I am typing this while awaiting my baggage in Casablanca Airport, fresh off an all-night flight from Montréal. Actually ‘fresh’ is probably not the correct word. But even after three and a half hours of airplane sleep there is the frisson that comes with arriving in the skullcap of North Africa for what will be my eleventh trip here. Travel is about movement. It is about escape. It is also a way of dodging routine and re-discoverng the shock of the new. But if one thing binds all my many voyages together (and, at last count, I have visited fifty-four countries) it is the universality of the human condition that you encounter everywhere. I have been in hardline Communist states (Romania during the nightmare of the Ceaucescu years) and the extremities of the Third World (the City of the Dead in Cairo - where over 30,000 people live in an actual cemetery) and the true back of beyond (the Australian Outback, the Atacama Desert of Chile). What always strikes me more forcibly is the fact that, whatever the economic status, the political complexities, the manifold theological or social tangles of a given society, life is also about people simply trying to make it through the day. Without question someone who lives in the Hollywood Hills has a different way of getting through the day than the resident of a village in the Moroccan Sahara. But to simply look at the fiscal externals is to miss an important point: everyone has dilemmas and disappointments and questions about life and one’s role within it. And marriages are complex everywhere. And children and parents tangle in all settings. And no, I’m not going to sing a chorus of that most saccharine of songs, ‘It’s a Small World After All’. But on a planet where the First/Third World divide is so sharply delineated, where the gulf between Western and Islamic sensibilities is ever highlighted, what fascinates me most about travel is other people’s stories - and how, even if you are talking to a guy who drives a cab in Delhi, there are pictures of his kids on the dashboard and a cricket team he supports with unbridled brio. As I often tell students of writing, travel is so much about finding your way into the lives of others. Because that’s where you learn the most.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 09:30:37 +0000
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