Travel and Exploration

1The guidebook had been very clear about the temple. It was, according to the most recent edition, a must-see for any visitor to the region, combining spiritual significance with architectural splendour. Oliver had carried this description across two continents and a fourteen-hour flight, and he was standing in front of the temple now, in a crowd of approximately three hundred other people who had read the same guidebook, and he was trying to feel something.

2Travel, at its most honest, is rarely the experience advertised. The photographs in brochures are taken at dawn, in winter, by professionals with equipment designed to make the ordinary luminous. The reality involves coaches, queues, sunburn and the persistent feeling that the photograph would have been better. And yet people continue to travel, in numbers that have increased every decade since commercial aviation made the world small enough to cross in an afternoon. The gap between expectation and experience has never been larger, and neither has the appetite for the journey.

3What keeps people moving, most travellers will eventually admit, is not the destinations. It is the intervals. The three hours on a slow train through countryside that has no name in the itinerary. The meal eaten at a table too small for the number of people around it, in a language that requires pointing and guessing. The conversation begun with a stranger in a waiting room and continued, improbably, for the rest of the afternoon. These are not the experiences that fill the review sites, but they are the ones that fill the memory.

4Oliver left the temple after twenty minutes, which was approximately the time recommended by the guidebook. He walked away from the crowd and down a street he had not planned to walk down. A woman was hanging laundry from an upper window. A child was drawing something in chalk on a wall. A man was selling something unidentifiable from a cart, and the smell of it, whatever it was, was extraordinary. None of this was in the guidebook.

5This is what travel gives you, when it gives you anything at all: the accidental. The moment that was not scheduled, not photographed, not posted. The encounter that reshapes the way you hold the place in your mind afterward. Oliver bought something from the cart. He did not know what it was. It was, he thought, possibly the best thing he had ever eaten.