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Wonder v. fear and guilt

Rebecca Front

There's no getting round it: travel really does broaden the mind, but it also has its drawbacks.

IF YOU had asked me a year or so ago, I would have told you with smug certainty that travel does not broaden the mind, it merely raises the blood pressure. I am not one of nature's travellers. I hate tunnels, fear air crashes, loathe coaches, and get sea-sick. I am also vegetarian, so 98 per cent of the menu in any restaurant is a no-go area. I am a lousy photographer, have a poor sense of direction, do not do water sports because my swimming is not up to much, and never engage strangers in conversation because ... they are strangers.

The one time I attempted to drive on the right, I displaced the wing mirrors of a row of cars with a choreographed precision Busby Berkeley would have envied. In short, I always felt I was better off at home, or in Tuscany, which is nicer than home in the U.K. but still sells Marmite.

But then, on a relatively stress-free three-hour flight, I started to think that it would not be so bad to stay in my seat a few hours longer and find a different continent. I began to view travel not as a problem but a possibility. And one night, as my husband eyed a cheap-flight website and asked me for the thousandth time if I would not fancy, say, San Francisco for a change, I said yes. So last month, I found myself hurtling down hills in San Francisco in a cable car and eating fresh raspberries in the middle of winter. But it was not the Golden Gate bridge that broadened my mind; it was simply being elsewhere, encountering difference.

In your own country, it is easy to make assumptions about people based on accents, about areas based on architecture. But even in the U.S., ostensibly very like Britain, I found myself unqualified to make those judgments, and it was rather thrilling seeing things without the usual filter of prejudice or certainty.

I heard a black bus passenger's take on the Dick Cheney shooting: "I would have got seven years in jail for that, accident or no accident!" A homeless man of no more than 20, with few teeth and track marks on his neck, was so pleased with the pitiful couple of dollars we gave him, he told us all the best vantage points for photographing his city.

Perhaps most remarkable was a conversation overheard between a young woman with Down's Syndrome, a young man with speech, hearing and mobility difficulties and their carer, who was taking them downtown on a cable car. Over the clatter of the mechanism, and using an ingenious combination of signing, touching, pointing, and shouting, they held a conversation that began, somewhat randomly, with "Do you like butter?" and ended with "I love you." It was a complete relationship in microcosm, taking no more than the 10-minute journey, and with each breakthrough in communication greeted with howls of infectious laughter.

More than just sight-seeing

Travel, I have belatedly realised, is not just about sightseeing, notching up destinations in a futile, trainspotting way. Away from home, work, the school run, our routine, we are bombarded with new information, suddenly alert and alive. You have probably known that for years, but for me it is a revelation.

So the irony is not lost on me that just as I have overcome my fears about long-haul flights, the outlook for air travel has become rather bleak. If an oil depot disaster does not ground us, then it is quite possible that plans to restrict the spread of bird flu will. And even without that, it is hard to see how we can go on flying willy-nilly about the globe with oil supplies politically vulnerable and dwindling, and each long-haul round trip damaging the environment more than driving a car for a year.

Travel may well broaden the mind, but it also knackers the planet, and the more your mind is broadened, the more unacceptable that trade-off seems. On my journey through life I have always been accompanied by fear and guilt. Just as the former has loosened its grip, it seems as though the latter is going to keep me grounded. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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