when i grow old...

I want to be like Jan Morris. I ddidn't know who she is until I read this feature on the Travel section on the Guardian. I think she used to be a journalist who has travelled around the world in her younger days, and she is still travelling to collect materials for her books. Below is her beautiful account of her travel experience post-WWII. When I grow old, I wish to have such recollections of my journeys around the world too.

Here's her story:

I began travelling professionally soon after the end of the second world war, and I travelled mostly in Europe, where the hyperbole of victory was fading, and disillusion had set in. Seven or eight of Europe's eastern countries, so recently liberated from the Nazis, now found themselves under Soviet oppression, and the so-called iron curtain divided the continent, as Churchill put it, from Stettin to Trieste. Everywhere was shabby. Everything was threadbare. Famous old cities of history lay ravaged, still in ruins.

Travelling in this disordered region was not easy. Currencies were hard to come by, visas were necessary almost everywhere, food was often scarce, trains were grimy and unreliable and for the most part air travel was only for privileged officialdom. And always there loomed over the continent, if only in one's mind, the baleful presence of Soviet communism. The iron curtain was like a prison wall, and crossing it from east to west, from St Petersburg (then Leningrad) to Helsinki, say, or from one half of Berlin to the other, really was like a personal liberation.

I'm sorry to have to say it, because those times were cruel indeed for many Europeans, but I greatly enjoyed my travelling then. It was an excitement just being on the long-forbidden continent, as we called it then, and travel in Germany had a peculiar fascination for me. I used vividly to think as I sat at a cafe in Hamburg or strolled a Bavarian meadow that only the other day our own thudding bombers had been killing people in these very streets, and only the other day, if I had gone for a walk here, in no time I would have been bundled off to a prison camp. As it was, no single German seemed to bear a grudge against me, but even now, six decades on, I can still summon the sensation into my mind, if I try hard enough.

But it was the miserable iron curtain that enthralled me most, in those early wanderings of mine. I always loved allegory, and to come across it almost anywhere, from a stretch of barbed wire or a line of pillboxes to its ultimate obscenity, the Berlin Wall, seemed to me a tremendously allegorical moment of history. I enjoyed the impassive faces of the border guards, when I crossed the curtain by one frontier or another, and they with infinite slow suspicion turned the pages of my passport. I relished the feeling of disquiet that accompanied me everywhere, a western journalist meandering through hostile police states, and I welcomed the moments when murky strangers asked me to take messages home to Britain for them, or played the agent provocateur with black market inducements. It was all grist for my mill, after all, and when a diplomat of my acquaintance once asked me to deliver an unexplainable package to an unidentifiable recipient, I carried it across the Chain Bridge at Budapest feeling childishly like somebody in a spy novel.

And now, in another century, almost in another world? Now I can potter around a spanking new Europe as I will, crossing its frontiers almost without producing a passport, and I can even go to the United States without a visa. Of course I relish these new freedoms, which have vastly broadened my horizons and enlarged my opportunities. I am no longer travelling to report for newspapers, but only to gather material for books. As age has caught up with me, too, I no longer pine for those frissons of the cold war, and don't in the least want to be interrogated by armed guards with Kalashnikovs in the interior of Africa. It is a wonderful thing, of course it is, that any of us should be able to travel, wherever we like, whenever we want, pop down to St Pancras and take a train to Avignon, pop up to Manchester airport and be off to Valparaíso.

I have to admit that with the ease and general safety of travel, it has lost a little of its excitement for me. Partly, I am almost ashamed to admit, this is because now everybody else does it too! Everyone has thrilled to Manhattan now. Everyone seems to have been to the Great Barrier Reef. One of my neighbours lately went on a package tour to Lhasa. Even the most beautiful city in the world, Venice, undeniably loses some of its wow factor when you can hardly see San Marco for the massed multitudes of its visitors, and every few minutes the Campanile is dwarfed by the passing of another obese cruise ship. And every one of us, if we haven't actually been to the forests of Borneo or the Amazon jungles, have certainly experienced them via television.

And yet, and yet … during my 60-odd years of the wandering life I really have been to most of the places I want to go to, have been in most of the world's great cities and experienced the wild world from the Himalayas to the Empty Quarter. For much of the time I am perfectly content to stay in my own incomparable corner of Wales. Nevertheless, the moment those engines burst into life and I fasten my seat belt, the moment I glimpse the Andes through the clouds or watch the blue Adriatic tilting through our windows – the moment I step out into a revivified Berlin or a fabulous Dubai, or find myself once again upon the Honolulu beach with a mai tai in my hand – at every such moment I think once again, as I did when I was young, how marvellous the great world is, and how rich the rewards of travelling it.

From The Guardian, Saturday 5 March 2011