Why do I travel? So I can come back home
While I take the ability to travel - for work, pleasure or escape - for granted, it's a privilege that I am grateful to have
My very first time travelling as an adult was on a press junket that I suspect no one else was interested in, which is how I, the minion-est of the minions in the office, landed up going. I was 22 and a sub-editor at Bombay’s one-time favourite newspaper Mid Day, with good copy editing skills but poor general knowledge because I had to look up Brisbane (which I thought was spelled Brisbon) to find out that it was in Queensland, Australia, home to the cricket stadium The Gabba, incredible marine and wildlife and a renowned university.
Like any first-time international traveller, I followed the itinerary to a tee, spent very little outside of what was planned, cursed myself when I bought a AUD 7 coffee and made the mistake of converting it to Indian rupees, and slightly nervously made it there and back. It didn’t occur to me to try and do more travel outside of what was planned - as it turns out I haven’t been back to Australia since then - but this trip gave me forever boasting rights of having visited 6 out of 7 continents on our planet, Antarctica being the exception.
Since then, I have done all sorts of work trips - from attending a week-long team meeting in gorgeous Cape Town that ended in a party every night to an unforgettably mundane 2-week stint in Bihar to conduct workshops with farmers that ended with dinner alone in my hotel room every evening; at one point, I was travelling out of my Goa home 10-15 days a month on work, averaging about 2 flights a week (until the Covid-19 pandemic hit). Suffice to say, I had become pretty blasé about it and have spouted statements like: ‘There’s nothing glamorous about work travel’ or ‘All I saw in Zanzibar was a conference room’.
And then one day last year, one of the women who worked at my company told me: “I saw on your calendar that you’re travelling on work, that sounds so exciting.” I can’t even remember where I was going, likely Bangalore or Bombay for some work meetings but I remember the enthusiasm in her voice, and that’s when it struck me that while I have begun to take the ability to travel for granted, it is still indeed very much a privilege.
Many of the women I work with are moms, some others inhabit traditional households, most of whom don’t have sole decision-making authority on when they travel and for what - kids, spouses, partners, families, employers, clients, even festivals come first. And this is not just true of the women in my world but any woman, any Indian, and probably South Asian, who are required to always consider familial ties and societal norms while taking any personal decisions.
My most memorable trip was to Brazil for the 2014 football World Cup with a group of friends. We were 8 people with varied interests and degrees of closeness, only half of whom was actually interested in football but all of whom had this undeniable instinct that this was going to be the biggest and best party in the world.
It was.
10 years later, I wonder if we’d be able to do it again: I can barely meet all my college girlfriends together for chai, forget getting a group of 40-somethings living in different geographic locations together for a 3-week trip. Everyone is 10 years older with even more varied tastes, some have kids now, while others have backaches; we are all dealing with life. In 2014 all of us had lesser money (and stronger livers), but more pertinently, we had the ability to make completely selfish and exhilarating decisions on how we chose to spend our time and money, with whom and for what reason.
My long-term travelling buddy has been my husband and, barring occasional arguments on directions, we are pretty aligned on what we like to do and how we like to travel, and are similarly motivated by food and drink, and lazy travel. A few years ago, we packed up our house in Bombay, stuffed as much as possible into two suitcases and drove 10,000 km all over India visiting friends and family and all sorts of tourist destinations in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, U.P, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan. The reason we left Bombay and drove around was to ostensibly find a new home to live in (which did end up with us moving to Goa) but it was also a time of crisis - my husband was feeling professionally burnt-out and wanted to take a break from work and I was still grieving the death of my father. The extended road trip allowed us a welcome escape from our troubles (and lives). There were long meditative days of driving, a respite from paying rent, and freedom from fixed schedules.
Many people we met at the time were fascinated and even wistful at what were doing, some commented that it was possible because we didn’t have kids (we still don’t), some thought it was outrageous, everyone thought it was courageous. I think it sprung out of need rather than adventure. Travelling around India by road can be hectic but eight years later, I remember the experience being healing and sublime. So much so that we have never felt the urge to pack up and leave our home again though the instinct to do road trips as a way of pausing and slowing down still remains.
More recently, I’ve started doing holidays on my own - out of necessity not preference. It’s not that I don’t like being alone, I am very comfortable spending time on my own with my thoughts and distractions; it’s just that, for me, travel and its resultant experiences of culture, food, memories, friendships, is always better shared.
But my friends, my spouse, my family all have other preoccupations and it’s getting increasingly difficult to match schedules. So, I decided instead of waiting around for people to get free, I would plan holidays on my own. As a woman who has done all sorts of travel for work and pleasure, this is still a somewhat new experience.
There’s something about the phrase ‘solo travel’ I find a bit grating. Maybe it’s the implied eat-pray-loveness of it, especially for a woman travelling on her own, that it is necessarily a journey of self-discovery (that for us mortals does NOT end in the discovery of Javier Bardem). Sometimes, a holiday is just a holiday.
But I get that it’s still very difficult for a woman to take off alone, that too on a holiday for leisure; a seemingly simple activity that implies freedom of choice, financial independence, high disposable income and privilege. You need to be Julia Roberts - or at the very least, me - to do this.
There are things that work and things that don’t. In April this year, I went to the Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary in the Himalayan foothills for a week-long walking trail (with the lovely Knowhere Travel) through tiny villages and gentle hills. It was exactly what I wanted - beautiful, peaceful, simple and the break I craved from my regular life. But, I found that when I have all this time to spare, I wanted to share it with someone I’m close to - to catch up, to eat and drink with, to share inside jokes with. Would I do it again, yes. Would I prefer to do it with someone I know, very much yes. Do i find it to be the most liberating thing I have done? Most definitely, yes.
These experiences and choices have been hard fought and lived and learned. Unlike some people, I don’t ‘live to travel’. I travel so I can experience my life more fully but I have a very strong sense of roots.
I travel so that I can come back home.