He walked the Mediterranean intermittent- ly over 20 years, clocking up 15,000 kilometres (and swam many, many miles) writing three books about this prolonged adventure. We’ll meet these and other wise and cheerful travel fanatics. And why Tao as a name for this column? Tao- ism is the ancient Chinese religion or teaching which extols the power of nature to which man- kind is subservient – the opposite of the for- mal, highly civilised strictures of Confucianism. Loosely, but powerfully, it connotes ideas such as “go with the flow “, harmony, simplicity and patience. No practised traveller would deny the benefits of such attitudes whilst on the road.
Yes, it is about destinations, of course: but is it also about other things? In the vernacular of travel, there are the terms “holiday”, “vacation”, , tourism and then travel. What do they mean – and more to the point, what can we make them mean for ourselves? These questions will form the rolling heart of this regular column. I am gifted to have a global band of lifetime travellers as contribu- tors – among them, the fabled Catherine Do- main, founder of Ulysses – the world’s oldest travel-dedicated bookstore nestled on the Ile St Louis . Catherine has been, it seems, near- ly everywhere, including a very remote island in French Polynesia, to which she returned at length, fully bonded with a web of families, year on year. After 10 years of continuous world travel, that became her hitching post – a kind of informal anthropology. And there is the peripatetic Joel Stratte-Mc- Clure, who divides his time between Paris and redneck Redding, northern California– a seem- ingly deliberate lifestyle strategy of contrasts. As a journalist, he ran fast and hard across the world, making Africa, France and broader Eu- rope his enduring mistresses over the decades.
W e are both blessed and cursed to live in an age when travel seems a birth- right. A common human desire, some want eagerly to travel, and some actually need it to feel fulfilled –at an almost instinctual level. But what is travel, and thus what is tour- ism? Why and how do we do it best? As think- ing people, who now spend an accelerating amount of time and money on travel’s pur- suits, is there a philosophy of travel we would be well to develop – a personal one, perhaps? Maurice Crackenthorpe Roaming travel editor-at-large THE TAO OF TRAVEL
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