Travel experiences that changed us – our writers recall the trips that stuck with them

We can probably all pick out the single travel experience that has had the most profound effect on us, and how we view the world. We asked some of our favourite writers for theirs, and here's what they had to say...

I found profound wisdom in Japan

The destination from which I returned most reflective, challenged, and provoked was, in some ways, eerily similar to my home.

Japan is an island nation with proud traditions of tea drinking and fanatical gardening. It’s been continuously ruled by a hereditary monarchy for millennia. The striking introversion of its people is punctuated by surprising bouts of public drunkenness. And yet, of course, it’s not like Britain at all.

The Japanese language is full of concepts that are almost untranslatable: nemawashi, a gardening term that describes a process of consensual decision-making; tatemae and honne, which capture the difference between a person’s stated reason for doing something and their real intention; and enryo, a notion of reserve that governs the relationship between host and guest.

I went there for the first time 10 years ago, to try to understand the idea of wabi-sabi, an aesthetic ideal that finds beauty in things that are imperfect and unfinished. My journey took me to a Zen monastery in the mountains, where the abbot told me that what summed up wabi-sabi for him was his daily bowl of brown rice.

But the person who seemed to explain the idea best was a man called Mr Kimura who taught tea ceremony in his little house in Kyoto. There was nothing laid-back or Californian about Mr Kimura. I watched him being very fierce with one of his students who was doing something wrong with the charcoal that heats the teakettle.

Mr Kimura hosted me for a tea ceremony in Daitoku-ji temple very early one November morning. It was a very intense experience – a strange amalgam of a music exam, taking Eucharist, and having tea with the queen. But what struck me most was his total focus on the act of preparing and serving tea – a form of meditation. There seemed to be a deep wisdom in what he was doing – giving himself over to the service of another person, rather than fixating on his own personal happiness. That has stayed with me ever since.

• Inside Japan (0117 370 9751; insidejapantours.com) offers a 13-day “Japan Unmasked” small group tour, which costs from ￡2,595 per person, including B&B accommodation, entrance fees and local transport. International flights not included.

Marcel Theroux

The past and present in Congo

We were perched uncomfortably on dried lava. A recent eruption had sent a sea of molten stone down from Mount Nyiragongo into the outskirts of Goma, engulfing the end of the runway in the airport and plunging that corner of the Congo into an even deeper humanitarian crisis.

Just over a decade later, plants of impressive strength and determination had forced their way up and through the black scab of rock. It was an unintentionally brilliant visual metaphor for the life of the woman I had come to interview. Her name was Mae. Her family had been murdered in Rwanda during the genocide. She had been captured and tortured. Upon escape she had fled to the Congo, which imploded into what would become the worst conflict on earth since the Second World War. She kept walking, surviving banditry, starvation, animal attacks and disease.

Now she works in the unstable north-east of the country, running a network of women that travel from village to village in the aftermath of attacks by armed groups. In one of the most violent places of earth, they wield a pencil. In the absence of any police or justice system, these women take victim statements. They ensure that the stories of victims will be told, will be preserved, and that when the world chooses to notice the atrocities of this time, there will be an archive of testimony, and there will be names, details and evidence rather than conjecture.

Mae taught me why we study history. We write stuff down. The best and the worst of what we do. Then we pass it to our children and hope they emulate the former and avoid the latter. In one of the world’s poorest countries, a refugee genocide survivor taught me something essential about history, renewing my determination to make it my life.

• The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) advises against all travel to certain areas of Democratic Republic of the Congo and advises against all but essential travel to the rest of the DRC, including the capital city, Kinshasa. For more, gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/democratic-republic-of-the-congo

• On This Day in History (John Murray; ￡14.99) is out now in hardback

Dan Snow

Why holiday romances rarely last

I was 15, and on the last day of a week-long holiday in Lake Como – which remains one of the most beautiful spots I’ve ever been. My best friend had paired off with a long-haired local lad on day two, leaving me to play gooseberry every day at the beach – as I tried to ignore their smooches – and every night, as she sped off on the back of her boy’s scooter, while I was left clinging to some pal racing alongside him.

Then on the last night as we sat by the lake drinking limoncello from a bottle someone had stolen from their father’s restaurant, this spectacularly beautiful boy appeared. He was shy but spoke good English, and we spent the evening deep in conversation. Nothing happened but a kiss on the cheek outside our hotel, as my friend and I rushed back to meet my parents’ curfew, but we wrote to each other every week for nine months.

I looked forward to those letters – filled with typos and scrawled in childish handwriting – more than anything. And by the end of those nine months I knew more about Daniele than any boy I’d ever met. We vowed to meet again as soon as we were able, and when a date was finally set for that August in Siena, I could scarcely contain my excitement, changing my dress four times and checking the name of the café in the Piazza del Campo far more. I was in a Thirties movie of my own making, and it seemed to me that night that my life was just about to begin.

Daniele looked very different when he arrived, but it was more than that. This was a different boy to the one I’d conjured up in my mind – he was real, flesh and blood for one thing – and we no longer seemed to have anything in common. From the start the conversation was hideously stilted. Seeing each other again was a mistake; whatever we’d both dreamt of was gone. I learnt then that it’s the ephemeral nature of holiday romances that make them so glorious. Trying to recapture them, trying to keep them, will only kill the magic dead.

• Audley (01993 227911; audleytravel.com) has an eight-day “North Italy and the Lakes” tailor-made itinerary, which costs from ￡3,665 per person, including accommodation, activities and excursions, transfers and flights.

