Travel time

When I was a child, my father would often pack us up in his Ford Escort and we would make the seven-hour car journey from Singapore to Negeri Sembilan in Malaysia. My mother would have made our lunch and we would stop by the roadside and have our nasi lemak or sardine sandwiches. If it rained, we would eat in the car. There were no budget airlines to take us to my grandfather’s house, nor even a smooth
expressway.

When we arrived, my sister and I would joyfully chase the chickens or walk nimbly through the paddy fields. There were no five-star hotels, room service, buffets, tour guides or fancy stores. We ate whatever my grandmother cooked, slept on a simple mattress on the floor and collected water from the well when we wanted to take a shower. The toilet was just a little bigger than a telephone booth; it stood at the back of the house amid the long grass by the banana tree.

It was like that every school holiday. We always knew where we would go but we were happy. My parents did not think of exploring other places. When we had extra money, my father would give us a treat by allowing us to stay at a small beach hotel in Malacca before we headed off to our grandfather’s house again. It was not until I turned 18 that I had my first plane ride – from Penang to Singapore. It was a short ride but I remember every single detail of the flight; I kept the plane ticket for months.

My daughter, Sam, on the other hand, was eight months old when she first boarded a plane. Her first holiday experience was to Australia and she found the plane ride more thrilling than the holiday. Now at 13, she has experienced countless plane rides and is totally at home in an airplane. She belongs to a generation of children who are savvy travelers and who have seen more wonders of the world than a great number of adults. They expect to go for a fancy holiday or two every year and to a different country each time. Why have they caught this travel bug? Perhaps we as parents have conditioned them to be like that. I for one have often said that Sam needed to see the world and to experience different cultures. I wanted to give her what I did not have, but I do wonder if I have gone overboard sometimes.

For example, there are those who travel just for the sake of it. They travel because everybody else is traveling so that they can boast about having been to such and such a place. They stay in cookie-cutter hotels, have to-do and to-see lists that they tick off religiously, eat fast food or other food they are familiar with and refrain from trying out the local cuisine for fear of an upset stomach. Their shopping experience centers on international luxury brands, many of which have boutiques in their own cities, rather than trying to understand the local culture and products. Some even go a step further by buying these products, selling them back home and making it the highlight of their trip.

At the other extreme are people who abstain from traveling altogether, who feel that there is no need to see the world. They prefer to save their money and to stay put in their country. And why not? they argue. They could see the world from the countless travel channels on cable today. A click of the remote button and they are transported to Kathmandu in a heartbeat, they might say. A friend once told me defensively that she is not obliged to organize overseas holidays for her children – the money is better spent on
education, was her mantra, repeated ad nauseam.

Are they lesser individuals than the travelers among us?

Perhaps those of us who love to travel have this need to break the cycle of everyday life, to explore different places, meet different people and hear different languages.
It is a form of education, which opens our minds and broadens our outlook in life. The experience can be life changing or not, but certainly it stays with us for life.