SENIOR TRAVEL
I want to meditate a little bit on senior travel. Really I am only meditating on my own senior travel and can’t speak for any other seniors.
This is written on my first full day in Delhi while I am still in jet lag and that probably colors my meditation. In just a few days, Wednesday to Saturday, I have gone almost half way around the world, 10 1/2 hours. Because of this my sleep rhythms and my daily eating rhythms have completely switched leaving me, even when I get a lot of sleep, out of sync and feeling as if I am in a brain fog even when wide awake. When I was younger I just struggled through. My worst jet lag experience was flying straight through to Sri Lanka with a group of 15 students to learn from Sarvodaya, a Buddhist village development organization. On the day after we arrived we were suddenly asked to outfit ourselves in all white and then to attend an outdoor Buddhist ceremony in which we, as honored guests, were placed in the front, seated on the ground, facing a huge crowd of worshippers for five hours of speeches by Buddhist monks in Sinhalese as we squirmed in the hot sun. Now I am by myself and sleep when sleepy and stay awake when I can with nothing that I have to do for the first day. But I think the older body adapts more slowly and now it will take me days to change my normal day and night rhythms.
But jet lag is just one extreme of the change travel demands. Another thing is that I am simply weaker and wear out sooner. And another is that I ache continually, when lying down, when sitting up and when walking. I don’t climb steps as well, can’t walk more than five miles without numbing up and losing interest in everything. All of this is just a normal part of aging.
But it isn’t only my physical abilities and aches and pains that slows me down. My attitude toward travel has changed and what I get out of travel has changed. It isn’t that I am not stimulated by travel or don’t feel invigorated by travel, I am just stimulated in other ways than I was stimulated when leading 15 students around with activity after activity all day long, trying to fit in as many experiences as possible.
The idea of doing that now exhausts me and is mind numbing. What I like doing now is being in a place completely different from Swannanoa, just being there, and feeling the life of people around me. I enjoy sitting quietly in Swannanoa and doing one or two activities a day and spending the rest of the day reading or writing or napping or going for walks. All of these quiet pleasures are stimulating in Swannanoa and they are stimulating in New Delhi. It is enough to be in India with different air quality, severe today, way over on the reddest part of the spectrum, with the sounds of hawkers walking down the street, knowing that tomorrow I will go to Connaught Place to order new glasses, stop at Nath Chemists to fill my medical prescriptions, and get a tooth implanted and one pulled at Dr. Kakar’s dental clinic and maybe eat a South Indian thali at Saravanaa Bhavan. That is enough, more than enough, activity for me.
I guess what I am saying is that I can feel every bit as enlivened by travel as I ever have but that it is just a completely different kind of travel from the way that I traveled in my thirties or my fifties. And there are a number of advantages to this slowed down and fully savored kind of travel. By staying in one place for a week, or a month, I cut down the costs of train or plane travel and get much better rates on accomodations and get the great pleasure of simply slowing down so that if I feel like doing nothing I do nothing, of napping when I want, or savoring each small thing rather than rushing from event to event or from one important building to another. I am done with sightseeing and packing everything in. I am ready to slow down and enjoy one thing at a time with really no interest any more in looking at buildings which every tour group that I cross paths with seem to be doing, listening to lectures and looking at buildings. I prefer to drink hot tea and read a book or listen to music and to take a quiet walk around the neighborhood.
My way of travel must seem boring and a waste of time to most young people who have three weeks to see Europe or families who have a week to see Paris. I prefer to experience Naoussa on the Greek island of Paros for a month where I can sit quietly on a rooftop looking out at the blue Aegean and write or talk with Efi my landlady and then stroll through the white washed town in the evening.
So when people in their 80’s say that they no longer want to travel, it is too exhausting and too much can go wrong (as has already happened to me in my first week) they are thinking of the kind of travel they used to do when young or the kind of retired travel in an 8 day senior group travel where they experience jet lag as they are marched by a tour leader carrying a flag through famous cities seeing important landmarks. I recommend the kind of travel that I am doing where you completely slow down, take things as they come, do whatever you feel like as you stretch out your experience in one place or several for at least a week at a time. If you are traveling with younger people, let them work off their energy as you used to do, but stay back much of the day enjoying wherever you are staying and the neighborhood around it. And you will find senior travel is just as much fun as any kind of travel, and maybe even better.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 