There is this old chestnut about George Mallory. When someone asked him why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, he replied, “Because it is there.”
Mallory was the forerunner of the intrepid traveler or Homo Intrepidus Traveleris. Resolute, determined to reach the destination by hook or crook or hitch hiking, she prepares for every trip like a general for a war.
For all you people out there who are reading this instead of planning for their next trip… learn from the intrepid traveler.
When it comes to gallivanting around the country, she displays such a surfeit of energy that makes a man feel he is suffering from a hangover on nothing stronger than buttermilk the previous night.
Typically one, who refuses to come for lunch with you before three o clock in the afternoon and then nibbles at her food, since its her first meal of the day, she is a different animal when travel mania strikes her.
It is rather easy to spot the intrepid traveler at ten paces.. or five if you are myopic like me.
She is the one who goes around with a long face if her ranking moves down here like a teenage tennis starlet whose endorsements move proportional to her rankings.
She knows the bus and railway time tables of out of way places such as Bushahr! So what, if she forgets that her next business meeting is an hour later.
The Intrepid traveler never visits places.. She only “does” them. Sitting around a campfire on the top of a cold Shivalik mountain, during one of the rare trips I made, all I can remember from the scintillating conversation was “I have done Timbuktoo, Jhumritalaya and Tegucigalpa.”
“What about you,?” She asked.
“err.. I went to Ludhiana last week.”
I was quelled by a glance that made me feel like the scum of the earth. I valiantly tried to list other places – Coimbatore, Aluva, Baddi, Rudrapur…. But I was not doing it right.. I mean going there is not doing it.
The intrepid traveler is a great photography buff. Whether she took to travel to shoot more pictures or shoots pictures as a matter of course during travel is a matter of conjecture.
But the after effects are ghastly. If you happen to bump into her after a trip, it’s like visiting a friend’s place after her marriage. You are subjected to the ancient torture of having to scan through loads of photographs.
To be fair, half these photographs are nice pictures of white mountains shrouded in white clouds or green mountains shrouded in white clouds or white mountains shrouded in green cloud .. oh well, the last one was a failed chemistry experiment.
The other half is what makes strong men wince and wish they were in some other place. This consists of a series of pictures of the intrepid traveler in different poses, against different backdrops, with different people, in different costumes, in different moods, eating different foods, during different times of the day. That’s enough combinations to make your head go dizzy and wish for something stronger than lukewarm tea.
All this writing has made me dizzy. More in a later post.