Travel

"Travel is the story you tell yourself about yourself." David Prior

Once a year the Australian Financial Review puts out a seriously glossy Fin! Travel magazine - inserted into their AFR Weekend edition. This weekend is that weekend.

Normally I flick through it in about five minutes - even less sometimes - and discard because it's full of ads for expensive watches, cruises and hotels with articles about holiday experiences which are - well - just decadent and out of my reach for all sorts of reasons. Although the photographs are often worth looking at. This edition, for example has a rather beautiful double-page spread of photographs from a flower market in Calcutta. A photo essay.

And this edition is no exception to the outrageous luxury rule. Do you fancy a Jaeger Lecoultre Polaris Date for example at a mere $17,000 or three nights in Florence for $10,755?

However this year in between all of that there were some seriously thought provoking comments, even if they are not really intended to apply to people who can't afford those watches and bespoke travel experiences. So I'm going to look at some of them and see how they could apply to me - well the people in my world. The vast majority of the world's population live in such poverty of course, that travel is not an option. Although - there is something to write about there as well, which may mean that some of the ideas/thoughts presented in the magazine might in fact require a post to themselves.

Perhaps the most interesting idea was presented by the same David Prior of my opening quote who apparently creates bespoke holidays for the rich and famous - the rich anyway. His is the three days in Florence trip. Further into the article, this is what he said:

"People travel because they want a more interesting autobiography ... My theory is that everyone has five great stories in life and three of them involve travel."

Think about that - what would be the five great stories of your life and do they involve travel? I would be interested to hear what your five might be - but that's just a passing thought - although you might like to think about it. Write about it even.

Well here is one of mine and one you've heard before. Teenage me on the steps of the Mairie in the beautiful village of Meung-sur-Loire near Orléans. The time is the fifties and, as I said, I am in my teenage years. It's the 50s - hence the clothes. And I'm willing to bet that one's teenage years are one of the five great stories of anyone's life. Remember too a story does not always have to be happy. Great literature and film has been centred around miserable teenagers. And they don't always involve travel - often the reverse in fact - the inability to travel.

Some of my teenage story is not happy - it's probably a rare teenager who doesn't have misery at times, but this story is a happy one - a fabulous awakening to a different world.

Not just a different language - which I barely knew when I first went there - but a whole different way of life. This, of course was partly due to a different environment - a small country town instead of big city suburbia and so there was a slower pace of life - and now that I think about it - always summer. I only ever went there in the summer. But it wasn't just that - everything was different, from the formality of greetings, the kind of conversations that people had, how they related to each other, to the food - oh the food! ... As I have said many, many times before - a revelation.

Later in the AFR magazine one of their writers Anna McCool says: "The most interesting trips often start with a question; what do people care about?" And yes, answering that question often reveals, not just something about this new place you are visiting, but also something about yourself and your own homeland . What do the Australians care about? might be an interesting question to ask - is it really all about mateship and all those other corny tropes that people talk about when commenting on us at the bottom of the world - or is it about something else altogether?

Again, later in the magazine in an interview with Baz Lurhmann and his wife Catherine Martin he tells us of a time when, aged 19 in a small acting role in Singapore, before he was famous - "If we are talking about the romance of travel that was where it started for me." - the 'where' being the Raffles Hotel which he moved into. Surely an extravagance for a 19 year-old - but yes it will change one's attitudes.

So was it France where that love of travel began for me? Is it the first of my great stories of my life? Well no I don't think so on both counts.

Perhaps it's in the genes. My mother comes from a long line of sailors who lived in and around the seafaring town of Portsmouth. My father was a sailor, and had a few isolated ancestors who travelled far - to Russia, Argentina, Malaysia. And maybe their own love of travel, was passed on to their children through smaller - but to children - adventurous trips. For:

"That sense of discovery - the thrill of new landscapes, cultures and flavours - can feel just as vivid closer to home." Regent Seven Sea Cruises ad in the AFR Travel magazine

My first years of life were spent in the London docklands, and a weekend treat in those years was to board a red double-decker bus - climb to the top deck - hopefully to the front seats, and travel to the Woolwich free ferry - a Victorian steamship - well a very old steamship because it had an engine room with huge brass wheels that drove the engine. You could go below decks and view them. We would go backwards and forwards across the busy Thames admiring the rich people on the top deck who had cars and absorbing everything that went on in the river.

My father would take us on tours around the ships he travelled on when in dock - down to the engine rooms, up on to the bridge, around the galleys and through the lounges and dining rooms. Later when he worked on cargo ships we would watch the cargo being loaded on and off and we even went on a short voyage to the continent with him - to Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg. Here I am aged just fifteen with my younger but taller sister, and mother on deck where we saw thousands of beautiful jellyfish floating alongside. And that trip involved my first trip in an aeroplane - a small one - so small they had to weigh us as well as our luggage. My sister was sick all the way.

