you arrive exhausted.

Where does it all end? Why do we do it?

Whatever the reasons we are all doing it more than ever. We might look to Paris for the answers. To Baudelaire and a sentence from his prose-poem of 1859: ‘N’IMPORTE OÙ HORS DU MONDE’:

Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas, et cette question de déménagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon âme. Or

“It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not, and this question of removal is one which I discuss incessantly with my soul.”

Of course, searching of the soul is one of the favourite pastimes of the French intellectual, so perhaps we need to enquire further of Baudelaire to get a clearer response:

“For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is the immense joy to choose to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world-such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent , passionate, impartial natures…” (The Painter of Modern Life, 1863)

He raves on a bit more about being the flâneur, the 19th century embodiment of today’s committed traveller… but you get the idea.

Each to his own, but I defy you to stop exploring.

Why do you travel? Where have your travels taken you?

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