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Travels Down Memory Lane

Many years ago, at thirty, I took my first overseas trip. I had always been intensely interested in travel and I remember as a  child spending hours poring over a huge Reader’s Digest atlas, plotting the places I would one day visit.

I grew up in a tiny country town in Western Australia. A trip to Perth was a big event. I did not leave the state until I was 17, and had barely travelled within it either. So you can imagine that an overseas trip – to London and Europe, as all Aussies seemed to begin with in those days – was such an event, such a life-changing, amazing experience, that I was in a froth of excitement for MONTHS before we left.

We did it the traditional way too. Not backpacking – too difficult we felt with two small children – but we hired a huge camper-van and Gordon learned to drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road and squeeze it along improbably narrow lanes, while I changed nappies and kept the littlies entertained in the back. 

Although we have travelled numerous times since, all over Australia and to every continent except Africa, nothing beats that first naïve dipping of my toes in the waters of the outside world.

All these years later, the itinerary is so clearly etched in my mind, I could still recount it day by day if I chose to. More than that, we all learned so much. Our daughter, four years old at the time, still remembers seeing ‘lady no-arms’ (Venus de Milo in the Louvre) and ‘my big tower’, also in Paris, and celebrating her fourth birthday at Stonehenge.

I remember being culture-shocked by squat toilets in Paris and Italy, feeling word-blind once we left England and were confronted by signs in other languages, and the frisson of excitement when handling new currencies and attempting to make baby communication in a strange tongue. I remember the Italian men who patted my backpack-riding eighteen-month-old blonde son on the head and exclaimed ‘ah! Biondino!’, and the roadblock guards in Israel who waved us through without stopping when they saw him sitting on my knee in the front seat. That same son staggered back to us, cheeks aflame, after being taken by nuns into the kitchen of a hospice near Jerusalem, so that the others could admire him too.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that while the comment ‘travel broadens you’ is correct, it is a two dimensional view. Travel, if done with the eyes open and mind on full-alert, does so much more. It deepens and lengthens and stretches you in unexpected ways.

I noticed it when we returned from that first epic trip which had included a brief, unexpected, lengthened stopover in Bombay. I began to read news items about places we had visited, now with a greater interest and understanding.

Visiting a new place always feels to me like ‘colouring-in’ the map, bringing the countryside alive. But more than that, it puts a face to the place. Now when I read of something happening in Calabria, for instance, I think of a bed and breakfast host (Mrs Shout, we called her because she had no volume control) pressing a package of hastily wrapped grapes and bread rolls on us to eat on our trip, and I read the item more carefully, even consult the atlas, to make sure it is not so near that she might have been affected.

I hear the voices too. When there is news of Belfast or Dublin, the soft lilting Irish accent replays in my ears, turning each pub to ‘pob’,  and subtly scrambling the other vowels. And sometimes the meaning, as well!

My memory breathes the scents and tastes of a land too: the spice-laden air of Malaysia, as complex as the ethnic mix; strawberries, their hulls flicked onto the footpath, as snacking Finns enjoy them as a summer treat; the earthy jab of unexpected truffles on bruschetta in the heart of southern Italy; and redolent, oozing cheeses throughout the whole of France. Yes, I decide, cheese would have to be the national odour of France.

Travel really has to be the ultimate educator. And while in Australia, this is the month children begin the long school year, they will never learn more about their own country or the world and its people, than they will by actually going and visiting them where they live.  It is an essential prerequisite for every person who wants to feel a citizen of the world, not just of one country.

Who knows where our travels will take us this year? Wherever any of us go, may we travel with an open mind, and more importantly an ready heart, so that we may understand ourselves and appreciate others better.

Bon Voyage!

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