The notes we don't play...

Travel? Hmm? I started writing a blog about my disdain for travel, well more specifically the process of getting there, not the actual experience of the country being visited. I didn’t finish it, and hence didn’t post it because I fell asleep on the plane on the way over. Oh the irony. I’ll finish it and fill you in after our return leg to the UK, if I remember.

Anyway, after just over two weeks away from home, I’m here to tell you, I’m not sure I even like the “experience” bit either. Oh wait a second. Wind your neck in. Before you start condemning me for being a bah humbug, at least listen to what I have to say.

On one of our recent expeditions to Matheson lake, which incidently was very pretty, I overheard a group of Irish people talking about where they’d been and where they wanted to go –I know, they get bloody everywhere. I think the exact phrase was “Have you done Queenstown yet?” Well have you? It seems that an entire generation’s attitude to travelling is summed up in this statement. What have you done? Where have you been? Where do you want to go next? Quantify, quantify, quantify!

But what does it matter? Everywhere’s the bloody same. Wherever you go around the world these days one city is pretty much the same as the next. Overpriced food, overpriced attractions someone trying to fleece you at every turn. One set of ruins looks much like the rest. As I’m fond of saying to Jane, once you’ve seen one cathederal you’ve seen them all. Looking out of the window at the mountains, I can’t help but think it looks just like the Lake District in England.

There is next to nothing you can see when travelling that you can’t see from the safety of your sofa in a book or on television. If you’re on a package tour, you have no control and get to see what the guides want to show you which is inevitably the commercial rubbish. Made worse by having to travel on a bus with morons of every ilk. If you’re travelling independantly, you have to research and book, and research and book some more and you still end up where everyone else does, but at least you get there when you want to and not when someone else tells you to.

But the pressure to go and see stuff is extreme. You’ve come all of this way and you really must see.... Of course it would be a complete waste of a holiday to travel somewhere and do nothing at all, but why do we feel the need to do everything it says in the guide books? We’re going to get some T-shirts printed with “Jane & Mark’s Honeymoon Tour” on the front and out complete intinerary on the back. So everyone knows we maxed out and saw what we had to see.

If I can hark back to those damned Irish. I may be wrong, but in years to come I bet it isn’t the places they have been to that they talk about. I’m pretty sure it will be the people they have met along the way. I bet they won’t even remember where Queenstown is.

We’ve already visited quite a lot of the tourist traps in New Zealand, but before you think I’m not enjoying myself here are the things I think I’ll remember the most:

• Walking along the deserted beach from Milnthorpe to Collingwood.
• Meeting the quirky owners of the vineyards around Nelson.
• The generosity of our landlords and landladies in our accommodation; only this morning we had some freshly laid eggs left on our doorstep and a note saying help yourself to whatever’s in the greenhouse. I preseume the eggs were laid by the chickens and not the landlady herself.
• Travelling in the car, just taking in the scenery and singing along to Elvis – Jane really is the Devil in disguise.

I think what I’m trying to say that it’s just the process of living in a different environment I enjoy the most. For me, the longer I have in one place the better. The scenery, the museums, the food, the wine, the “things” can all be found elsewhere in one form or another.

Alright, if you’re being picky there are some things you can’t find anywhere, but so what. Do the “things” enrich you? Do they make your life fuller and more complete? I’ve heard it said of ambition that you can spend so much time trying to achieve a goal that you miss everything else on the way. Dave and I often joke about the pretentiousness of musicains who say things like “sometimes it’s about the notes you don’t play”. But surely sometimes less is more.

For me travel can be as simple as dinking a cup of coffee and looking out of a window at your surroundings. Breathing in the air. Enjoying the company of the people you are with. It should be a simple and relaxed experience.

Dave’s mum famously once said; “There’s a lot about the unknown we know nothing about”.

Sometimes that’s just the way I like it.