Why we Travel

'Why we Travel' by Pico Iyer is a reflective, quotation-rich essay probing the many reasons behind our urge to travel. It moves from the outer journey to the inner one, arguing that travel is ultimately a heightened state of awareness that renews and transforms us.

To lose and to find ourselves

We travel, Iyer begins, 'initially, to lose ourselves; and… next, to find ourselves', to open our hearts and eyes, to learn more of the world than newspapers allow, and 'to become young fools again', slowing time down and falling in love with life once more. Quoting Santayana, he says we need to escape into 'open solitudes' to 'sharpen the edge of life'.

He connects 'travel' with 'travail' (hard effort), noting that travel guides us toward a balance of wisdom and compassion, of seeing the world clearly yet feeling it truly, and that its first joy is leaving our beliefs and certainties at home and seeing everything afresh 'from a crooked angle'.

Tourist or traveller?

The real distinction, Iyer argues, is not between 'tourist' and 'traveller' but between those who leave their assumptions at home and those who don't. Travel 'whirls you around and turns you upside down', teaching how 'provisional and provincial' are the things we imagine to be universal. It shakes our complacencies by exposing us to moral and political urgencies we seldom face at home, and is 'the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places' from abstraction and ideology.

Carriers between cultures

In travelling we become carriers between cultures, 'walking video screens and living newspapers', the eyes and ears of people in closed or impoverished places, and their contact with the outside world. Yet, quoting Proust ('the real voyage of discovery… in seeing with new eyes'), Iyer says travel also lets us bring fresh, appreciative eyes to the places we visit, so tourism can revive cultures as well as harm them.

The inward journey

Travel, Iyer says, spins us round in two ways: it shows us the world's sights and values, and it reveals 'all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty'. Abroad, free of caste, job and label, we come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves and feel most alive; we are 'born again' into a younger, more open self. Quoting Camus, 'what gives value to travel is fear', he says we travel not for answers but for better questions.

The wonders within

Culture increasingly mixes, Teriyaki McBurgers in Kyoto, 'many-tongued and mongrel' cities, and technology lets people 'travel' without leaving home; yet the most significant movement, Iyer insists, is internal. Following Emerson and Thoreau, he says 'we carry within us the wonders we seek without us', and the most valuable journeys are 'the thresholds we cross in the heart'.

Travel, then, keeps the mind nimble, kills prejudice and fosters humour. Like love, it is a heightened state of awareness in which we are 'mindful, receptive… and ready to be transformed'. That, Iyer concludes, is why 'the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.'