You can stay safe at home, and never taste the world’s wonders

That’s the thing about travel. It expands the mind, excites the senses, gives us a sense of place and puts things in perspective.
At least it does so for me. Years ago I worked in a pub in London as a barman. George, the elderly geezer who managed the pub, turned to me in surprise one day after I had told him that I intended going from Hammersmith to Piccadilly Circus on my day off. “What on earth do you want to do that for? ” he asked. “ I have never left ‘ammersmiff.” I was born here, I went to school here and I have worked in this pub since the day I left school. Everything I need is here why on earth would I want to go to anywhere else?”
Months earlier I had traveled from South Africa to Luxembourg — with only R750 in traveller’s cheques to my name — caught a bus to Calais, then a train to Dover, then hitched my way to the top of the country. I touched the sea at John o’ Groats in Scotland then zigzagged back from coast to coast until I arrived in London, a month or so later, short of money so took a job in a pub.
I was astounded at George. Piccadilly Circus was just around the corner in a manner of speaking but he had never been curious enough to stray more than a few kilometres from his home. On the positive side his remark made me feel like a brave and intrepid explorer traveling to the corners of the earth.
“But you have always had ants in your pants,” said my mother, Cynthia, recently when we were talking my need to be out and about.
Indeed I have, but they don’t call it that anymore. These days we have important names and alphabet soup for everything. What were then ants in your pants is now Attention Deficit Syndrome (ADS). There is apparently also Nature Deprivation Syndrome (NDS) and then we all have ETV and DSTV and that you get from too much Multichoice. And lets not forget the new ASDL which if you are lucky you may just get from Telkom.
Be that as it may, the reason I have been raving on about the mind-expanding advantages of travel is as a result of reading an article in a magazine I happened upon recently in which there was a story about a rock duo who call themselves the White Stripes.
The story was about their concert-playing trip to Brazil and it began by describing their travels on the Amazon River. It went on to describe their performance at Manaus Opera House or the Amazon Theatre (Teatro Amazonas).
In two seconds flat I was back in Manaus, on the river again, walking in the rainforest and recalling the sight of that opera house with is tiled dome glittering in the sun. Built in 1881 at a time when fortunes were made in the rubber boom, it was to be a jewel in the heart of the Amazonian rain forest and make Manaus one of the great centers of civilization.
Had I not traveled there my enjoyment of the article and my ability to picture what was being said would have been diminished.
Music does much the same for me. I remember arriving in London in the “hippy age” excited to be breathing the same air as the Rolling Stones. I went to Ireland, to Dublin just to walk down Cypress Avenue, made famous by Van Morrison with a song of the same name. And yes, I felt a cold shiver snake down my spine at the news of the Airbus that plunged into the Atlantic off the northern tip of Brazil last week. Not too long ago I boarded a flight at Guarulhos airport in Sao Paulo that also flew over the Atlantic.
George, happy as he was in “ammersmif” would never have died in an air crash I guess, but neither would he have smelt the smoke of a wood fire in winter in the Karoo, swam in a lake during a lightning storm in Norway nor for that matter have been able to close his eyes and imagine the White Stripes on stage under tile-domed Teatro Amazonas.
This column appeared in the Cape Times on 8 June 2