I don’t travel to arrive.
I travel to remain perceptive.
Most people treat travel as consumption: places collected, photos taken, proof gathered. Arrival is the point. The destination becomes a prop, the traveller the performer.
That has never interested me.
What matters is the movement between places — trains, platforms, terminals, corridors, windows. The hours where nothing is expected of you and nothing is being sold to you. Transit strips life back to its mechanics.
The First Journey
My first ever foreign journey did not begin with an airport.
It began with a through ticket from Brighton to Paris.
A late train to Newhaven.
A night ferry across the Channel.
Arrival at Dieppe — the maritime art-deco station — and onward by rail to Paris.
A land route. Continuous. Legible.
It is a journey that can no longer be made that way. The connections are gone. The rhythm broken. What once felt natural has been replaced by abstraction and acceleration.
But that route mattered.
It was the route of kings and queens, traders and diplomats — movement that respected geography, time, and transition. You felt the crossing. You earned the arrival.
That journey set the pattern.
Night Trains
I have always loved night trains in Europe.
They understand something airlines never will.
You go to sleep in one place and wake in another — not in a terminal on the edge of nowhere, but in the centre of life. Morning light through a carriage window. The platform already busy. People going to work, not dispersing.
Arriving by night train is arrival without rupture.
There is no sudden reassembly of the self. No artificial border between travel and life. You step off and the day is already underway.
Nothing illustrates this better than arriving in St Petersburg at seven in the morning: the station alive with movement, commerce starting, people purposeful and awake. Not spectacle — function. Not welcome desks — momentum.
Airlines cannot replace that.
They skip the in-between, and in doing so they discard meaning.
Between Places
Looking out of a train window tells you more than standing in front of a monument.
You see towns that didn’t make it.
Industries thinning out.
Places where people still work, not where they pose.
Most of life is passage, not arrival.
That’s why the old line holds true:
It is far better to travel than to arrive.
Arrival freezes things into identity and expectation. Movement keeps them provisional, observable, alive.
Travel for Work
I have always preferred travelling for work.
Not because it is comfortable — it isn’t — but because it shows the world as it functions, not as it markets itself.
Factories starting up.
Offices half-lit in the early morning.
Ports, depots, logistics hubs.
People focused, tired, competent, purposeful.
You learn far more from watching people do things than from watching them relax.
Work strips away narrative.
Incentives become visible.
Competence, or its absence, reveals itself quickly.
This kind of travel is not escape.
It is observation.
Airports
I don’t enjoy airports — and that is precisely why they are useful.
Airports are stress tests.
No one is at their best.
Time is compressed.
Rules matter.
You can learn a great deal about a country by watching how it handles the swirl: queues, delays, signage, authority, exceptions, confusion under pressure.
Some places manage the swirl with calm competence.
Others with rigidity.
Others with chaos disguised as friendliness.
Others with silent efficiency that does not need explanation.
Airports reveal how a country treats time, strangers, and failure.
Pleasure hides truth.
Friction exposes it.
If you want to understand a country, don’t look at its monuments.
Watch how it moves people when nothing goes to plan.
Transit as Method
Transit spaces suit me because no one belongs in them.
There is no territory to claim.
No identity to defend.
No performance required.
You are free to observe without participating.
Movement weakens ideology.
Staying put hardens it.
Travel, done properly, breaks local assumptions. It reminds you that most lives are lived quietly, not optimised, and that systems only reveal themselves when they are under load.
I don’t travel to be impressed.
I travel to see clearly.
And clarity, once gained, is worth more than any destination.