Why do we travel?
Lately, the travel magazines
are full of wonderment at a new fad
-
Reality Tourism - that sees
comfortable upper middle-class travellers
from Western democracies wanting to view the slums of Brazil and the townships
of South Africa.
This trend does not surprise me:
we travel to experience
a completely different world,
be it a pacifying beach in the
tropics,
or a hectic marketplace full of goats
and chickens.
Then there are those who travel
for business, for work, for military,
for romantic or for family reasons.
I was born to a travelling family
and once did not think much about
the reasons, since my father worked
for a government airline, and every
January we received a set of four taxpayer-subsidized tickets for each member of our family -
twenty tickets in all.
My mother and father and my grandparents
decided where I went as a child: Vancouver, Tampa, Lake Sturgeon, Old Orchard Beach, Canterbury, London, Arosa, Zurich,
Paris.
In my late teens, careless and ever
hopeful,
I would just dash out to the airport
with our company's schedule in one
hand
and a carry-on bag in the other
hand, embarking for Antigua, London, Vienna, Paris, and Athens.
Since my parents did not give me any money,
my travel funds
came solely from jobs such as supermarket
clerk, data entry clerk, and even babysitting.
I was the only woman to stay at a hotel
in the Caribbean that
only Caribbean travellers
frequented.
I simply could not afford the
hotels that
other travellers used.
The place was spotless and respectable, though spartan.
Here are some of my happier
memories:
