The Enjoyment of Travelling

Travel used to be a pleasure, now it has become an industry.  No doubt there are greater facilities for traveling today than a hundred years ago and governments with their official travel bureau have exploited the tourist trade, with the result that the modern man travels on the whole much more than his grandfather.

In order to understand that art of travel, beware of the different types of false travel which is no travel at all.  The first kind of false travel is travel to improve one’s mind.  The second type of false travel is travel for conversation, in order that one may talk about it afterwards.  The tourists are so busy with their cameras that they have no time to look at the places themselves.  Of course, they have the privilege of looking at them in the pictures afterwards when they go home.  It is natural that the more places one visits, the richer the memory will be, and the more places there will be to talk about.

This sort of foolish travel necessarily produces the third type of false travelers, who travel by schedule, knowing beforehand exactly how many hours they are going to spend in Shimla or Shillong. Before moving he makes a perfect schedule and religiously adhere to it.  Bound by the clock and run by the calendar as he is at home, he is still bound by the clock and run by the calendar while abroad.

True motive of travel should be to travel to become lost and unknown.  A true traveler is always a vagabond.  The essence of travel is to have no duties, no fixed hours, no mail, no inquisitive neighbors, no receiving delegation, ad no destination. A good traveler is one  who does not know when he is going to, and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from. A good traveler does not care for anybody in particular but cares for mankind in general.  Having no particular friend but having everybody’s one’s friend, loving mankind in general, he mixes with them and goes about observing the charms of people and their customs.

It is true that there is something which terrifies the and surprises the soul to find that mother nature, with her great skill and wisdom and energy has suddenly produced a thing like a stone cave or a blessed spot.  As it is said the lion uses the same energy to attack an elephant as to attack a wild rabbit, so does the mother nature do the same thing.  She uses all her energies to produce a stone cave or a blessed spot, but she also uses all her energy in producing a bird, a fish, a flower, a blade of grass or even a feather, a scale, a petal, a leaf.

To comprehend the different organs of the horse is not to comprehend the horse itself what we call the horse exists before its different organs. Laoste said, “Thirty spokes are grouped around the hub of a wheel and when they lose their own individuality, we have a functioning cart.  We knead clay into a vessel and when the clay loses its own existence we have a usable utensils.  We make a hole in the wall to make windows and doors and when the windows and doors lose their own existence, we have a house to live in.