One

On March 2, 2020 I was at Orlando Airport, on my way home after a month in Florida, where I was working on an update for Lonely Planet. Covid was a reality, but the impact of it was yet to be properly defined, an amorphous portent of doom whose enduring inconvenience had yet to take its proper shape.

I got talking to the Aer Lingus ground manager, who breezily predicted that all transatlantic flights would be grounded within a week, “two at most.” I was surprised by the audacity of his prediction; he may as well have declared that the electrical grid was going to be shut off.

As it turned out, this cheery Cassandra was right. Within 10 days all travel from the EU was suspended and Ireland was in lockdown.

I hadn’t quite appreciated how quickly everything would happen. I’d spent a part of that afternoon visiting different Duane Reade stores buying hand gel and anti-bacterial wipes as my wife had said they were hard to get in pharmacies back home in Manchester. 

I remember feeling faintly ridiculous unloading an armful of miniature bottles at the till and thought that if they checked my bag at the airport, they might assume I was some kind of hygiene obsessive. 

It never dawned on me that when I got home the next morning, I wouldn’t see the inside of an airport for more than 18 months. 

Two

In the days before the internet and cheap flights and a world made smaller by both, travel writing was – at its very best – about unlocking the mysteries of faraway places so that adventurers had a roadmap for travelling through central Africa or making their way north along Highway 1 from Hanoi to Saigon.

I became a travel writer because it was the late 1980s and I didn’t really know what else to do and the thought of writing up a bunch of my own journeys of exploration really appealed to me. But I wasn’t a natural travel writer. I loved travelling, and enjoyed writing, but for the first few years I struggled with the isolation and loneliness that is a big part of the travel writer’s life. 

The first time I met Maureen Wheeler, who’d co-founded Lonely Planet with her husband Tony, she told me that all travel writers are weirdos by necessity. 

It takes a certain type to leave the comfortable familiarity of home in pursuit of the unknown – and stay away for months at a time, without friends and always at the mercy of the deadline. Guidebook writers rarely linger: a couple of days anywhere and there’s always the next place, the next list of hotels to check and the next uninviting port town to write up.

I long ago got used to being alone when I travel for work. As I get older and more settled in my own company, I’ve learnt to cherish solitude, which prompts me to ask questions of strangers and strike up conversations with people I’d ordinarily be too timid to approach.  

Three

I thought a lot about those early years during those first few weeks of lockdown. In between baking and binge-watching and bike rides in my local park, I spent a long time reliving my first solo adventures as a travel writer.

The best travel adventures are only fully appreciated in hindsight, when the immediate difficulties of struggle and loneliness are behind us. In the 1990s I travelled around Yunnan, in southwestern China. I had no Mandarin or, worse, any Bai – the language spoken in the north of the province and where I spent most of my time. I got by with basic phrases, hand gestures and long periods when I didn’t speak to anyone at all.

One day I found myself in a tiny village called Qiáotóu, when a small crowd gathered round, curious to find out what I was doing pointing to a page in my guidebook and saying “hoo-tee-ao shia.” I was butchering the tone, so it took a while for someone to recognise what I meant.

Hǔtiào Xiá! He said excitedly, and then they all chimed in. Hǔtiào Xiá! It was the Mandarin name for Tiger Leaping Gorge, the reason I was there in the first place. 

I had planned to do the two-day hike through the gorge on my own, but an escalating chorus of voices and facial gestures later a teenager in jeans, t-shirt and plimsolls was thrust forward by the crowd and it was made clear to me that I was to follow him.

We took off out of the village and began climbing steadily. Tiger Leaping Gorge is one of China’s most stunning natural features, a masterpiece of natural architecture that that rises almost 4km from the brackish waters of the Jīnshā River.

For most of the trek, my silent guide was ahead of me, not so much climbing as gently walking up the mountain, his plimsolls easily gripping the slippery undergrowth and making a mockery of my walking boots and panting efforts. As the hours passed my breath got shorter and every so often I’d stop with a pain in my chest as he just continued zig-zagging through the thicket of trees ahead. We stopped for the night in a small hamlet, eating egg and tomato and drinking scented tea in silence.  

By mid-afternoon of the second day, I was exhausted and dirty and my back was sore. I stopped more frequently, cursing my sorry state and panicking because I had no idea how much more of this I had to endure. Every so often I’d yell out, “How much longer?” and he would smile and give me the thumbs up. Under my breath, I called him every name under the sun. It’s the not knowing when that kills you.

