Fernweh

Counting the 190 undisputed sovereign nations in the world, I have until this moment visited 12% of the countries that are out there. Three years ago, the count lay at meager 5%. Being in Europe has simplified matters immensely. However, regardless of the number I can’t help but feel blessed.

Travel is a luxury. It is easy to preach how everyone ‘needs’ to travel. However, the privileged often mistake a want for a need. Many who cannot travel are limited by monetary reasons, others by physical constraints and some by invisible social bounds. A twenty-one year old with an education debt of $26,000 shouldn’t be questioned as to why he isn’t backpacking through Europe. You will sound terribly ignorant if you ask a family of four Asians why they haven’t they visited the Andes. A mother with a nursing baby is perhaps seeking sleep far more desperately than a beach umbrella in front of an azure coast. Those of who us who have managed to head out of the door, armed with a towel and passport, should never forget how blessed we have been to experience this benefit.

I might be a late bloomer to international travel but am not new to the concept of displacing oneself in newer surroundings and then eventually making your way back home with a bag full of dirty laundry and strange memories. My dad ensured that even as kids we were used calling random accommodations home even if it were for a few days, eating local meals and waiting in line for attractions, patiently. Those years of travelling east, west, north and south in the Indian peninsula had laid the foundation. 

On that bedding of interstate twenty four hour bus travels, I plunged forward ratcheting up countries and the contiguous states of the United States. For the longest time, it was a matter of pure statistics, checking boxes and playing the ‘I have been there’ game. I wouldn’t fail to tell someone that I had been to Japan and eat the Fugu fish or some other fact that made me eclectic. 

It is only until recently that I actually understood what travel means to me. Although I still can’t entirely get away from statistics (as is evident from the way I started this) the memories that I bring back now couldn’t be further apart from the miles I have traveled or the pictures I have clicked.

In a small sleepy town of Saint Remy in Provence, I found myself getting giddy with delicious food inside a French veranda. As I wandered through olive trees my ears hurting the shrill of cicadas, my mind muddled with a much older summer vacation in Nashik, as if time was no longer a boundary. I can clearly remember the way my skin was baking in the heat, the redness of my arms and the utter want of shade. The road trip was summarized by turquoise lakes, imposing mountains and sunflower beds. I remember the dotted line of the road as it punctuated the silences with my adventurous wife. Faces that I have seen flash across with their smiles or with the look of confusion when they were asked ‘where is Landstrasse 68’? Languages collide in my head. The more I travel the more I think that the Babel fish is not fiction. 

Travel swells my emotion like no other. Even on the worst of days where a road trip includes a visit to the medical clinic for getting stitches instead of hiking in the Swiss mountains, I have to struggle hard to find a reason to hate travel of any kind. 

Travel is the ultimate accumulation of the past. A concentrated bag of feelings, smells and senses that is sometimes so heavy that you need an off day at home to truly fathom what you have brought back.

And once you realize that unpacking after a trip is only temporary, the addiction is what you want to live for.