Why do we travel? It is, to be sure, one of the great luxuries of our age.
Back when things were nasty and feudal and your livestock shared your living room, most people went from cradle to grave without travelling further than you do now to get to that further, slightly nicer Woolies.
Now, lots of people — too many — have moved on or been displaced by famines and wars. To have the freedom (where freedom = time + resources) to untether yourself from one place and go elsewhere for reasons of only curiosity, variety and excitement is a privilege beyond measure.
Many of us travel simply to see what we are like over there. We imagine, quaintly, that seeing Beaujolais Nouveau Day from a café in Burgundy will make us better people. We feel as though we’re demonstrating that pioneering curiosity that has gotten us where we are (and where is that, exactly?) any time we brave the vicissitudes of exchange rates and global crackpots.
I remember the late (and truly great) author Jenny Diski proffering that we travel “because everyone has to have a place to go”. Certainly the people I encounter when I choose to set out for the further reaches all seem to confirm that.
I’ve always wondered about the garrulous man I once sat next to on one of those disorientatingly long bus journeys through our country’s interior. He robustly ignored all markers of non-engagement (headphones and avid concentration on a Javier Marías novel held at hostile closeness). He was not, he confessed, a reader. We were already in different camps.
By the third hour, it transpired that my fellow inmate did actually read, provided the reading material involved grizzled detectives and bloody killers. With indescribable effort, I held up my end of a conversation that flitted bewilderingly from the merits of Jo Nesbø’s last effort, to the rowing prowess of my alma mater, to the time he and his wife-to-be had boarded a bus to the newly independent Zimbabwe to watch Bob Marley in concert.
Just when I was wondering what new turns the endless river of conversation would take, he sprang to his feet as the bus swung to a stop. It was 2am in the sort of town nobody comes from. The bus stop was dark and deserted, and when he sprang off into that darkness, it swallowed him up as though he had never been there.
This sort of thing happens to me all the time, briefly encountering strange and oddly wonderful people in unexpected places. Despite this, I have never really been one for the sort of conversation that bubbles to the surface when people are travelling together. The people you encounter in those pauses that life inserts are invariably weird because you would never meet them otherwise. Something about the accident of being thrown into the air at the same time, or meandering down the same stretch of national road, lowers the inhibitions of other people, setting free their stories and their demands to be understood.
At Washington DC’s Dulles Airport, once, we were loitering while we awaited our flight to Munich. We fell into conversation with an interesting old chap. When I say we, I mean my wife. I do not strike up conversations with strangers and they rarely trouble me, but my wife has a friendly resting face and an undiminished curiosity about humanity that propels her into unexpected discussions, with me trailing reluctantly behind.
“Our” new friend was holding a teddy bear half as big as he was. He was, he told us, on his way to visit his children. His four-year-old grandchild was, he said, terribly fond of bears. This explained his eccentric carry-on, although it in no way accounted for the tremendous size of the thing.
Anyway, the man was mostly blind and very old — older than you would expect someone to be when they are flying from one side of the world to the other by themselves and old enough to lend a certain bravery to his being there. Later, as we soared over the Atlantic, he explained that he had left Sweden in the 1960s to study computers. This was back when computers took up most of a room. The kids had grown up and relocated to the mother country, and he had remained out in America, growing older. It was cheaper for him to go to them than the other way around, and that was why he was on a plane talking to us.
He was like someone cribbed from a Jonas Jonasson book. The 90-year-Old Man Who Flew Across The World With a Teddy Bear. In Munich, I half-expected a boisterous parade to be arranged in his honour on the tarmac as we arrived. Instead, we waited with him, watching the usual foolish stampede to nowhere that begins when the plane arrives at the gate.
When he sprang from the wheelchair that had been laid on by the cabin crew (90 and mostly blind, remember?) and we parted ways warmly, my wife joked that we still had time to change our next flight to Malmö instead.
Sitting together in that vast glass terminal, it suddenly seemed easier to believe that the point of travel, ultimately, is to shrink the world’s supply of strangers.
From the May issue of Wanted, 2026
