By PHIL JARRATT
Why I travel
I’M WRITING in the sky tonight, on my way to somewhere else, sad to leave my kids and grandkids for a time, but happy as usual for the change. And tomorrow we’ll be in the other place we call home, with its usual welcoming assault on the senses, and the sweet, intoxicating feeling of an exotic other that you know so well, but never quite get over the strangeness of actually being there.
My friend and colleague Ross Phillips recently turned me on to the writing of a man named Pico Iyer, and appropriately tonight, as we fly over the northern songlines, I am listening to the beautiful, soothing music of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu while I mull over a collection of Pico’s blogs, which in my view touch on the same basic tenets of people and place. In an essay called “Why We Travel” Pico writes:
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
I love the simplicity of this passage, and I wish I had written it myself. But no, my own travel ramblings are from a less lofty height. In my forthcoming book, “Travel Gets You Nowhere”, I ruminate on a fairer for all airline policy in which total weight is the pricing consideration. Consider it for a moment. Such a policy would mean that most people would lose weight before a flight and therefore travel healthier, while unrepentant fat bastards would be priced out of the market and wouldn’t be crowding you out of your seat in cattle class. So that’s where my head is at.
But back to Pico Iyer, who quotes George Santayana in “The Philosophy of Travel” about the need to “escape into open solitudes … to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”
I like sitting by the pool with a paperback and a cocktail as much as the next guy, but I also identify with this concept of sharing for a moment the hardships of others as a means of placing your own blessed life in context. Says Pico: “Never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them … Few of us ever forget the connection between ‘travel’ and ‘travail’, and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship – both my own, which I want to feel, and others’, which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion – of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind.”
For the next couple of months this column will be coming to you from South East Asia, from some familiar and not so familiar places. I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I know we will.
Jim’s big bash
AS MUCH as I love good food, the super-chef culture kind of crept up on me. God knows in the good years I tried to catch up with it, mortgaging houses to pay for fish and chips at Rick Stein’s joint in Padstow, Cornwall (where there is a sign next to the order board that says “Phil Jarratt always has a table”, but unfortunately it refers to a British union leader of the same name), shouting the family to Jeremy’s 15 in London, and throwing silly money at Wolfgang Puck’s rubbish in Los Angeles.
Now I’m more than happy with a green curry at Halse Lodge or a local’s double at Gaston, and the odd special night with Mary and Michele at Little Humid, or Jim and Greg at Berardo’s, but as no-one can be unaware, it’s Food and Wine Festival time, and I wish I was there for the fun of what one local wag described to me recently as “schoolies’ week for chefs”. Jim Berardo and his vast team put heart and soul into what has become Australia’s premier foodie event. Like most events in our town, the Food and Wine Festival hasn’t had an easy road to get where it is today, and huge kudos is due to Jim and partner Greg for the hard yards they have put into it. My tip: surf all morning and eat, drink and be merry in the Lions Park all arvo. Go on, treat yourselves.
