Travel is only for People who Can't Cope with Being at Home
I have a love - hate relationship with travel.
Sometimes it's hate - hate, like the time I had a particularly gruesome stay in Rome; when I came home I had a T-shirt printed that said "Rome without Romans would be like Sex without Aids".
Occasionally, it's love - love: Last September I had the best risotto in the world on the Grand Canal and that same day had a drink at Harvey Nick's 5th Floor Bar only 7 stools away from Emma Thompson.
To me, the main problem about travel is that I have to leave home. I love everything about being home. If I were any more parochial, I could be rolled up with a lacky band and thrown free on people's front lawns once a week with local church fetes advertised on my bum.
When I do travel, which is too often, I try not to look down on Perth when the plane banks over the Swan River on its way north. I cannot cope with all that glistening water where I sail, those golden beaches where I walk, those bookshops where I work and those people and dogs that I love.
Not when the next 6 hours will bring Harry's Bar on the Changi Airport's cactus infested smoking deck (dubiously claimed as Singapore's favourite bar and indubitably its sweatiest). Followed 14 hours later by rush hour on London's M25, living up to its reputation as the the world's biggest long - term carpark, sitting in a hire car without a clue on how to change the radio dial from the inanities of BBC Radio One.
I know that if I do glance down, I will have an uncontrollable urge to find the nearest exit - which the cabin crew has kindly informed me could be behind me.
I admit to frequent temptation to summon the nearest hostess (in my case, invariably the young lady who looks remarkably like Leigh Matthews) and utter vague references to Semtex packed in promising bulges in my board shorts. Which will explode spectacularly once it exceeds a 5 kilometre limit from Royal Perth Yacht Club.
I have resisted. But only so far.
It does not help that I am by nature not a particularly pleasant, patient, tolerant sort of chap.
This immediately excludes my travel plans from any special deals offered by Air India, Garuda Airways, Royal Brunei, any airline owned by bogside Irishmen, Formule 1 airport motels and any aeroplane seat further back from the pilot's bottom than 8C.
Unfortunately, until Platinum Frequent Flyer status saved my life (as well as simultaneously ruining it), the early years of my globetrotting were run on a budget that stretched no further than stand-by on Aeroflot.
This led me, as a callow youth in a really cool leather jacket, to attempt numerous flirtatious relationships with airline personnel of both (or maybe even three) genders, in the vain hope of moving from the seat nearest the luggage hold (where cabin crew could occasionally share a drag on a fag) to somewhere nearer the pointy end of the 747.
The very rare occasions on which my latest variant on the personas of a wonderfully charming, down-on-my-luck Vietnam Vet / Country Vet did get some traction, I confess that I did nibble nonchalantly on chilled caviar while sneering at the poorest parts of India 30,000 feet below me and those very ordinary people in Cattle Class 100 feet behind me.
However, it only intensified my fear of having ever to go back to my seat in a row number higher than my revered great-grandfather's age. Which, invariably, I did have to do.
I also have the attention span of a five-year-old whose ADD tablets have been swallowed by the cat:
I can be persuaded to abandon crabbing in dinghy in Mandurah for trout fishing in a loch in Scotland, but by six o'clock I will be sulking about not getting to Edinburgh in time for a single malt and a MacDonald's.
At the Louvre, Tate Modern and MoMA New York I have spent more time in the giftshops than the galleries.
(Do you know it only takes 19 minutes to see the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, seven mummified pharaohs, go to the 'loo and graffiti a reactionary but succinct assessment of architect I. M. Pei's absurd glass pyramid on the exit doors?)
To be honest, I admit I have succeeded in acquiring a taste for a number of things, even when a disconcerting 20,000 miles away from my favourite seat at the yacht club bar:
There is nothing quite as serene as a day shopping in New York City when you have memorised the exact locations of the public lavatories in Bloomingdales, Maceys, Barney's and Saks of Fifth Avenue.
I also love practising that sharp short right-arm jab with the Nikon zoom lens to the nose of gypsy pickpockets on the Piazza della Signoria.
When surrounded by a gaggle of Japanese tourists and German guides in Bavaria, I adore asking all and sundry if they've lost any good wars lately.
Yes, I do love all that.
But of course the thing that I really love, is coming home.
What I hate, is having to go away to do it.
Relevant links:
Why it's hard to leave Perth, Western Australia
Where we work: Elizabeth's Bookshops Australia
Leaving Home (for sale)
Proud Dad: Toby Schmitz (Actor & Playwright, Sydney)
Proud Dad: Rory Schmitz (Artist & Gallery Director, Berlin)
Qantas Platinum Frequent Flyer
I have a love - hate relationship with travel.
