Real Travel Writers Return
Only by returning do we truly experience a place
Visit a place once, and you tick it off your bucket list. Return, and you’ll experience a destination even deeper. Well, that’s my perspective, anyway.
Travel and photography are intertwined. It’s practically impossible to do one without the other, which probably explains why my attitude to travel is influenced by my photography.
For me, a photograph is a moment in time. It’s a snapshot. Literally. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. That’s it. You’ll never experience that exact moment again. The captured photograph, however, helps the memory relive that experience, but the time itself has gone.
If I return to the same spot to take the same photograph, even if it’s only a few minutes later, I’ll never take exactly the same photograph. I can’t. It’s a different time. Yes, the composition might be the same, but the light will be different. Heck, in some parts of the UK, I’ve experienced four seasons in one day, so I can capture a scene in hailstones one minute and then clear blue skies the next.
And that’s my interpretation of travel. It’s an experience of a moment in time. Returning somewhere is not just about going back. It’s about experiencing something familiar but in a different way.
I regularly return to the UK’s Lake District. For many years, I stayed near Hawkshead, not far from where the children’s author Beatrix Potter lived after her Peter Rabbit books became bestsellers.
I’d always experienced it in spring and summer, when thousands of Japanese tourists would visit (Beatrix is mega-popular in Japan), and I’d hear the rapid staccato speech of Japanese conversation mixed with the tuneful melodies of Lakeland birdsong. On every visit, that part of the Lake District was a tourist trap. (But I knew where to go to escape the crowds.)
But in 2009, I returned to the same area and experienced what, at that time, was the record-breaking rainfall ever to hit the region in a four-day period. Other Lake District towns, like Cockermouth and Keswick, were devastated by floodwater. The water level on the lake at Windermere rose by 18-inches. That might not sound a lot until you realise Windermere is ten and a half miles long and up to half a mile wide.
For two days, I was trapped. The road to Hawkshead was under three feet of water. It was only half a mile away, but impossible by car. The only way I could get provisions was to take the three-mile high-level hillside footpath around the flooding.
When I arrived at Hawkshead, I was bowled over by the sense of community. Here was everyone who lived here, pulling together, looking after each other, and getting through adversity. I never saw the Lake District as a tourist place again after that.
I think it’s worth returning to a place even if you had an unpleasant experience there. Many years ago, we travelled to Minehead, on Somerset’s coast, overlooking the Bristol Channel. It’s popular with walkers, for it’s the start of the 630-mile South West Coast Path (as made famous in the film The Salt Path). At the time, I had a dog, and I was meeting relatives off the bus.
I kid you not; every lamppost had an anti-dog sign on it. Don’t leave dogs in hot cars. Don’t let your dog foul the pavement. Keep your dog on a lead (leash) at all times. No dogs allowed on beaches. As a dog owner, I just didn’t feel welcome. Frustratingly, the bus my relations were arriving on called in at the Butlins Holiday Resort there. Guess what? Yep, you can’t take dogs in, even if you’re just meeting someone off a bus. We didn’t hang around.
Fifteen years later, I went back. This time there was no dog, but I had a ten-year-old nephew. We had a blast. We lost hours skimming stones off the pebbly beach, playing crazy golf, and riding the steam railway. Thank you, Minehead. Returning has given me some happy memories of the place.
I mentioned earlier that the weather plays a big role in my travel experiences. If it’s bright and sunny, I’m taking sweeping views and vistas, capturing how a place exists in its landscape.
Take Portmeirion in North Wales. Its Italianate-style buildings on the banks of the Dwyryd Estuary look amazingly Mediterranean on a gloriously sunny day.
But when I returned there a couple of years later, the weather was grey and dismal. Instead of the wide-sweeping views, I found myself focussing in on the detail. That’s when I noticed the Mermaid panels were everywhere: outside holiday accommodation, by the bandstand, and as decoration on walls.
That’s when I learned that a lot of Portmeirion is pretty much recycled. Large parts of it have been salvaged from other buildings right across the UK.
This is 21st-century recycling, but dating from the 1940s. Returning on that grey, drab day revealed a whole new side of Portmeirion I’d not seen before.
As a walker, I often return to places more than once. Take the Old Man of Coniston, for example. I’ve climbed this 2,635-foot mountain four times. Not because I’m a sadistic idiot, but because the first, second, and third attempts were rewarded with thick cloud at the top.
It’s only when I returned for the third time, and climbed it on my fourth attempt, that I finally saw the view from the summit. And returning was worth it.
I also have another rule whenever I return to an area I’ve visited before: I must go somewhere new to me in that area every day.
It takes years to really get to know somewhere. Heck, only last week, I walked along a footpath in my hometown I’d never walked before. I’ve only lived here for twenty-eight years.
One such discovery happened recently on a return visit to Pembrokeshire. This idyllic Welsh county is home to the UK’s only truly coastal national park. And the coastline is spectacular.
But it made me wonder what I was missing inland. As I researched online, I came across the Cilwendeg Shell House near Boncath.
I can’t remember how many times I’ve driven through Boncath, yet I’d seen no tourist signs pointing to this. Booking had to be made online, and once paid, I received instructions by email on how to get there, where to park, and the code to access the key to get in.
I’ll let the photos do the talking, for I was speechless when I got there. And because there were no tourist signs, I had the place to myself for the two hours I was there.
This is why returning is so important. As explains in Returning to Sin City, every time we return somewhere, we return as a different person. Similarly, shows in his After the Storm that the landscape we know so well is always changing, and sometimes drastically.
So yes, when it comes to travel, I’m definitely a ‘returner’. This is not the same as the nostalgic advice to “Never go back,” because nothing will be exactly the same. And that’s precisely the point of why we should return to places.
Every return trip is the start of a brand new travel experience.
