I travel hard. I've walked up to 40 km in a day. I don't really do lunch. I quite often get up with the dawn.
But sometimes you just want a place to sit. And sometimes, those places come back to your mind as little places of peace and contentment.
I was at the Pechersky Lavra in Kyiv on a saint's day. It was busy; monks in dirty gabardine with ancient army surplus backpacks in from the country, women in bright floral patterned headscarves, VIPs in shiny suits and stiletto-wearing blondes, long queues to see some particular shrine, the odour in one of the churches of incense and candle wax and burning wicks and unwashed bodies.
Glittering domes of gold. Chanting. Smoke trails rising from the candle racks. Golden icons shimmering in heat haze.
A huge cobbled ramp behind the main court leading down to the catacombs. Bearded patriarchs in their coffins, in velvet slippers and embroidered robes. A press of pilgrims in the tiny rock-cut chapels, kissing each glass case in turn.
After a while I was worn out. I wandered to a little church further south. It was closed. Outside was a cemetery with a rose garden. I sat; I can't remember whether there was a bench or whether I just sat on the wall. I just sat, and felt the breeze, and smelt the roses.
One time on the way to Santiago I found a rock that was shaped just right for the contours of my body, and on a cool December day, warmed by the sun. I lay on it and watched the sky, bright blue with white clouds, and felt myself almost falling into the sky at great velocity; and then I closed my eyes.
That day smelt of gorse and dry grass, and there were charms of goldfinches, but I remember the deep relaxation of that rock as if it cast a spell on me for the whole day.
There's a grove of huge cedars at Hemis Shupackchan in Ladakh - above the village, already some way out. In an arid, high-altitude desert where every field has to be built up over generations of fertilising - I'd passed women raking last year's composts out over the fields in the morning - there are no forests, and few trees, but here there were beautiful spreading trees and green turf under them. I spread myself out for half an hour in the warm shade. I've rarely felt so at peace.
And sometimes, in towns, you find your little place. In Orchha, for me, it was the tiny space next to the griddle of potato patty man. I watched pilgrims and tourists go by, and sometimes an ash-faced sadhu with long braided hair or a saffron robed sannyasi with the white and red marks of Vishnu on his forehead. Lunch was there most days, a 20-rupee potato patty, and it was one of my happy places.
Then there was Ram Babu's fruit stall. A little stool dragged out from underneath it, and I was ready to sit and wait for my juice. Sometimes goats came and tried to grab an orange or some greenery while his back was turned. Sometimes one of the local cows had to be dissuaded from sidling up to the stall and leaning on it. Once, Ram Babu treated someone for bad knee pain with his special iron knife - I hadn't realised he was the village magician. I met charming gents from Bhopal and Indore, other customers who came to Orccha every year. I learned to play karrom. That was my second happy place to sit.
And my third? I sat there only once, one bright morning, very early, when the old blind sadhu who lived in the Chaturbuj temple and the younger sadhu who looked after him were singing in the rising sun. The old man had a kind of tin can fiddle with one wire string which he played with a ring on his finger, and when they'd finished a bhajan they smoked their bong, offered me a toke, coughed plentifully, and started another bhajan; and as the sun rose, the stone warmed up, and we warmed ourselves, and the misty shapes of the town came into focus.
These memories come to me now, when because of covid I've not been more than forty kilometres from home for nearly a year. And they don't come as photographs, but as memories full of atmosphere, and smell, and coolness or warmth, and touch.
That is why you travel. When you need your memories, they will come; and they're a form of sustenance.
