TRAVEL

My travel insurance went up this year: being over-75 and breaking my wrist a couple of months ago might have had something to do with it.  I looked at what other insurance companies would charge me and decided to stay with the one I’ve got.  Goodness knows what they’ll charge when I reach 80. 

I can see that travel insurance alone might inhibit more adventurous journeys as I get older and that would be one excuse.  There are other reasons not to travel at this age:  What if I have a medical issue abroad?  Can I manage my own luggage?   What if I lose a bank card?  The carbon emissions of planes.  These are all things that might have been on the edge of my consciousness when younger, but the feeling of robustness, of confidence in my own abilities, would have made most of those things irrelevant back then.  Sadly, they are more forefront now and, while they haven't stopped me yet, they give me pause when I consider a journey to far flung places.  I already have friends who have stopped travelling other than in the UK - bladders, hips, eye-sight, bowels have become too much hassle now.

But this morning as I looked up at the criss-cross of vapour trails in a clear blue sky, I was inspired again to think about countries I haven’t yet visited.  Travel, for me, is as much a journey of the mind as the body.  I still need adventures to shake me out of my habitual way of thinking and test any remaining skills of comprehension and adaptation. Quite literally, travel makes me see the world differently, through the eyes of people with different histories, different values; people who might be battling with their climate or their government as we do, but not quite like us.  That relief of finding that the world is not just the world as the UK sees it, but a vast planet of interesting people and gorgeous places, takes me to different places in my mind as well as my body.  

Some of my contemporaries have bought a place abroad, are doing house-sitting or a time-share, and know how they will spend their holidays each year.  I do not.  (You might ask why retired people even need a holiday when they’re not working, but it’s the same as before - to get away from things that irk us, and to reach out to new experiences.)  I am glad not to have saved up my travel till retirement, but to have done much of it at a younger age when I could have a young person’s escapade: hitchhiking around the USA; volunteering on school-building projects in India, Africa, Nepal; horse-riding in Ireland.   Such memories will be a balm when I am no longer able to travel.  A trip to Japan this year was strenuous only because my companion and I carted baggage around on bullet trains and buses.  Still able to walk for miles, we were nevertheless glad to fall into hotel beds, sometimes in the afternoon.  That wouldn’t have happened when we were younger.

I also have a new passport, the blue one now that we are out of the EU.  It may well be my last 10 year passport and last passport photo.  A strange thought…  It is strangeness, I think, that still galvanises my yearning to travel.  The experience of being a stranger in a foreign land, particularly intense when I travel alone; the not-knowing where I am going or how to order food; the hesitancy when trying to speak a foreign language; the shock of an aquamarine sea or a snowy mountain top.   Travel beckons with beauty and excitement, but always with that frisson to it:  a little bit of fear to jolt life out of a rut.  

And then there is the heart’s longing to visit a loved-one on the other side of the globe, when Whatsapp and Zoom no longer suffice.  Sometimes a necessity, sometimes sheer joy.  How lucky am I that this is still possible.