These were perhaps not 'ordinary' experiences, but travel. "Close to home, but miles from ordinary." as that same Regent Seven Sea Cruises ad. tells us is also true of my love of travel from an early age. The cruise company is of course meaning 'home' in the sense of Australia and the Pacific, but it is indeed true everywhere.

When we moved from the docklands a little further out of London, and acquired a car - in late childhood - every trip in it was an adventure. Cars were more prone to breakdowns back then and there were a few of those. We travelled often to Portsmouth to visit my grandmother - always a touch of worry that the car would break down - and occasionally to the west country where we holidayed in small guest houses and once in a caravan - which was hugely exciting.

At weekends we went on drives around the Essex countryside - Rosemary's rides we called them because I would map out a route from the gorgeous Ordnance Survey maps, on which I would search for fords so that we could splash through them. We would stop in small villages with names like Hook End and Navestock Side, where our parents would stop for a drink in a pub on a village green and we would stay in the car eating crisps and drinking lemonade whilst watching the cricketers on the village green.

Even the drive to high school in the school bus through that same Essex countryside would often reveal new interesting, beautiful, previously unnoticed treasures along the way. So yes you can see the extraordinary close to home - every day - and of course in retrospect they become even more extraordinary because they no longer exist - the Woolwich ferry still exists but I doubt it's free and it certainly would not be steam driven. Still lots to see on the river though. Cars no longer often break down ...

"Travel is a privilege" says Anna McCool in the AFR magazine. It certainly is and the travel revealed in it is certainly not for the ordinary - in spite of the "Close to home miles from ordinary" section of the magazine which is opened with this completely over the top but somewhat stunning photograph.

In another section called The Thrill Factor - full of glamorous hotels and holiday spots, there are nevertheless a few facts and some advice worth noting:

"New Airbnb data reveals three in five Australians say they find 'holiday mode' within three hours of home."

So true - when travelling by plane it's when you have checked in your bag, by car, it's when you have left the streets you know well, by train it's when you take your seat and relax.

"Go high or low, nothing in between" Maybe that's why Baz Lurhmann's stay at Raffles in Singapore has stayed in his memory for so long. Maybe it's why I remember the camping holidays I enjoyed in new and very different places like Yugoslavia and Scotland with David and good friends. Maybe it's why all those disasters that inevitably happen on holiday become funny stories to be told around dinner tables. Maybe that's why when a special occasion looms - our 60th wedding anniversary David! - one should consider something truly memorable. Although I think that at our age it would not include hiking the Inca trail to Machu Picchu for example.

"Opt out of the internet plan and always bring pens and notebooks to record the details." Even if you never look at what you wrote again, maybe somebody else will, and maybe even the act of writing it down will make the memories linger longer. I wonder if tapping away on a computer counts? You don't have to use the internet, but I guess it would be a temptation. So yes, perhaps a pen is best - and oddments pasted besides your writing - tickets, guides to this and that, a napkin from a café ... the ephemera of life, of travel.

And yes - "Travel is a privilege" - well the kind of travel - even on a more humble scale than that promoted in the AFR that we have all experienced - that is a privilege but also:

"When you see people in other parts of the world, and think about your own pathetic Karen-like problems, it's a very beautiful kick in the pants" Catherine Martin

So do I have five great stories in life and do three of them involve travel? I would add food to that as well because:

"How do you get to know a new place in a hurry? - I book a food tour with a company like Culinary Backstreets or reach out to a local artist ... Kirshka Kaechele (wife of David Walsh MONA)

However, not necessarily by going on an expensive food tour - just eat the local food.

Five great stories? Yes - at least. For me anyway, possibly not for those to whom I tell them. Every day has a new story if you really want to put your mind to it, and it probably involves travel - and food.

We had some friends, now moved to Perth, who, when retired would, once a week, stick a pin in the Melways road map of Melbourne, and travel to that suburb wherever it was to explore it. Every one was different they said. I've always thought that might be an interesting thing to do.

Sometimes you find inspiration in the most unlikely places.

YEARS GONE BY

May 17

2025 - Baked oats

2024 - Boring? But I'll persevere

2023 - Noodle politics

2022 - Chicken, mushrooms, wine?

2021 - Missing

2020 - Missing

2019 - Looking for a luxury escape in the sun

2018 - Torched - a new foodie word

2017 - How can aeroplane breakfasts compete?