Eventually we came out onto a grassy clearing that stretched upwards for a couple of hundred yards before dipping and disappearing beyond the horizon. My guide was waiting for me at the field’s grassy brow. 

When I reached him, I could see the gorge laid out beneath me. I could make out the river, an inconsequential greeny-brown trickle far below me. On either side the valley walls rose to reach the peaks of the gloriously named Jade Dragon Mountain and Haba Snow Mountain.

All around me is untamed scenery and then I felt the tears well up in my eyes. I was crying for lots of things: the remote beauty of it all, at my being there at all, at my being there and not being able to share the moment with anyone I loved. It was just me and my teenage guide. 

He smiled and put his hand on my arm, giving it a gentle pat.

“Nice, yes?”

Like an alcoholic chasing the high of his first drink, I’ve spent much of my professional life chasing that feeling I had standing on the edge of that gorge.

Fionn Davenport and guide at Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan, South West China

Four

I’ve been lucky enough to manage it too. Not always, and certainly not everywhere – but with enough frequency to always keep me enthusiastic about the prospect of going somewhere.

Crossing the Bosphorus on a commuter ferry while drinking tea from a tulip-shaped glass. Looking down on a cloud inversion in the Alps. Watching the ‘Happily Ever After’ fireworks at Walt Disney World in Orlando. The pleasure is as much in knowing that I’ve come a long way for the experience as in the experience itself. 

Since returning from Orlando, life just got smaller. I watched a lot of television and went for long walks with my wife. I grumbled my way through house repairs and spent money I didn’t have on things I didn’t need. I cooked a lot and made promises to myself that I would use this time to write something other than a travel guide or another article listing the 10 best whatever for another newspaper.

But I didn’t. After I’d finished my work on Orlando, I just watched more television and talked to my family on the phone and worried about an uncertain future where travel wasn’t as ubiquitous as electricity and that thing I’d spent a quarter of a century doing had suddenly become redundant.

There was no work because travel was fraught with risk and burdened by shame and politics, and the very desire to go somewhere was treated as a hostile act. 

“We are all in this together” was a popular refrain, but clearly we weren’t: the world still needed medics and lawyers and accountants and teachers, but the pandemic made it uncomfortably clear that the world could go on without travel writers.   

As my income dried up and my finances dwindled, I hunkered down to endure this grim time of multiple confinements and the lethargy and sleeplessness that marked this barely changing present. 

Unable to plan more than a couple of days into the future, social media’s notifications teased me with memories of days past. Four years ago, I was in London for an exhibition of Bowie’s art at Sotheby’s. The year before, I was in Balgo, Australia, just about to set off on a nine-day trek through the Gibson Desert. Two years ago, I was in Abu Dhabi, on my way to Bangkok. 

Small encounters with friends, family dinners and forgettable getaways were granted a new poignancy by my inability to do any of them.    

What were once pleasant reminders of a life on momentary pause soon become a cruel tease of what once was and, in the throes of this enforced presentism, hard to imagine ever being again. It’s the not knowing when that kills you.

Five

The when came in fits and false starts – a loosening of restrictions here, a shift into a higher tier of lockdown there. Everything at the mercy of the virus, that “piece of bad news wrapped in a protein” (to quote biologist Peter Medawar). 

As hope waxed and waned, my enthusiasms dimmed: I cooked with less brio and grew resentful of our walks and the overbearing sameness of it all. My insomnia, however, asserted itself with ever more strident authority and I would sit up at night, bored of books and television and podcasts, and felt my ability to self-soothe steadily slip away.

I looked at photographs of trips I’d taken and I began to forget what it felt to actually be there. Even though I knew this would one day end and the world would once again be available, for now travel felt very abstract, a thing not reasonably imagined. 

And then, slowly, there it was: a trip to plan. As this crouching age of seemingly endless confinements near its end, I will be travelling once more. Eighteen months after I last went anywhere, my wife and I will go to Madrid, where I’ll write about Spain’s efforts to attract the visitors its economy so desperately relies upon.

There’ll be all the extra inconveniences of a new world stripped of a certain amount of spontaneity, from PCR tests and vaccination certificates to certain types of face-coverings and pre-booking everything. Having spent most of my adult life in and out of airports, I am hesitantly curious about what to expect – besides bigger queues and longer wait times for everything. 

But whatever delays or hassles or disruptions there may be this trip means our lives are once more getting bigger, and I can once again indulge that feeling of intense nostalgia for the experience of going somewhere new.