I always check in online before heading to the airport. I beat the queues, head straight to the bag drop and before I know it, I’m at security, waving the security guard away as he keenly asks whether I am carrying liquids, a laptop or any obviously lethal weapons like, God forbid, a pair of tweezers or nail clippers.
Once on the plane, another routine – I send a farewell message on Whatsapp to the family, switch off my phone then reach for the headphones and in-flight movie magazine. I flick through the pages of the airline’s mediocre selection of movies and TV shows and make a brief mental plan of how to keep myself entertained over the next three to 12 hours.
When the plane has ascended high enough for someone to boot up the inflight entertainment system, I plug in and zone out, only re-entering a state of conscious awareness when choosing which bland economy class ‘haute cuisine’ meal I want to challenge myself to eat.
When I arrive at my destination, I creep along the snaking line at immigration to get that necessary stamp of approval to enter the country. Or, if really lucky, I blitz through with a simple passport and fingerprint scan at an unmanned kiosk. Then, I pick up my bags, hop in a cab, head to the hotel and wait as a man or woman typically in an ill-fitting and creased blazer eventually passes my room key card, gives me a non-Duchenne smile and wishes me a pleasant stay.
By the time I finally swipe myself into my hotel room and hookup near me the door closes behind me with a heavy thud of finality, I realise how little genuine human interaction I have actually had since the moment I said goodbye to my family at the airport. The art of travel, when purely in the sense of getting from A to B, has become reduced to a mission centred on haste, simplicity and minimal contact.
When people say it’s ‘about the journey, not the destination’, I’m starting to think that maybe they’re being quite selective about which elements of ‘the journey’ actually count.
Travelling across the world has become so routine and so normal to many of us that now more than ever, there is little to no variability in what wildcards are thrown at us. Deviations extend as far as being the unfortunate recipient of a random security screening and body scan to lost luggage, heaven forbid.
However, I do think that the growing mundaneness of travel is partly dependent on the mode of transport we choose. I’d expect a more personable experience when sitting on the back of a tuk-tuk, for example, than I would at an airport immigration desk.
There is a definite divide between places where you are willing to embrace deviations from your path and those where you favour efficiency. Is it because we don’t see any romance in international air travel the way we used to? 
Of course, this romance may still remain to those who still appreciate air travel as a novelty and an irregular opportunity in their lives. In that sense, I do not intend to undermine the romanticisms they still hold.
However, as an individual that has been privileged enough to travel quite regularly, I think that perhaps I now seek meaning in other ways. I have begun to see it and feel it in slower forms of travel, like hiking through hillsides with village porters (who speak a different language) for company or having to hop on the back of a pick-up or local bus in the rain to get to the next village.
It’s almost as if there has been a switch. What one of us finds as frustrating, and mundane is wonderful in the eyes of another. It only really truly becomes ‘about the journey’ more than the destination when we experience travel in a way we do not anticipate those unplanned excursions and deviations from our itinerary.
Thankfully, I think that means we haven’t lost essential the romance in travel after all, we just don’t feel it comes in the same forms that it used to any more.
