Best Foot Forward

People – the true treasures of travel

As pedicures go, it was more interesting than the average. Not just because I was in a spa on a ship, looking out at the sun scintillating on the water, although that was undoubtedly cool. It was because in the next cubicle, Linda from North Carolina was having her hair done by Mario from the Philippines. Now usually, I can't abide hearing chitchat in a treatment space, but this was different. Because I was a party to a convo that you could have put on the radio, pretty much unedited, and it would have been as engaging as it was edifying.

Linda had already introduced herself to me in reception, commenting I spoke the Queen’s English. She, by contrast, spoke the luxuriously lilting lingo of Dolly Parton. Now doubtless, she could probably point to a number of nuances that rule that comparison out, but to someone from West London, it sounded Dixie-delicious to me. Like listening to mellifluous country music minus the guitars.

From the get-go, Linda gave Mario carte blanche to do his darndest in the hair department. The minute he started shampooing, she could tell she was in the hands of a pro. I know this because she told him. By the time she was having a blueberry scalp massage, I’d also learned that when she trusts a professional, she shows them great loyalty. Maintains devotion, even if they’re still working into their seventies. Meanwhile, my beauty therapist was judiciously but silently buffing my feet. Back and forth. Back and forth. Filing away sans comment. Truth is, we both had our ears to the wall.

Mario, who’d been all over the world, loved to travel in Europe because just walking through cities with their old buildings was like meandering through a living museum. I’d never really thought about London like that. While I gamely gallivant to the far-flung, I fail to dwell and devour the details on my own doorstep. My loss.

Linda, meanwhile, had come to additional conclusions about travel. That most good people around the globe are very similar at heart. They want much the same things. Suffer the same sadnesses. Share the same hopes. She summed it up thus: ‘We all get up in the morning’. She paused. Mario paused. My pedicurist paused. I paused.

I found Linda to be one of the happiest people I’d come across in a while. Did she live some charmed life that kept her chipper? It was only later, during a torrential downpour on a hike, when we sheltered in an old bar and drank wine, that I discovered her husband had died a few years back. That she’d sold up everything and moved, having to start over. That a friend had been due to accompany her on this cruise but had pulled out, so Linda had decided to brave it and come alone.

Except she hadn't come alone. She'd come with a spirit of love, interest and enthusiasm for other people and their lives, and in that, she couldn’t have packed lighter and more appropriately if she’d tried.

It got me thinking about the often untold benefits of travel. The non-brochure bonuses. Sure, I’ve clocked up some out-there experiences and for that, I am eternally grateful. I’ve spent time with the mountain gorillas in Rwanda, photographed polar bears padding along glaciers in the Arctic, swam in the brisk waters of Antarctica (albeit for two minutes), seen the Taj Mahal at dawn, the Namib Desert at dusk.

But thinking back, it’s often the people I’ve met who have affected me the most. Case in point: I can’t look at a simple business card now and not feel ashamed at how much I take for granted. Why? Because in India, a young lad who earned a living transporting people around Jodhpur in a battered tuk tuk, showed me his most prized possession. It was a dusty plastic wallet that held the business cards he’d amassed from folks who, like me, visit a city out of interest, in great comfort, then disappear. All we left were calling cards. We should leave more.

I remember the old woman in a village in Myanmar with her turquoise turban and beautiful expression, punctuated by a tiny chip in her front tooth. Instead of the hardships she’d experienced, of which there were many, she pointed to the immediate joys – her grandchildren taking flowers to the shrine.

I recall the man whose job it was to sit high on a jagged mountain that overlooked a sharp bend in the mighty Mekong River – if two boats were on a potential collision course, he’d emerge from beneath his tattered awning that barely protected him from the scorching sun and wave a flag like fury.

I think of the chat I had with a scientist, elbows propped on the southernmost bar in the world. He worked at the Vernadsky research station in Antarctica and had knocked up some vodka, a dollar a shot. Well, what else do you do, apart from scientific calculations, when the pack ice parks up for months on end?

In fact, when I Interviewed Michael Palin just before I left for a trip to Papua New Guinea, he said what he had come to realise from his journeying is there is more that unites than divides us. Inordinate numbers of ordinary citizens value similar essentials - shelter, food, security, fulfilment, fun, belonging to a family. And often, when you travel, strangers who take you under their wing can feel like family for that snapshot in time. We may not be related by blood. Nor share a backstory. But we are bound by our reactions to each other’s everyday experiences, even when one person’s everyday experience can seem quite extraordinary to another.

My pedicure complete, I planted my beautified feet back on the ground, glad I looked well-shod but more grateful for the philosophy lesson in getting back in touch with my roots. Like the best blueberry scalp massage Mario could deliver, it was just darlin’.