Come fly with me: Travel tangents

With a bit of time on my hands, I got back into a life sans travel — a couple of weeks which induced in me a laid-back sense of just being. And sucked into this chilled-out mesh of nothingness, with a few dabbles of writing and work, eating out and going to the beach, I found myself not wanting to take another flight. I wondered, as I sat by the pool hours before flying, what it was about travel that makes most people go on holidays year after year, rather than engaging in the journey inwards.

It is an inherent fear, I realised, of what we would do with ourselves in that situation of being alone in new and unknown surroundings. And it is our comfort zone — which includes family, friends, home, work and everything that accrues to familiarity — that inevitably closes in on us and coddles us in all its friendly warmth. Anything that doesn't fall within the indeterminate walls of this zone, apart from, say, a good package holiday or an organised group trip, alerts a sense of instability and of apprehension.

What is easy to comprehend but not as easy to imbibe is that travel — which neither has definition nor boundaries but for which we must step out of the rigid confines of our culture — changes perspectives, develops the marvelling mind and opens up our curiosity.

Sightseeing, meandering through the streets, walking through marketplaces, eating local food and partying can provide an overall impression of cultures. As Mahatma Gandhi said: "A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the souls of its people."

A stranger I met recently, in the most unexpected way, discussed everything from the variations of Arabian culture and clothing to readership and poetry in the UAE — all within a quarter of an hour. A while ago in New York, a lady who liked my bag ended up having an interesting chat about acting, over coffee, despite a busy day. And going to a family dinner in a village in India opened up an unexplored world — not just of authentic cuisine — and took me through a labyrinth of history and customs I would have otherwise been unaware of.

However, no matter how deep an insight we gain of the language, history and culture of a country, there is truth in what Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.

So perhaps it is the ability to adapt, absorb and savour the ways of a foreign land, the subterfuge of dressing and speaking in a local manner, that will make us more open and savvy as travellers, that will expand our levels of inquisitive interest.