“He knows not where he’s going,
For the ocean will decide,
It’s not the destination,
It’s the glory of the ride”
Edward Monkton, Zen Dog
At a church, high on a hill in Ethiopia
I have often been asked how I choose destinations I travel to. It’s not an easy one to answer. The lure of a holiday to popular ‘big city’ destinations subsided for me many years ago – almost as soon as it started. If there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that big cities are not on my ‘must visit’ list much like star hotels or hotel chains are not on my ‘places to stay’ list. There’s a kind of a predictiveness to both which takes away from the real experience of a destination. A Sydney is a New York is a London is a Paris. A Hilton is a Hilton is a Hilton wherever you go. So what then influences where I go?
It varies depending on who I go with.
Inle, Myanmar
Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia
My solo trips are guided by two key tenets – I go to places where no one I know has been to before, and to places where I know no one. What this does is strip away any familiarity or expectation one may have of a place, allowing me to travel unbiased and uninfluenced and with no fallbacks. It allows me to ‘solo travel’ in the truest sense of the word. Then I look for unusual experiences. So Myanmar because it was in a state of transition, just opening up and waiting to be discovered. Armenia because of my fascination with its history, tradition and culture. It was also the first country in the world to declare itself Christian and I wanted to understand what that meant in a region that had been through so much of political turmoil and struggle. Morocco because every article I had read told me how unsafe it was for single women and I wanted to test myself and the country (we both passed with flying colours). Cambodia because at that time every article I read about it told me that it was a country of landmines and yet, like Myanmar, it was waiting to be discovered. So it has been with all the other countries I have travelled solo – any country that sounds intriguing and exotic in an unfamiliar way is on my list of solo travels.
Sermon on the mount…at the rock-cut churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia
There are other fascinations. For a strange reason, studying Nevil Shute’s A Town like Alice as part of my English course left a huge impression on me and so, on my first trip to Australia, Alice Springs it was. The book came alive right before me and it was such an amazing experience though I’m sure the town would have had little or no impact on those not familiar with the book. Then Ethiopia. Who goes on holiday to that country? All I knew about Ethiopia was in the context of famine. It so happened that my cousin was on a fellowship there for a few months and invited me over. It was breathtakingly beautiful – the people, the food, the monuments.
Warsaw, Poland
Tallinn, Estonia
Bratislava, Slovakia
With my husband, we initially travelled to places we thought would be ‘nice and interesting and different’ until we discovered Eastern and Central Europe and fell in love. Since then, our trips have been a relentless pursuit of discovering all that Eastern Europe has to offer – from Romania and Bulgaria to Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and so on. The people, the food, the old towns, the culture have captivated us, and we have had some of the loveliest holiday experiences in these countries. We just have a couple of smaller little countries to cover in the region before we have to start discovering new territory!
The UNESCO biosphere reserve of Spreewald, Brandenburg, Germany
At the iconic Stari Most (Old Bridge) in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina
When our daughters were young, our destinations were guided by activities for them. Water and animals were a big draw, so it was beach destinations like Goa or the Maldives or Lombok or jungle holidays like the Jungle Retreat at Masinagudi or animal experience like the Singapore or San Diego zoos. Or Disneyland which is a fun family destination. Now, as they have grown older, we have been expanding boundaries with them, trying to do combination trips that give them a sense of the unique and unusual, as well as the more familiar. So trips to the UK have been combined with a trip to Poland or a trip to Germany has been combined with a trip to Croatia/Montenegro/Bosnia and Herzegovina.
A Mathura special – sweet lassi
With friends, does it really matter? The company takes precedence over destination, so it could be Sri Lanka where we’ve got lost in the old world charm of Galle or discovered beach hideouts like Jungle Beach. Or it could be Goa where the toss of a coin determines whether one goes left or right and which beach or seafood restaurant one must hit. Or even a long Indian train journey which epitomizes Monkton’s ‘glory of the ride.”
The leather tanneries of Fez, Morocco
And so different influences are at play in my choice of holidays and there’s never a ‘bucket list’ because holidays should never be pulled out of one.
