In November, The Economist wrote: "Early in the pandemic, most forecasters reckoned that international travel would not recover to the levels of 2019 before 2023 at the earliest, and more likely in 2024. That still seems a reasonable bet."

That was before Omicron...

But, as I wrote in our rather subdued year-end retrospective, it seems to me that there'll be no going back. Our relationship with travel has already evolved, and will very likely continue to do so.

This year -- the most stationary of my whole life, I think, although I guess our flight from our home in Malaysia to our family in the UK puts us up among the most-travelled minority this year -- I have champed at the bit. Often. But I have also felt myself becoming bizarrely -- worryingly? -- reconciled to doing less.

Is that good or bad?

Well, the kind of travel that is low-key, local, and long-term was always what we were aiming for in post-retirement life, and now these are even more appropriate watchwords.


I early figured out that working, studying, or interning offers a great way of seeing a place for longer. These are photos from my Master's internship in Thailand in 2003. This is my room

I have to admit to feeling a little stung on reading this piece by Lucy Ellman: "My beef is with frivolous travel of the selfish kind, the act of inflicting yourself, uninvited, on other cultures, this constant movement to and fro of the chronically rich, with their taster menus of destinations to which they’re attracted purely due to their own lack of direction, humility, and self-knowledge... Travel kills as much knowledge, taste, and culture as it purportedly spreads... The truth is you don’t personally have to survey every square inch on earth, no matter what your so-called friends tell you or what you read in newspaper and magazine travel porn. After all, the only really interesting thing about travel is seeing new flora and fauna, and we’ve killed off most of that. What is more important, in the end, than listening to Bach or reading Dickens? Humankind should be your business, not this hypnotic globe-trotting."

There's certainly plenty to ponder here, although I think she's exaggerating, and I don't actually think I'm guilty of the totally thoughtless travel that she skewers (but then I suppose we never do...).


Mueang Boran, Samut Prakan



In the pre-pandemic era, it's hard to deny that there was way too much mindless travel going on. (And for excellent ideas on reshaping tourism, see this article by Stuart McDonald.)

But a prolonged and radical reduction in travel will also lead to problems that go way beyond the economic field (tourism is a way, however imperfect, of redistributing wealth).

Human beings as a species are travellers, after all. They always have been. This is surely why, as Emily Thomas writes, it is not possible to really know a place without having been there: "There is a way it FEELS to be in London, and a way it FEELS to be in New York, that cannot be captured except by visiting that place. London-in-itself offers a different point of view than London-from-your-living-room."

Not every individual human is an inveterate roamer. But if you do have the "travel gene", or something resembling it, you definitely feel somewhat less than human without regular physical experiences of depaysement. I'm 100% convinced of the educational benefits of reading and language-learning, but at the end of the day, travelling less means understanding less, being alive less...





I was very struck by Malaysian writer Emily Ding's travel philosophy, which very strongly mirrors mine. She writes: "I've long known that I'm not a perpetual traveller; I can't be on the move constantly. I’m also not a short-trip traveller, especially to new or faraway places; I would rather not rush the experience. Which explains why I usually try to save all my time for long trips, and try to base myself in one place for a while, so I can combine both work and play... I need the time and space to reflect on my travels, to go back through everything I've seen and heard and learnt, and put it all down somewhere. It's my documentary impulse, I guess, and I can't physically move on until my head moves on. Much as I enjoy traipsing around talking to people on the ground level, I also enjoy just cooping up somewhere reading and listening and watching everything to do with a place -- usually after I've been there, so I can square what I’m learning with what I've seen. I am equal parts wanderer and homebody."

Yes! That's me, totally... I have a more substantial homebody element than I did pre-pandemic, but basically, her description reflects the kind of travel I always aspired to in retirement, and now value even more, in light of everything that's going on in the world.





At the moment, the balance is way out of whack. There's far too much homebodying and far too little wandering. I pine -- really pine -- for a dose of that invigorating depaysement that fires up your brain and your heart and your emotions...

Nevertheless, the idea that less is more is not going to lose its validity any time soon.

(Incidentally, I would 100% recommend Emily's newsletters. She and her guests offer windows on the world that are particularly valuable at the moment, when we can see so little of it for ourselves.)

So... Freedom to travel, almost two years after this ongoing scourge took over the world, is still a distant dream. But we're learning -- somehow -- to make do. Hopefully, those lessons will stand us in good stead in the future, when -- God willing -- we'll be able to suck in great lungfuls of depaysement once more.


Wat Pho, Bangkok


Wat Arun, Bangkok