This was published 7 years ago
Essay: These spiritual experiences made me a travel writer
By Brian Johnston
The Japanese embrace the fleeting nature of beauty and pleasure.Credit: iStock
Illumination first comes to me in church, though it isn't the road to Damascus it perhaps ought to be. It is instead a road that leads me far away, over the hill and towards the horizon, halfway around the world and eventually to the Pacific Islands that are the compelling antithesis of the world in which I grow up.
I spend most Sundays as a teenager attending Presbyterian services at the Auditoire Calvin in Geneva, sitting on a hard chair listening to remarks about repentance from a minister in black robes. Sermons are followed by dreary hymns played at a funereal pace as dour-faced elders look on. The elders remind me of the statue of fierce, killjoy Calvin on Geneva's Reformation Monument: long and gaunt, beady-eyed and scoured with wrinkles.
This church-going, improbably, provides me with a first moment of insight that helps set me down the path of a lifetime of travel. The church's women's group organises a slide show talk about a member's journey across the Pacific, which I go to see with my mother. I can still recall my shock as distant islands flash up in the church hall in wanton bursts of colour: palm trees against a violent sunset, emerald hills sliding into a sapphire ocean, brown-skinned women with coconut breasts. My astonishment is open-mouthed and revelatory.
Heading for that next horizon.Credit: iStock
This is another world I never imagined existed beyond the pages of National Geographic, let alone one that ordinary people could actually travel through. Sitting in Geneva in a chilly draught on a winter Wednesday evening, I resolve to see it myself one day. I've often thought it ironic that this slide show has more effect on me than all those years of weekly hymns and sermonising. On such casual moments of insight, our futures unfold.
Years later, as I watch an actual Pacific island appear beneath the wings of my aircraft in an effervescence of reefs and peacock-iridescent water, I think back to that evening. Later I wonder: if the Loyalty Islanders could see a slide show of grey, winter Geneva, what would they think? In Mare, locals live in blue houses, and white churches have red roofs. I attend a church service among women wearing straw hats ringed with garlands of flowers and shells, and men in brightly patterned island shirts. Hymns are fast and enthusiastic. I sit under pirouetting ceiling fans and listen to the singing, and suddenly feel in that instant that I couldn't be in a better place. It's a moment in travel that I know will stay with me forever.
I sometimes think it's moments like these that are really what we all search for in travel, as much as a junkie craves her next hit. This stabbing, in-the-moment happiness, or sense that this is all we want in life: is this what saints feel when they encounter God? Certainly it seems intensely spiritual, and is immediately something I recognise in descriptions by mystics when they talk of transcending time, or feeling oneness with the universe. Maybe this is what we really seek when we head beyond a horizon, whether that horizon is physical or in the mind.
Atop the Great Wall below the Milky Way galaxy.Credit: iStock
The experience is so elusive that there seems to be no English word to describe it. Mysticism is too uncomfortably religious, if not outright nutty. "Being in the zone" is a workable phrase, despite being vague and colloquial. I'm rather fond of the Spanish word duende, used in Andalusia to refer to the heightened emotion that comes to an audience when they see or hear an exceptional performance. If music or dance makes the hairs on your neck rise, or moves you to tears, that performance has duende. I first encountered it when I heard a classical guitarist playing Memories of the Alhambra with a tremolo melancholy enough to give me goose bumps.
I think we all have remarkable emotional responses to certain moments in travel but, looking back through decades of a life on the road, I can count them on my fingers. So much of travel is unremembered because it's so banal: another tourist trap, a lost suitcase, a bad meal, just another view that scarcely holds your attention for a minute. And yet, despite all experience to the contrary, we continue to set forth, burning with the need to be elsewhere. Perhaps, deep in our unconscious, we all long for duende. It may be elusive and short-lived, but it brings piercing satisfaction.
