All in the mind: oh, the places we go when stuck at home

The place I dream about, when there’s nowhere to go, is actually a sliver of an afternoon at a hotel in Tokyo. Hidden inside a downtown skyscraper, the Hoshinoya looks like nothing much from the street. Come closer, though, and you notice the exterior is a dense and beautiful metal lattice of
hemp leaves, a traditional kimono pattern that, once inside the building and depending on the time of day, becomes a shadow play on the hotel’s intentionally austere walls.

The afternoon I’m thinking about demonstrates how travel is moving not only to a different setting, but into a new mindset. Sitting on tatami matting (the hotel asks guests to take off their shoes at the door so as not to ruin the floors), watching the light move across the room in a kaleidoscope of shapes in the hushed silence only a ryokan can generate, it was difficult to remember that I was on the 14th floor in one of the world’s busiest cities in the year 2018. It felt like I could have been anywhere in history.

The places don’t tend to be the showiest or most well-known attractions, but rather glimpses of what feels to me to be the essence of a country.

The memory is more poignant now that we’ve lived through so much of it lately. History, that is. It turns out that the scene wasn’t timeless at all, but a snapshot of a very particular moment in my life and of a world in which artificially cheap commercial air travel made journeys as far-flung as Sydney to Tokyo possible in … well, if not the blink of an eye, then a mere eight hours in a slightly reclined seat.

It surprises me, the places that I’ve chosen to revisit in my mind over the last year. They don’t tend to be the showiest or most well-known attractions, but rather glimpses of what feels to me to be the essence of a country. For Italy, I think of the stillness of an Umbrian hillside town at 11 in the morning during the height of summer: the silence, the cypress trees on the horizon, the feeling that, about 600 years ago to the day, this would have been a pretty happening place.

For France, my mind turns naturally to food – in particular, the ridiculous amount of whipped cream served on a bowl of judiciously picked strawberries in the garden of the Château de Chantilly, outside Paris. I was researching a travel guide at the time – this is many years ago, before smartphones, when tourists relied on books to tell them where to eat and what to do in a foreign country – and remember wondering how on earth I would explain to the budget travellers reading this guidebook that these three strawberries were absolutely worth 10 of their hard-earned euros.

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Spain is prickly heat on the backs of my knees after a long drive in a car with open windows along the southern coastline. Portugal is a shop in Porto, which exclusively sold tins of sardines, each one of them a little work of art because nothing that can be made pretty in Portugal is not.

Indonesia is a brief, glorious rain shower that arrived as I was wandering around a sprawling gallery outside Ubud, and India is looking out the exquisitely filigreed windows of the Hawa Mahal in Jaipur, grasping immediately why it has always been known, unofficially, as “the Palace of Breeze”.