Is there more pressure than pleasure in our holidays?

I am not an Insta traveller, neither as in one who goes berserk on Instagram when I am on a pleasure trip nor as one who plans instant jaunts covering thousands of miles and multiple countries in two weeks and ticking boxes of places seen and shut in the phone gallery.

I am not a pitstop traveller either, huddling with visiting crowds to catch fleeting glimpses of attractions in touristy places or a globe-trotter with a wish to charter the length and breadth of the map in this lifetime.

I am a winger; an out-of-towner who likes to burrow into mountains and comb the beaches, bask in the sun weaving stories in the head and soak in the seasons as they change colour. It is just a preference: to gather pine flowers on my treks and seashells on my strolls by the sea, and not to play hopscotch between must-see spots listed by travel websites. I don’t draw up itineraries before getting on a plane, because the intention when I step out on a holiday is not to ‘see’ but to ‘soak in’. Not to pack in places, but to peel open a haven.

As I said, it is a preference and a view that I have held for long: vacations are meant to unload the baggage of a stuffed-up routine life and not to gather fatigue and bags under the eyes. But, as it turns out, the holidays most people take these days are turning out to be huge hustles which call for a week of resting and rejuvenation upon their return. The pandemic has made us all wanderers in a vengeful manner, but somewhere in the frenetic need to get away, are we all missing its true purpose?

“I had more rest in the weekends when I was in town than when I went on holiday,” a friend confessed after a recent whirlwind tour he went on with his family touching key attractions in Europe. It summarised the quality of holiday that is becoming commonplace, its pace matching our intense lifestyle and urgency to make our toils seem worthwhile.

Of course, it is different strokes for different folks, and there is no way all the definitions of pleasure travel can converge at a common point. But at the end of it all, when one walks in after a week or two elsewhere, if all one feels is weariness and a blurred sense of having taken a break with no concrete gains to declare except rattling off place names, I wonder what one has achieved in terms of emotional, mental and physical recharging.

While putting fridge magnets picked up from souvenir stores around the world might be a passion for many, to me, it is the memories that I make at leisure by staying over and connecting with a place, its atmosphere, its people and filling my lungs with the air that smells of its foliage and local flavours that makes for an authentic getaway from the rigours of routine life. And for that, I need to go far from the madding crowds where worldly attractions are minimal and the bounty of nature is one’s sole respite from the daily grind. My happiness quotient comes from gadding about lazily with nowhere to go, taking in all that I encounter by chance and finding new experiences that become iconographic memories. There are no templates to my travel; I have no fixed objectives nor route maps. Happenstances are what make my holidays invaluable and hard to replicate.

Try to sell a tour package to me and I will freak out in the sheer thought of having to fit into a daily plan, with no freedom to take detours when I please or to revise an itinerary. It is a holiday only when we break diurnal patterns and give ample scope to our days to pan out the way they want to. Time should be at our disposal to be spent in vacant contemplation by the sea or in carefree hikes up the hills or casual conversations with people who cross our paths and say ‘hello’.