Why We Travel (eBook)

Chapter 1

CURIOSITY: From Windsor to Waikato

Windsor was a good place to grow up, even if you weren’t royalty.

Throughout my childhood, hundreds of thousands of tourists came to the town every year, thanks to our famous local resident, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. At 11 a.m. each day, the soldiers of the Household Division – dressed in their scarlet tunics and bearskin hats – would march behind a band from their barracks to Windsor Castle, for the Changing of the Guard ceremony. After drinking in this display of military pomp, the tourists would file into the castle, and enjoy the Queen’s interior design.

Familiarity may not breed contempt, but it tends to breed disinterest, as I didn’t even visit the castle until my early twenties. But our famous neighbour had her positives: the castle’s Crown Estate provided easy access to nature. The tourist industry meant lots of jobs in hospitality. And teenage delinquency was limited to eating Woolworths pick’n’mix without paying.

I had gone to the local junior and middle schools, then won a scholarship to do my GCSEs at a Quaker boarding school in Reading. I did well academically, but I only had a few friends, and I always felt dislocated, so I chose to return to the local state system for my A levels, and joined the Windsor Boys’ School in 1999.

Not long after I started at Windsor Boys’, my mum discovered that the school was planning a rugby tour to Australia, New Zealand and the Cook Islands. She told me that, if I got a place on the team, she would pay for my place on the tour.

Mum had travelled to New Zealand in the 1970s, and she loved it. She inspired me with stories of smoking volcanoes, empty beaches, trees unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs, and wildlife that had evolved in isolation from the rest of the world. It sounded magical, and my excitement was matched by my teenage desire for independence: I would be travelling with my peers and without my family, but within the safety net of an organised tour.

Mum had raised my sister Barty and me by herself. We lived on income support in social housing and, while we never struggled for food or clothing, we didn’t go on fancy holidays or buy expensive junk for the house. But Mum felt that it was important for me to have experiences that broadened my horizons, so she took on a second job as a cleaner, just to cover the cost of my ticket.

All I had to do was to learn how to play rugby.

In my late teenage years, I was a slightly overweight geek, more focused on hip-hop and science fiction than on drop-goals and scrums. Most of my friends were metalheads and skaters who sat around in parks, getting stoned and drinking cider.

With a goal to achieve, things began to change. I spent evenings at rugby training instead of the local park, and watched rugby games on the telly, rather than Star Trek. I also had to get fit for the first time in my life, so I trained at the school gym every morning.

I could barely catch a ball at my first rugby session, but I kept turning up and doing what the coaches told me to. I played as a prop because it mostly involved just leaning on other people, and because no one else wanted to do it. I was given a place as a substitute and slowly got better and fitter, until I eventually made it into the starting line-up for the second team. I would be going on tour.

The day of departure was nerve-wracking. I was about to spend three weeks further from home than I had ever been before, with a group of near-strangers who had been mates with each other for a decade. A large part of me didn’t want to go because I was nervous that I wouldn’t have a ‘place’ within the group.

The two teams played six games each during the tour, and we stayed in the family homes of our opponents, rather than hotels. That meant we had to come out of our shells and speak to locals, instead of hiding at the back of a group. It also meant that we experienced things that most tourists would never see, so we got to know each country at a deeper level than most visitors.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in New Zealand, which I had basically thought of as a far-flung outpost of Britain in the southern hemisphere: they spoke English, ate lamb, had the Union Jack on their flag, and they even played rugby and cricket. Australia’s indigenous Aboriginal people had been almost invisible during our visit there, and I assumed that the same would be true of New Zealand’s indigenous Māori.

My preconceptions were shattered from the moment we arrived: Auckland airport signs appeared in Māori as well as English, and our coach driver, Bernie, told us legends about Polynesian gods stalking the land and ocean. When we arrived at Ōtūmoetai College, the students greeted us with a Māori haka that put goosebumps on my arms.

Once the formalities of that greeting were over, both groups milled around like boys and girls at a school disco, our local hosts on one side of the room, and us, the touring party, on the other. Curiosity got the better of me, and I was the first to cross the gap, to start asking the Kiwis about their cultural mix.

‘It’s just the way things are,’ said my host, ‘Māori and Pakeha (white New Zealanders) go to school together. We work together, we fall in love, we get married. There’s still challenges, of course, but it means that Kiwi culture is a mix of both cultures.’

The next couple of days were enthralling. We explored the Bay of Plenty with our hosts, and hiked up Mount Maunganui, an ancient lava dome that was once the site of a fortified Māori village. At Rotorua, we saw bubbling mud pits and superheated geysers, before swimming in hot pools heated by the same geothermal activity.

The rugby games were a close-fought affair. As the second team, we always played the warm-up match, and we managed to win an ugly encounter of muddy tackles and dropped passes in pouring rain. Our first team were in the lead throughout, but they were foiled by the referee’s scandalous decision to award a last-minute penalty to the hosts. The ball sailed through the posts and put an end to our winning streak.

As soon as the two games were over, any frictions from the pitch disappeared, and we were all invited to one of the players’ houses. They were preparing a hangi – an underground oven, in which volcanic rocks are heated on a bonfire in a pit. Once the flames had died down, food wrapped in leaves was placed in metal baskets above the rocks. Then everything was covered with wet cloths, buried in soil and left to cook in the heat.

A few hours later, the pit was dug up and the food unwrapped. The lamb was the tenderest that I’d ever eaten, and it came with seafood that one of our hosts had caught in the bay. We stayed until dawn, drinking beer, chatting to our opponents and getting to know our teammates. It was a ritual that we went through after every game that we played, in every town that we visited; making new friends and learning about their lives.

By the time we got back to Windsor, I was an integral member of a close-knit fraternity. We had forged bonds of allegiance through shared physical hardship and built memories that would stay with us for ever. For most of my teammates, the tour had been an extended holiday, with fun activities and novel things to buy. But, for me, it was life-changing.

There was something intoxicating about arriving in a place that felt subtly different to home, from the font on car numberplates to the way people greeted each other. By spending time in unfamiliar environments with a new social group, I uncovered skills and interests that I never knew I had.

‘Ash was a great ambassador,’ my coach said to my mum when we returned. ‘He was always the first person to speak to the other team because he wanted to know everything about the places we visited.’

That single trip to the Pacific was a revelation. I found a world beyond skate parks and Star Trek, and I realised that asking questions – both meaningful and minor – made travel infinitely more rewarding. It taught me the power of curiosity in travel, which lit a fire inside me that has been burning ever since.

Humans live in every environment on Earth, ranging from the desert to the Arctic, but we are not born with the bodies or instincts to survive in most of them.

Simple animals, like flies, are born with innate behavioural responses. Complex animals, like lions, learn essential behaviours from their parents. These animals have had to adapt gradually to their environments through thousands of generations of natural selection. But we humans are different: we adapt to our environments through a mix of skills, knowledge and collaborative strategies that no single individual could ever figure out in their lifetime.3

Just think about the skills and knowledge of a remote tribe in the Amazon: the construction of shelter and making of clothes; knowing what plants to eat, and how to prepare them; animal-tracking to find prey; crafting bows and arrows, blowpipes and darts; collecting frogs’ poison to hunt; preparing and butchering prey; and building fires to cook dinner.

This complex social knowledge is ‘culture’ and we learn it from other members of our societies. As humans develop new knowledge, it is passed on and improved in a kind of evolution that takes us beyond mere biology. This ‘cultural evolution’ means that we adapt much faster than other animals to new and...