Missing travel?

 

Missing travel ?

Like any other social creature I too have been, and still am, missing being with some people in this time of social and physical distancing. But I am also missing places and the act of going to places (literally please). Believe me, very destructive thoughts continue to raise their demonish heads within my cranial space against Coronovirus for clipping my wings.

The continuous encircling of the sun 24x7 because the planet I am sitting in one corner of, is doing so, does not count as travel for me. 

For most of us the aim to travel right now is to meet parents, children, grandchildren and friends whom we haven’t seen for nearly a year, or maybe for work, weddings and funerals and pilgrimage. Travel not only means the excitement of deciding the destination, planning the trip i.e. bus, train and flight tickets, hotel reservations, what to do/see, anyone to meet, what to eat/try,  a book and something else to do for the journey and hotel stay, but also packing and locking the house, et al.

The hills, beaches, lakes, rivers, oceans, museums, forts, long quiet straight roads lined with pine trees or eight lane ones bordering expansive fields, small quaint towns with geranium pots on the windows or megastructures towering over you, natural wonders that take your breath away or man-made marvels or historical monuments, small kiosk selling bun makhhan (buns with butter) with chai or a stylish restaurant offering the best paella, even hot chocolate from a cosy cafe on a snowy morning, every option seems like the ‘Oh, I miss that’ moment to me.

In my mind I even travelled back to 2019 and said a ‘thank you’ for the several opportunities it gave me to travel to many places whether Chennai or Frankfurt, Hyderabad or Gdansk, Ahmedabad or Athens, sometimes with the added bonus of meeting people I care for.

This tree opposite the Temppeliaukio Church in Helsinki was selective about autumn.

I push aside reminders of inconvenience faced during travel, concerns over hotels, anxiety over visas, long queues, insanitary conditions at railway stations, overpriced food at airports, inconsiderate passengers who let the kids bawl/listen to music without earphones/take off their shoes but not the stinking socks/ keep nudging your seat.

I do agree that the air is cleaner with the planes not flying, the animals in safaris maybe happier without the presence of strangers invading their privacy, executives relaxed that they can wear boxers for Zoom meetings. But think of those thousands of people working in the tourism, transport and hospitality sectors, you’d agree my concern makes sense. Therefore, I do not think now is the right time to worry about the bigger issue of over-tourism but for the need for Naomi Campbell level of sanitizing regimen, surely yes.

I consulted Google Baba for ways to handle this despondency. Several sites and experts, travel bloggers and vloggers have suggested some of the following ways. You may take advantage of any or all of them if you are also going through the same emotions as I am about Jaane kahan gaye who din (Where have those days gone!)

1. Printing physical copies of your favourite photos from your old trips saved in digital form. Put them in a photo frame or an album to feed the sense of nostalgia. Unfortunately, never having imagined this situation, I always looked ahead to having more such good, even better travel experiences and thus deleted almost all of these photos.

2. Jogging your memory to recall whatever you learnt during your travels and practise it. On trips when I was not meeting friends, I did nothing except sitting on vacant benches and breathing in to absorb the atmosphere, so what do I do?

3. Travelling with your imagination when you are watching movies or shows on TV or reading. Woefully, watching PS I Love you/Leap Year, my mind started travelling from the misty mountains of Ireland to Gerard Butler/Matthew Goode. I would advise all those with an appreciative eye for beauty in human forms to stick to the impersonal approach of National geographic and such channels.

4.   Cooking or ordering food that you ate: Can I do that- enjoy Parsi mutton curry, Malyali sadya, quadruple chocolate sundae or spanakopita, goulash, grilled bass, Schweinshaxe and jambalaya etc., in unfamiliar environs, trying to record the taste of each in my senses for posterity. The smart ones would suggest that I should source the ingredients, cook or else order them. No dear, I prefer the nostalgia, it would keep the fire to travel alight in the times of fear of being in an enclosed airport/airplane on a long haul flight.

5. Sharing experiences: I am trying to do that, reliving some of my memories. Does it strike a cord or does it annoy you for reminding of what is not very possible at this moment? 

6. Educating myself: The wise ones say go immerse yourself in the unknown depths of knowledge about cultures, foods, habits of people around the world but wouldn’t the travel happening only between my ears qualify as armchair travel?

Mani who used to hate the stress of travelling for work, seems so sick of being cooped up that he suggested a road trip. That to me would mean even less freedom of movement in the same company. Besides, it might be very much like taking a kid out for a drive for the sake of going out or the flights to nowhere.

A handful of global airlines are now taking passengers on a ‘flight to nowhere’, which is essentially a trip where the aircraft circles around for a few hours before landing at the very same airport it departed from.

The rationale - With thousands of aircraft, carriers can put in some decent flight time for the jets and reunite passengers with the sheer experience of being up in the air.

Get them back into flight routines The trips can help reacquaint flight crews with the machines, and go back into active and alert mode. It also allows pilots, who are on unpaid leave, to earn the flight times required to maintain their licenses.

Drawback Flights circling in a specific area will, however, naturally cause higher concentration of pollution and the airlines may be challenged by environmental groups. The sector has already come under fire for being a high carbon emitter.

What do industry watchers think?

Andrew Charlton, an aviation analyst, said: “What we need are safe destinations. We are not afraid to fly; we are afraid to arrive.”

John Strickland, Director of JLS Consulting, makes this point: “I don’t see this becoming a substantial activity or as a big source of revenue, more as a novelty exercise. Pleasure flights have operated in the past to view astronomical phenomena such as the Northern Lights or to see the beauty of Antarctica.”

From dedicating more flights to cargo to providing COVID-19 insurance, operators have been doing whatever it takes to survive in the current market.

Singapore is taking the ‘nowhere’ model onto the seas as well, by allowing ‘cruises to nowhere’ as a first step towards resuming leisure travel. The country’s tourism board has appointed Norway’s DNV GL to create a health and safety framework for cruise lines that want to restart sailings from Singapore.

(https://gulfnews.com/business/aviation/airlines-might-soon-have-flights-to-nowhere-for-anyone-missing-air-travel-1.1601609980487)

Maybe some enterprising young Indian would take the first step of selling such bus and train trips too.

People I know are dreading visitors right now. They want only ex-Covidians who have anti-bodies kicking up a storm in their blood. That leaves me testing the patience of only very few people. Should I try to butter up my very generous sister and brother in law to have us over for a DNA reunion at her place, Covid or not?

The last piece of advice is:

7. Plan Your Next Trip: Now that is something which should be followed seriously. I am not sure when that would happen but there is no harm sketching in mind an evening on Varanasi ghats with Ayesha (Will Nivvie come along?), staycations in unknown villages of Himachal, taking long walks in the Sikkim and Bhutan air, spending time in a remote Zen monastery, whiskey tour in Scotland, follow the cheese trail in Europe, a quilting retreat, a week in Morocco with Lily and Manish (I prefer that to their original Egypt plan), celebrating Cynthia’s birthday (either she travels to India or I go to Zambia), browsing in Weihnachtsmarkts in German towns with Geetha, quiet times in Vermont/Alaska/Greenland, trips back to Viksa or Dalian. 

Ah! there is so much to do that I’d have to turn into a satellite to be able to see all of them.