Racing Trains: a Travelogue

Description

“Racing Trains” is the first in a series of travelogues which celebrate the foolishness of travel in all its outrageous forms and revels in travel’s unlikely catalytic effects.

The foolish traveler is when…

… You leave your passport at home because you’d left your laptop bag in the back of a van in Delhi and then not put it back where it belonged and then not checked it…

… you realise that carrying locked luggage through Amsterdam is not just about stopping people taking things out – but stopping others from putting unwanted things in…

… you assume don’t need a visa to go to Lithuania via Byelorussia…. and then get marched off a train at gunpoint and surrounded by dogs…

And yet we repeat it, time and time again, forgetful of the previous foolishness because all that foolishness brings so much more wisdom: connection, new understandings and possibilities for change.

Travel is so much more than the leisure or economic imperative it brings – the ‘holiday of a lifetime’, ‘the city break’ or the ‘export opportunities’. It’s the opportunity of fresh insights, new languages, alphabets, texts and musics and the realisation just how much people across the world share our desire to listen to artists, to guide the young and to eat and drink with utter strangers.

It’s when you travel when you can invent the most preposterous of ideas and schemes. All the shackles come off and you think never mind blue sky but brilliant blue purple vermillion ochre and cobalt blue skies with no holds barred, and no sense of what is not possible.

This disinhibition is something to be encouraged. It’s a consequence of travel for which one must give thanks whilst simultaneously wondering where it’s all coming from, especially when you yourself sitting on strange hotel patios with strangers inventing God only knows what and wondering why.