Answering travel’s big question?

An AAP report says that the Art of Travel is not your usual travel program, rather than suggesting places where people should take their next holiday or whetting their appetites with visions of exotic locations, it offers a philosophical look at how and why we travel.

In the new ABC DVD, English philosopher and writer Alain De Botton, known for his essayistic books, launches an inquiry into the reasons behind travel. Why do we travel? What are we looking for? Do the dreams match up to the realities?

“Everyone goes on holiday, but how often do we stop to think about the very nature of travel itself?” he asks.

Holidays are the surest keys to unlock our ideas about happiness, he points out, but they can often be disappointing.  While few things are as exciting as the idea of travelling somewhere else, the reality of travel seldom matches our daydreams.

The tragi-comic disappointments are well-known: the disorientation, the mid-afternoon despair, the lethargy before ancient ruins. And yet the reasons behind such disappointments are rarely explored.

And it’s all a matter of perception. On a flight into somewhere like London, for example, half the passengers may be extremely excited to be going to a new destination, while the other half sadly anticipates a return to “boring, old home”.

During a telephone interview from London, De Botton suggests luxury travel may be alienating, as it’s difficult to meet or get to know locals in any meaningful sense.

But a holiday romance with a local could be one of the best ways to get to know a place, he says. That way you can discover a country through the local person’s eyes.

The problem, he says, is that it doesn’t matter where you travel, how luxurious it might be, or how relaxing – you can never escape yourself. And once back at home, life can be painfully normal.

The Art of Travel features the work of poets, artists, and philosophers, alongside encounters with holidaymakers and people from the travel industry.

On the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth 2, de Botton meets a widow who shows him a photo of a man she met on board and had a hot romance with.  But she points out that while the holiday fling was enjoyable “life on board is not the same as real life”.

“It can be depressing to come home from a holiday,” de Botton says. “Suddenly it’s as if we’ve never been away.”

De Botton confronts the blandness and cynicism of the tourism industry, while offering nuggets of advice to make us think hard before choosing the next holiday destination from a glossy brochure.

Holidays rest on the assumption that going from A to B will make you happy, he says.  But what is needed, perhaps, is for people to change their attitude.  Curiosity is the essential ingredient.

In that way we may “even find our own backyards no less interesting” and we might “learn to become travellers around our everyday lives”.

De Botton’s writing has been termed a “philosophy of everyday life”. His latest book, The Architecture of Happiness, discusses questions of beauty and ugliness in architecture.

A Report by The Mole from AAP