By: Robert Dessaix
In medieval Europe a knight’s return from pillaging foreign lands was the occasion for swooning and wonderment. He regaled anyone he could buttonhole with tales of derring-do and outlandish local customs. When pilgrims got back from an encounter with the Infinite in Jerusalem, say, or even, more improbably, Wales, the whole village would be agog. Victorian travellers hastened to harangue the Royal Geographical Society about their adventures.
Nowadays when we get back from overseas our friends turn off their phones and pretend they’re not at home. Blessed by the pope in Rome? Who cares? You saw Aida in Salzburg? Snorkelled in Oman? Rode a mule across Bolivia? Their indifference knows no bounds. Unless you’re a television celebrity or Bruce Chatwin. But you’re not.
Travellers these days are visitors rather than knights errant, pilgrims, or explorers. Nobody visits a cathedral any more to sack it, or even to see a relic or marvel at vaulted ceilings, let alone to be transfigured. We visit places because they’re on a list of places to be visited. Here in Hobart, for instance, busloads of tourists zoom past the architecturally bizarre St George’s church, one of the earliest Anglican churches in Tasmania, at a cracking pace every day of the week. The more quick-witted pull out their phones and snap it – what an electrifying conversation starter that will be back in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan – but most look blankly straight ahead, contemplating lunch. Marco Polo and Magellan had things to recount when they got home – actually, Polo had things to recount without even going where he said he’d gone (it is now suspected) and Magellan eventually failed to arrive home at all – but these days everything anyone would want to know about anything has already been explained to us by Stephen Fry on QI, and ‘divine’ is what you call a slice of Stilton, so nobody will give a fig about what you did in Bali.
Should anyone ask if you had a good time when you get back, just say Yes. Who do you think would want the details? Not even your children would want the details. Why would they? Why would they care whether you saw the sun rise over Kanchenjunga or stayed in bed? Why would anyone at all give a brass razoo whether you spent a week with yack herders in Mongolia or went throat-singing in Moldavia? If anyone says they’d love to see your photos, they’re lying. All the photos that need to be taken have long since been taken and posted on the internet.
Travel, as Alain de Botton wrote years ago, is mostly about waiting – for planes and taxis, for the traffic to start moving, for museums to open, the weather to improve, a waiter to serve you, the train strike to end, for something to happen, for God’s sake. And then you go home. For you this eternal waiting is character building, but for everybody else it’s pretty mind-numbing stuff.
Why, then, do we bang on about our travels when we get home? To make them last longer, presumably – at somebody else’s expense. I doubt many genuinely wish to pay the price.
If you can’t keep mum when you arrive home, imagining yourself an antipodean Patrick Leigh Fermor or Paul Theroux, then here are a few ground rules: never imply that your stay-at-home friends’ workaday lives are colourless – they probably are, but so what?
never allude to wisdom you’ve picked up in the Orient – we are not only not curious about your conversion to Taoism, we find the whole notion of ‘wisdom’ limp-wristed in the age of Wikipedia and Brian Cox
never affect familiarity with foreign places in an uncalled-for way – don’t, for instance, start calling Florence ‘Firenze’ or pretend you became one of the locals by catching a bus with a goat on the back seat
never tell us what you’ve been eating – cornflakes, a fricassee of python brains in a coconut sauce, it’s all the same to us. Maeve O’Mara might feign interest in foreign culinary habits, but that’s her job.
Did you have the time of your life? Fantastic. That is quite literally all that matters. Instead of harpooning family members and people you meet at parties with tales of your travels, tell somebody who really does care, somebody whose interest in what you did and where you did it (and with whom) knows no bounds: yourself. Keep a diary; a diary is insatiably curious about everything. Besides, as Oscar Wilde put it, from now on your diary will reliably give you something sensational to read in the train.
Robert Dessaix is the past presenter of the ABC program Books and Writing. He is the author of several memoirs, essay collections and novels, including Night Letters, A Mother’s Disgrace, and What Days Are For. He lives in Hobart. His next book The Pleasures of Leisure is due out in May.
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