Covid-19 coronavirus: Pre-pandemic travel

They say you don’t appreciate what you have till it’s gone but the good news is that overseas travel is there . . . just waiting, writes Laura Waters

Imagine a machine that can transport you to another world within hours. You scroll through a catalogue of options and choose your parameters: climate, inhabitants, landscape, food, activities. It would be like virtual reality but way better and you could even come home with a wood carving or a tan.

We used to do it all the time but did we appreciate in those heady days just how utterly incredible flying and international travel was? It took my parents a month to sail from London to Melbourne in 1961. That’s four weeks of bingo, deck quoits and a whole lot of gazing at the horizon for the reward of eventually setting foot on Australian soil. The globe’s mind-boggling diversity is spread across unfathomable distances and in the early days of travel when we found ourselves in a foreign place, boy did we appreciate it.

But in a world that has normalised globetrotting, our wings have been clipped and it’s prompted me to reflect on what a complete miracle travel actually is. How extraordinary is it that we can board a plane in the land of Jandals, green hills and 18 people per square kilometre and – with very little time and effort on our part – disembark 12,000km away in the pungent steamy air of a city thronging with taxis, temples and funeral pyres smoking on a riverbank? Or perhaps we might find ourselves digging our toes in silken sand at a beach bar while a reggae band plays, or watching lions on the hunt with Maasai warriors at our side, or indeed any other alternate world of our choosing.

This planet is huge and I remember when it used to feel that way. I was 18 when I took my first international flight and I still recall the utter thrill and mystique of that Singaporean tech-shopping district where I drove a hard deal (got ripped off) in pursuit of a new camera with a very big lens. I wore it proudly around my neck during my next stopover in Honolulu, snapping photos of men diving off waterfalls, girls dancing in grass skirts, and an insipid-looking yet nevertheless exciting Pipeline. The surfboards, the pineapples, the foreign accents … Mind. Blown.

I made travel my job, for 12 years working for tour operators that helped other people experience the joys of global roaming; all that “product testing” on the side was just a bonus. Between work and leisure, I clocked more than 45 countries and of course I loved it but did I really appreciate it? Was I mindfully wowing over every wondrous moment of being in a land so different from my own? Not always. Sometimes I complained that the plane left two hours late, that there were no spare sun loungers on the beach in Zanzibar or that Peru doesn’t have decent cheese.

Somehow the world had shrunk and with it, a little bit of the excitement too. I mean how small has the world become when, in a backcountry hut on the flanks of Mt Ruapehu, I can bump into an American I first met four years earlier while paddling the Whanganui River? In a planet of seven billion people, that seems kind of crazy.

Travel had become easy and relatively cheap and as the years passed, the moments that stayed with me were ones that struck a particularly deep chord. Like the time a Sherpa woman beckoned me into her back garden in the Himalayas, her tanned face crinkling with smiles. We shared not one word of common language yet through a game of charades I walked away knowing that she was 26, that her father was sick and that she was trying to learn English. It was the best conversation I never had. Or the time I sat on a hotel bed in Arusha in Tanzania, combing my damp hair after a shower. Had my gaze not been so relaxed and unfocused I might not have seen the chameleon perfectly blended with its surroundings as it clung to a tree branch right outside my window.

These days I’m a travel writer. A life-altering 3000km hike from Cape Reinga to Bluff a few years ago gave me the courage to chase that dream and things were going okay too until that meddling virus appeared on the scene. My travels now – when restrictions allow – are within a few hours drive from home yet still I’m discovering places I never knew existed and that’s pretty cool.

But that big wide world is still out there. There are desert Bedouin to share tea with, samba schools to attend, chateaux to sleep in, and whale sharks to swim with, and one day we’ll climb aboard that incredible machine that transports us to other worlds and we’ll appreciate travel for the miracle that it is.