Celia Walden

I was wrong about the food in Brazil

I was expecting Brazil to be fun. But good food? About as likely as a delicious tapioca pudding. Well, I figured as I boarded the plane to Sao Paulo, never mind. There’ll be coffee and steak, and maybe the caipirinha cocktails count towards five-a-day.

But, knock me down with a samba, from the very first meal the trip was a kaleidoscope of new, fabulous food moments, fed by Brazil’s heritage as a melting pot of Amerindian, African and European heritages and extraordinary produce.

Food markets revealed a whole Carmen Miranda of new fruits – pink acerola, green cupuacu, little black jabuticaba that grow not on stems but straight from the bark of the tree. There was local bottarga, an Italian-style dried mullet roe, fragrant from a beeswax coating, and honey from melipona bees, a rare native stingless variety. Orange dende oil, made from the dende palm and used in the Afro-Brazilian cookery, stained the dishes of the Bahia region saffron yellow, including moqueca, the fish stew that beats bouillabaisse, subtly chilli spiced.

And then there was tapioca. Brazilians are obsessed with the stuff, but forget those hideous frogspawn school puddings. Although it is made from the same root, the manioc or cassava, Brazilian tapioca is closer to Italian polenta. Every stew, including feijoada, the national dish of beans and pork, comes with farofa, a crumble-like mixture of sautéed tapioca flour mixed with seasoning and flavourings that serves to mop up the last of the sauce instead of bread.

I ate leaves dipped in tapioca flour and fried to a crisp elegance, pao de queijo, cheese and tapioca ping-pong balls of airy deliciousness, then Brazil’s own take on Marmite, made from cassava juice boiled until black, tarry and savoury. And yes, even pudding: cakes of tapioca laced with coconut and passion fruit. Sometimes it’s great to be wrong.

• Latin American specialist Geodyssey (020 7281 7788; geodyssey.co.uk) can arrange a tailor-made trip to Brazil and can also offer restaurant and dining recommendations.

Xanthe Clay

Sometimes it's worth making no plans at all

I’ve been on many incredible trips, discovering 18th-century shipwrecks in southern Patagonia, exploring underwater cave systems from Japan to Somerset, diving a sunken city off Ancient Greece. But it all began with the first plane ride of my life.

With humble beginnings in the Scottish Highlands I managed to make it to 18 before I’d seen the inside of an aircraft. Having once considered Edinburgh a foreign land, I decided to get a work visa for Canada, fly into Vancouver, spend 12 weeks working my way across 3,000 miles (4,800km) of North America to fly home from Toronto. And that was the extent of my plan.

I’d be hesitant to undertake such an improvised, objectiveless plan today and things did not always go well. I spent more than half of my nights sleeping in parks, under bridges, in barns or, in one genius move, a full three weeks on the Greyhound buses by planning to spend each day in a place at least a five-hour, overnight ride from the last. I picked fruit, cleaned hotel rooms, worked in a Native American craft shop, tried to become a cowboy and hitchhiked a lot (a Scottish flag on my rucksack served me well).

I lived off service station potato wedges and was thankful for a three-pint jar of jam the fruit farmer gave me. The trip had its highs and lows but it taught me that the line between dreams and reality can sometimes be as slim as deciding to start. The life I lead now is unusual and adventurous and still full of lows as well as highs. I possess nothing different to anyone else except I just got on and did it.

Sometimes it is good to make small, incremental steps towards your goal. And sometimes you’ve got to stride forth, with your chest out, towards the deep end and, before you have a chance to overthink it, jump in.

• Canadian Sky (01342 886494; canadiansky.co.uk) specialises in travel to the country and can arrange a multi-city tailor-made trip to Canada.

Andy Torbet

The vital importance of a gap year

I didn’t know much Spanish, and the only thing I knew about South America was that Paddington hailed from there. My school-friend Rob may have been even less prepared. So as we stepped out of my father’s car one hot April evening and got into a bus in the irresistibly dodgy border town of Tijuana, transformation seemed more or less assured. Four months earlier, we’d been shivering away in our medieval cloisters; now, both barely 18, we were off for three months of true education.

I honestly remember little of the trip now, but at each step, as we rode buses all the way to Bolivia, some door of possibility flew open. In Panama I learned that those of us with dark skins (unlike Rob) were not allowed to leave the airport.

In Bogotá, neither of us registered, until far too late, why all the other guests in the Hotel Picasso were young, pretty girls, who showed up every morning with a new partner. In San Agustín we rode horses for nine hours to observe some enigmatic statues in the jungle, a jaunt that precluded sitting down comfortably for weeks.

After I came down with altitude sickness following a train ride at 15,000ft, I saw a new side of Rob, as he staggered from pharmacy to pharmacy in the little Peruvian town of Huancayo, requesting, in very loud English, medication for his friend. In Bolivia we encountered witch doctors and bowler-hatted women under cobalt skies; none of it fit into any textbooks that we knew.

Wherever we went, really, after 13 years in classrooms, we were getting inducted into places in the heart – and imagination and spirit – we could never have guessed existed. The great beauty of any gap year is that, by the time you arrive at university, you know that everything liberating and good can be found only along the highway.

• Journey Latin America (020 3553 1773; journeylatinamerica.co.uk) can organise a trip to multiple destinations in South America.

• Pico Iyer is a novelist and travel writer. Autumn Light (Knopf; ￡20.54) and A Beginner’s Guide to Japan (Knopf) are out this year
  

Pico Iyer

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