Just Seeing The Regular Sights Doesn’t Make Sense To The Senses
There was nothing to see. Thick gray clouds blotted out the mountains, and snowflakes fluttered out of the heavy sky. My wife Jeri walked along the Plain of the Six Glaciers, near Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies, and cursed her luck. She wouldn’t be seeing any glaciers on this wretched day.
But then she heard the sounds - first the groaning, creaking voices of the prodigious rivers of ice, and then something more startling. On the mountain above her, hidden behind the veil of clouds, it started like a clap of thunder and finished like a sonic boom.
Somewhere nearby, enormous chunks of ice were breaking off a glacier and cascading down - one of nature’s more impressive displays. Unable to see it, she concentrated on the spooky, otherworldly noises of the moving ice - the kind of sounds that once led Native Americans to believe glaciers harbored human souls.
Had it been a bright, sunny day, Jeri probably wouldn’t have remembered those sounds. The crackle and roar of the glaciers would have been mere background noise for the big visual show of the falling ice blocks.
With that in mind, I’m going to propose something radical for your next journey: close your eyes. Not every minute of the day, but often enough to give your other four senses a chance to explore your tantalizing new surroundings.
Over the course of human evolution, our vision has become so dominant that it threatens at times to render our other senses irrelevant. Think about it: when we travel, we go “sightseeing.” We rarely set out to go sound-hearing, or texture-touching, or fragrance-smelling or taste-tasting.
And yet our other senses, given half a chance, can give us a portrait of the world that’s profoundly richer and deeper than our eyes alone could ever hope to.
I’ll never forget, for example, the first time I set foot in a real old-fashioned New York delicatessen. The aromas were so thick they seemed to hang in the air like smoke. There were open cases of pungent cheeses; rafters hanging with musty, peppery salamis; and briny vats full of pickles. After inhaling all these wonderful smells, eating the food seemed almost superfluous.
Other places have their own unique smells: the earthy loam of a redwood forest, the cloyingly sweet incense of a Buddhist temple, the acrid chimney smoke from coal-burning fireplaces in the Lake District.
Special places have their own special textures, too. In the Galapagos Islands, I once walked barefoot across a dried lake bed, breaking through the crusty surface and feeling the gritty cool mud beneath squish between my toes. I remember the sensation of running my hands over sensuously smooth, history-worn temple columns in Luxor, Egypt, and chafing my legs against the burlap-rough skin and bristly hair of an elephant in Thailand.
In Parisian cafes, I love to eavesdrop on the conversations around me. I rarely understand a word being said, but the intonations and the melodies of the voices speak volumes about styles and attitudes and the emotional state of the city. Other places have their own signature sounds: the far-off bleating of sheep on a mist-shrouded Yorkshire hill, the gonging of cowbells in Swiss villages, the scratchy recordings of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer from Istanbul minarets.
Our taste buds, of course, have done a good job of holding out against visual hegemony. For many of us, food and drink define a place almost as surely as its sights.
To me, the startlingly vibrant flavors of Italian gelato display, in their own way, a genius worthy of the Renaissance masters. Whether it’s a frisky young white Burgundy or a Santa Fe chili sauce so hot it makes your bald spot sweat, your taste buds will tell you where you are.
Don’t fall into the trap of believing that only visual images are suitable reminders of your travels.
Your other senses, and in particular smells, have a remarkable ability to exhume long-buried memories.