My Favourite Piece of Travel Writing

My favourite piece of travel writing is short and to the point, but it questions everything about ‘here’ and calls to mind perfectly the change of ‘there’ that is its lure.

It is a description of people in an airport, and how easily they strike up conversation with each other. They are:

‘Strangers rendered open-hearted from jet lag’
(Pico Iyer, The Global Soul)

We travel to be operated on; by the sun, by the sights, by there, the place we want to get to, and most of all, by the miles of distance between there and here, by the separation itself.