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those who have narrower foci to even begin to understand how mediaeval a world it still is in places.

Travelling for me is about two things: discovering the rest of the planet & the people that inhabit it - and rediscovering myself and my own corner of it.

It is about getting past the fear and walking the streets of an unknown city or following an unmarked trail. It is about experiencing the much-talked-about icons and forming my own view of them. More so, it is about discovering the hidden corners of forgotten villages or deserted coves, the snippets of beauty that exist because so few people have found them yet. It is about catching moments: a sunrise, a nightfall, a rice-threshing, a wash-day. It is about witnessing the amazing feats of mankind in his art and architecture and engineering through the millennia that we have walked the planet. And about bearing witness to the degree to which we get it so unforgivably wrong at times. It is about acknowledging our heritage and our achievements, whilst recognising that so far as mother earth is concerned we treat her badly, but we are ultimately truly insignificant. Whatever damage we wreak, she will survive us. The power that carved the Grand Canyon or raised the Himalaya is not something with which we can compete.

It is also about coming home. We do not appreciate home so well as when we have been away. The joy of being able to clean my teeth under a running tap. To walk barefoot in my own backyard, to place precious bread on the bird-table, and smell the apple-blossom. Like many people I often feel that my life is not all I'd hoped it might beit takes a journey and a homecoming for me to appreciate what I have, and what I have achieved: to be loved, and trusted, to have a home and a garden, employment and respect, family, friends, a soulmate, and the freedom to go away from it all and return at will.

It is about learning to look at my home town with the eyes of a traveller, learning to see the beauty that passes me by every day. Seeing the richness of local heritage and its connections to far away places. Appreciating the British climate even: days of heat and humidity make me appreciate a summer shower. Miles of desert sand make my parched patch of lawn seem lush.

Travel gives me time. Without deadlines and obligations, without having to be what the people around me expect of me, I can slow down and really look at the world. I can examine my reactions to it, and question them. I can find out a little more about who I really am.

For a writer, travel replenishes the storehouse of memory. Tiny snippets of experience are filed away to inform or colour our future endeavours. The smell of fresh fish on the harbour. The brazier-lit street in the hill-town. Mist on the lake. The faces of the old men playing chess, and the young boys playing volleyball. The stillness of sacred spaces everywhere. The scents and the stinks. The sounds. The conversations. The food, the drink. The deep sleeps of contentment and the restless nights of fear or discomfort.

Why travel? Because there is no better way to learn.

"Seek and thou shalt find" as someone once said, a long time ago.

Learn more about this author, Lesley Mason.
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