One of my other, most memorable spiritual travel moments hits me on a visit to Gunung Leuser National Park in Sumatra, Indonesia. It shows that travel's discomfort and banalities can be overcome in an instant; or perhaps it proves the Romantic theory that torment and trouble actually produce spiritual insight. In any case, getting to Gunung Leuser starts amid a swirl of dodgem-cars and kamikaze motorcycles in Medan. It progresses to spine-jolting country roads lined by mind-numbingly monotonous rubber plantations, and finishes on a muddy riverside walking track as the roads peter out. Then I have to haul myself across a river in a dugout canoe by a rope and pulley. I soak a boot scrambling onto the far bank and trudge up a hill in a dank rainforest. Insect repellent stings my eyes, perspiration soaks my shirt. Conditions don't seem to predict enlightenment.
In travel, while you might get glimpses of perfection, perfection itself is unachievable.Credit: iStock
Then a tree shivers, branches part, and I'm eyeballing an orang-utan. It peels back its rubbery lips and grins. It bends its lanky limbs and lurches from branch to branch. It hangs upside down by a leg and smirks down at me, as if waiting for applause. Its orange hair is Einstein untidy; it has melancholy, knowing eyes, and seems as fascinated by me as I am by it. It's another instant of pure magic – duende in the wild – that I'll never forget.
Animal encounters can certainly provide a feeling of connectedness with nature and unexplained happiness; so can forests and mountains. I remember once leaning out of a chalet window in Switzerland's Lauterbrunnen Valley and drinking in the deep mountain silence: just the shiver of pines in the wind, the hiss of a waterfall tumbling off a cliff. I draw in great gulps of air and happiness and watch the stars appear, thinking: I have mountains in my soul. But all such moments are random and unexpected. I've had the same feeling in Sheikh LotfollahMosque in Esfahan in Iran, so unexpectedly and exquisitely beautiful. I've felt it in Pushkar in India, watching little oil lamps on islands of marigolds bobbing down a darkened Ganges. It doesn't spring up only in uncrowded, contemplative places, though perhaps those conditions help.
The problem is that such moments can't be explained, and nor can they be manufactured, despite the promises of the tourism industry. They aren't provided by luxury hotels rooms, whale song in spas, or the latest Michelin-star meal. Nor do they result from the idealised travel so bleated about in social media: the sunset cocktail, the business-class airport lounge, the "authentic" local shop. In travel, as in the rest of life, materialism is only a placebo to make us feel better. It's temporarily distracting, but doesn't deliver what we're truly looking for. Duende can't be bought; it's a gift of fire from the gods.
The other problem is that spiritual pleasures are, by their nature, fleeting. My orang-utan encounter stabs me with happiness, but the next one is just an enjoyment, and by next day – ho hum – do I really need to climb that muddy hill again, or shall I just sit in my guesthouse with a Bintang beer and whinge about awful Sumatran bus journeys? The only thing to do is to recognise that the best things in life are transient. Soak them up without distraction while you can, and don't bother trying to recreate or repeat them.
We can learn a lot about this from the Japanese, who embrace the fleeting nature of beauty and pleasure. They picnic under cherry blossoms with a heightened fervour because, even as they do so, the flowers are falling like confetti, dooming the spectacle to a short week. No wonder their songs that celebrate the blossoms are infused with melancholy. Things don't last. And while you might get glimpses of perfection, perfection itself is unachievable. What to do but accept the flawed and transient, the wabi-sabi of life that leaves you forever with a spiritual longing. These are my travels: the odd moments of perfection, welded together over decades of in-between ordinariness and longing, just like broken kintsugi pottery.
Yet how unexpected and how exquisite are the times when it all comes together and I see the light. I sit on a fishing boat on a dark South China Sea, heading from Mersing on peninsular Malaysia's east coast to Tioman Island. Four hours, with a sinking sun and a rising moon that catches the platinum scales of flying fish as they leap from the waves. A sea snake writhes on the water, a hieroglyph on a black slate. In the dark I feel my little vessel is all that is left in the world, travelling into a void over a shifting sea. Yet sitting there on a bare wooden board, I suddenly feel an unexplained and profound happiness. At that instant, there is nowhere else in this whole wide world I'd rather be than on this boat heading towards a topical island that awaits in the darkness like an enigma.
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