Reinvention, Escape, Curiosity, Perspective. Why I Travel

One of my earliest memories is looking out my window over the fields by night at the back of our house, wishing I could be out there. I cuddled my white fur seal teddy, fingers clutching the white window ledge. I must have been six or seven and my Mum lived in Malawi, Africa after my parent’s divorce. My little brother and I lived with my (wonderful) Dad and I was safe and happy. It wasn’t that I wanted to leave him. It was that “out there” seemed so much more exciting and that preference still underlies my need for travel. Others call it ‘fernweh,’ a German word meaning far-sickness, the opposite of homesickness. I also like Jack Reacher’s explanation in Lee Child’s thriller, Never Go Back. “Ninety-nine of us grow up to love the campfire, and one grows up to hate it. Ninety-nine of us grow up to fear the howling wolf, and one grows up to envy it. And I’m that guy.” [Or presumably girl!] I love the Reacher series for the vigilante justice he metes out, a sense of restoring balance to the world, but perhaps I’m also jealous of how Reacher leaves at the end of every book, with only a toothbrush in his pocket … Here are some more reasons why I travel. (1) Reinvention In 2000, I was living in London, celebrating that the Millennium Bug didn’t happen even though we’d spent years preparing for it, living well on corporate expense accounts. I was 25, partied hard, drank far too much and worked like a demon in my consulting job. I popped painkillers and caffeine tablets by day, tequila shots and vodka by night, oscillating between wild excess and ascetic abstinence. I barely remember that time. I was lost and couldn’t seem to drag myself into a new reality. I had glimpsed a different way of life when I sailed on the tall ship Soren Larsen in 1999, but I returned to the day job and my rut of a routine soon after. I was more scared of the person I was turning into than the upheaval of heading to the other side of the world. Somewhere else was preferable to my reality in London. So I resigned and left London in May 2000, arriving in Perth, Australia, determined to become someone new. I learned to scuba dive in Fremantle and did my first dives on Ningaloo Reef, snorkelling with whale sharks as I headed north. I camped across the expanse of Western Australia, watching the stars of the Southern Hemisphere pass overheard. I walked in Kakadu, hiked and kayaked in the Northern Territories — and I will write in more detail about that trip another time. I didn’t shed my old self easily — there were still plenty of nights of excess — but reinvention is easier when no one has expectations of you, when you can move on the next day and never have to explain yourself, when you can be anonymous. Some might find that scary, that you could disappear and no one would even notice, but I have always found it liberating. Fast forward to 2004, when my brief marriage to a dive instructor in New Zealand fell apart (that’s another story, too). I needed to reinvent myself once again. If I stayed near the people who cared, that’s the way they would treat me. So, I left New Zealand and travelled to Egypt, a place I had always wanted to visit since visiting the British Museum as a child, fascinated by the mummy room and later, entranced by Indiana Jones movies. I took off my wedding ring before the plane landed and over my weeks there, the sun erased the white band on my finger. I didn’t tell my fellow travellers what I was going through, my journals soaked up the pain instead. I found joy again in the rock-cut temple of Abu Simbel and the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, which I eventually wrote about in Ark of Blood, my third ARKANE thriller. Of course,