The Journey Is the Destination
Travel is not only a question of where you go. It is a question of what speed you move at.
The Teleportation Problem
At airplane speed, the world becomes a set of points: departure city, arrival city, hotel, restaurant, museum, monument, beach. The space between those points disappears. You leave one climate-controlled room, pass through a few others, and emerge somewhere else.
Flying is miraculous, useful, and often necessary. It is also a kind of teleportation. It collapses geography into logistics.
I fly often, and usually gratefully. But I rarely remember the space between the places I flew.
The Speed of Noticing
Walking is the opposite. Walking is the speed of noticing. It refuses to let a city become abstract.
You see the storefronts between the landmarks. You see where children are picked up from school, where old men sit in the afternoon, and where the neighborhood changes before any map would admit it. You smell lunch before you see the restaurant. You hear the language of a place at conversational volume.
Walking lets a city interrupt you properly.
But walking takes time. More time than life usually gives us.
In Praise of the In-Between
This is why I love trains.
A train is the great compromise among ways of moving. It is fast enough to cross real distance, but slow enough that the world remains continuous.
From a train window, places do not simply appear. They become. A city thins into suburbs. Suburbs open into fields. Fields gather into towns. Towns thicken again into another city.
You see the back side of places: laundry, factories, small stations, half-built apartments, farms, walls, rivers, children waving, people waiting with plastic bags, motorcycles paused at crossings.
On a train, you are moving and still at the same time. You sit in one place while the country passes through you. People board and leave. Food appears. Languages shift. The landscape changes at a pace your mind can follow.
Singapore to Hong Kong Overland
One of the best trips I have ever taken was five weeks across mainland Southeast Asia, from Singapore to Hong Kong.
I flew into Singapore and flew out of Hong Kong, but in between I did not take a single flight. I moved by train, bus, car, bicycle, motorcycle, and foot. A few times, I rode on the back of a motorcycle. Several times, I walked across international borders.
That trip felt different because the region never broke apart into destinations. Malaysia did not suddenly become Thailand. Thailand did not suddenly become Laos, Vietnam, or China. Each place gave way gradually to the next.
The borders mattered, but so did the miles before and after them. The differences were not erased; they were placed in sequence. You could feel transition instead of merely reading about it.
Some people have taken this instinct much further than I have. Dave Kunst walked around the world. George Meegan walked from the southern tip of South America to the northern edge of Alaska. My friend Tyler MacNiven walked the length of Japan and later tried to walk across Iran. They had the time, courage, obsession, or madness to make the journey itself the whole point.
I have not. I probably will not, at least not in that totalizing way. I have responsibilities, constraints, jobs, relationships, time boxes, and calendar holds.
On my honeymoon, I will fly around many of the same parts of the world that I once crossed slowly, because there is only so much time. That is the tradeoff. I understand it, and I will still love the trip.
But some part of me wishes I could do it the long way again.
The Grocery Store Test
The point is not slowness for its own sake. The point is access to the ordinary.
The same instinct is why I love grocery stores when I travel.
Museums show what a place preserves. Monuments show what it wants to project. Grocery stores show how it lives.
They reveal what is cheap, what is expensive, what is imported, what is seasonal, what comes in five varieties, what comes in one, and what people cook when nobody is watching.
A grocery store is not a detour from seeing a place. It is one of the fastest ways into ordinary life.
Maybe that is the real distinction. Some travel is built around arrival. Some travel is built around continuity. I am happiest when I can feel the line between places rather than only the points.
A walk through a city, a train across a country, a grocery store in a neighborhood, a border crossed on foot: these are not delays before the real thing. They are the part where the real thing has the best chance to reveal itself.
Most of the time, life requires me to arrive. When I can, I still want to feel the miles.