Sometimes it's hate - hate, like the time I had a particularly gruesome stay in Rome; when I came home I had a T-shirt printed that said "Rome without Romans would be like Sex without Aids".
 |
| Would YOU leave this for the M25 ? |
To me, the main problem about travel is that I have to leave home. I love everything about being home. If I were any more parochial, I could be rolled up with a lacky band and thrown free on people's front lawns once a week with local church fetes advertised on my bum.
When I do travel, which is too often, I try not to look down on Perth when the plane banks over the Swan River on its way north. I cannot cope with all that glistening water where I sail, those golden beaches where I walk, those bookshops where I work and those people and dogs that I love.
Not when the next 6 hours will bring Harry's Bar on the Changi Airport's cactus infested smoking deck (dubiously claimed as Singapore's favourite bar and indubitably its sweatiest). Followed 14 hours later by rush hour on London's M25, living up to its reputation as the the world's biggest long - term carpark, sitting in a hire car without a clue on how to change the radio dial from the inanities of BBC Radio One.
I know that if I do glance down, I will have an uncontrollable urge to find the nearest exit - which the cabin crew has kindly informed me could be behind me.
I admit to frequent temptation to summon the nearest hostess (in my case, invariably the young lady who looks remarkably like Leigh Matthews) and utter vague references to Semtex packed in promising bulges in my board shorts. Which will explode spectacularly once it exceeds a 5 kilometre limit from Royal Perth Yacht Club.
I have resisted. But only so far.
It does not help that I am by nature not a particularly pleasant, patient, tolerant sort of chap.
This immediately excludes my travel plans from any special deals offered by Air India, Garuda Airways, Royal Brunei, any airline owned by bogside Irishmen, Formule 1 airport motels and any aeroplane seat further back from the pilot's bottom than 8C.
Unfortunately, until Platinum Frequent Flyer status saved my life (as well as simultaneously ruining it), the early years of my globetrotting were run on a budget that stretched no further than stand-by on Aeroflot.
This led me, as a callow youth in a really cool leather jacket, to attempt numerous flirtatious relationships with airline personnel of both (or maybe even three) genders, in the vain hope of moving from the seat nearest the luggage hold (where cabin crew could occasionally share a drag on a fag) to somewhere nearer the pointy end of the 747.
The very rare occasions on which my latest variant on the personas of a wonderfully charming, down-on-my-luck Vietnam Vet / Country Vet did get some traction, I confess that I did nibble nonchalantly on chilled caviar while sneering at the poorest parts of India 30,000 feet below me and those very ordinary people in Cattle Class 100 feet behind me.
 |
| Qantas Business (theage.com.au) |
I also have the attention span of a five-year-old whose ADD tablets have been swallowed by the cat:
I can be persuaded to abandon crabbing in dinghy in Mandurah for trout fishing in a loch in Scotland, but by six o'clock I will be sulking about not getting to Edinburgh in time for a single malt and a MacDonald's.
At the Louvre, Tate Modern and MoMA New York I have spent more time in the giftshops than the galleries.
(Do you know it only takes 19 minutes to see the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, seven mummified pharaohs, go to the 'loo and graffiti a reactionary but succinct assessment of architect I. M. Pei's absurd glass pyramid on the exit doors?)
To be honest, I admit I have succeeded in acquiring a taste for a number of things, even when a disconcerting 20,000 miles away from my favourite seat at the yacht club bar:
There is nothing quite as serene as a day shopping in New York City when you have memorised the exact locations of the public lavatories in Bloomingdales, Maceys, Barney's and Saks of Fifth Avenue.
I also love practising that sharp short right-arm jab with the Nikon zoom lens to the nose of gypsy pickpockets on the Piazza della Signoria.
When surrounded by a gaggle of Japanese tourists and German guides in Bavaria, I adore asking all and sundry if they've lost any good wars lately.
Yes, I do love all that.
But of course the thing that I really love, is coming home.
What I hate, is having to go away to do it.
Relevant links:
Why it's hard to leave Perth, Western Australia
Where we work: Elizabeth's Bookshops Australia
Leaving Home (for sale)
Proud Dad: Toby Schmitz (Actor & Playwright, Sydney)
Proud Dad: Rory Schmitz (Artist & Gallery Director, Berlin)
Qantas Platinum Frequent Flyer
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