How to bring these ramblings to an end?
Jean-Luc Godard, the French Swiss film director is quoted as having said that every story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. Perhaps this struck a chord for me, being also of French Swiss stock, or maybe because it also brings to mind Eric Morecambe’s line: “I am playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.”
It is easier to recognise the beginning than to predict the end when time catches up and life obliges the traveller to pull in his or her horns, accepting that the necessary energy and stamina are no longer up to the job. The beginning: perhaps the first school trip across the channel, the first package holiday with one’s parents, the first parentless trip with one’s peers, the first spark of curiosity that there is a whole world out there full of discoveries. For many, it is the impact of past travel writers who have evoked the magic of ‘abroad’, of history, art and architecture, music and natural wonders, different peoples, religious festivals and cultural events. For me, the Danish travel-writer, Jorgen Bitsch, conjured up wonderful images in his books of life in the Amazonian jungles, Arabia and Asia, which have inspired me to follow in his footsteps and experience such things for myself.
However, while not everyone is smitten with the urge to see what lies beyond, for some it is an over-riding compulsion to see what is round the next corner or over the next hill. There is no known cure for this condition; the true traveller cannot really ‘get it out of his or her system’ but is smitten for life.
But as time passes, a conflict arises, pulling the traveller in opposite directions and facing him or her with personal, social and moral dilemmas. On the one hand, the medical profession encourages one to keep moving continuing physical and mental activity to maintain one’s health; on the other hand, a range of factors are lined up to make this more difficult with the passing of time: increasing disability, anxiety about international political stability, overseas medical facilities if needed, and now the moral question of use of global resources involved in travel. Even the suggestion that travel is merely extended colonisation.
This may well be a matter of global concern, but I do wonder if this view is shared by inhabitants of visited countries, particularly, of poorer ones, many of which now have a thriving and important tourist industry, people who would be negatively impacted if their country’s tourist revenue were curtailed or eliminated. This indeed has already happened in countries like Egypt or Tunisia, or now Sri Lanka, where security is or has been an issue, and it is often the poorest who are first to feel the effect.
So this book only has an end in the sense that every book, or film or artwork must have a cut-off point for it to be released for public scrutiny, but travels and blogs are and will continue, insha Allah, unless any of the above impede that ongoing process.