The Art of Travel.

Posted on | December 5, 2009 | No Comments

I have just arrived back in Dubai from a 6 day trip to Canada, yes that was 15.5 hours in the air and a 9 hour time change for me.

And don’t let me forget to remind you that we transited through Europe, where we did not stay over, so the door to door trip was 24.5 hours, all for 6 days.

Was it worth it? No question, yes.

What this trip reminded me of though, is the simple fact that today so many of us have lost the connection to travel as an art and travel has become only a utilitarian function.

Part of the problem with the disappearing ‘art of travel’ is we get onto aircraft for sometimes as long as 17 hours to get from A to B, where in the past that would have involved multiple connections and the obligatory stop-over.

Today a stop-over is no longer a gift but a dreaded travel torture technique.

I beg to disagree about the stop-over as a bad thing and where possible try to create the time for these to get out of the airport and into  a  city/country for a mico tour of that place.

I love the smell of the air in a place, it tells a story that sometimes you don’t want to hear but you do anyway.

Food, people, reality, global-connectivity are all pieces of the allure of a stop-over and have for a very long time been a way to relax,explore and connect with people and places that we might not otherwise connect to.

But today in our fast paced need for speed lives we are failing miserably to live in the moment because that moment is being radically morphed into a working space, a utilized space, a thing to use as opposed to a time to invest in ourselves.

How disconnected can you be when traveling? To me that is the measure of the use of your time!

Too bad we rush from here to there without taking a little bit of time to see things from another focus, most of the time we see things from an aircraft window at 37,000 feet!

In a 7 hour lay over in Paris I ate breakfast beside the Eiffel Tower and wondered why anyone would not opt to take a break in their travels to do just the same?

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