Daniel Klein takes a stroll after a meal at Dimitri’s tavern, on the Greek island of Hydra, which he has been visiting for 40 years.
In his early years, Klein darted through Europe like a bird of passage, moving from town to town under the same vagabond spell that draws so many young backpackers today.
“Nothing made me happier than boarding a train at the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris, a Eurail pass in my pocket, and then getting off the train when the whim struck,” he said. “I was always seeking extraordinary encounters, always in motion, like an anthropologist with ADD.”
Age put an end to those days of mad-dash travel, and maybe, as he now feels, it was always meant to.
Below are excerpts from a conversation with Klein, 74, author of Travels With Epicurus, on how to travel in one’s later years.
Q: How did the way you travel change as you’ve gotten older?
A: In the past, I’d spend a few days walking around a new town, eating in cheap restaurants, looking for adventures and generally feeling like a mysterious stranger. Then I’d hop on another train and see where it took me. I certainly travel differently now. For starters, I now need to pack my “clinic” - I’ll spare you an itemized inventory of pills and medical devices, but suffice it to say that it’s all I can manage to fit it into a single carry-on bag. On the plus side, I don’t need to pack rock-climbing gear or a broad variety of garments for various climates, because these days I have absolutely no desire to climb rocks, and I only travel to one place and stay put.
Q: Does staying in one place offer any advantages compared with sightseeing?
A: There’s something about old age that can induce the patience needed to gradually sink beneath the surface of a new environment. Instead of trying to keep track of constantly changing scenes, we can delve into a single scene. Yum.
Q: What’s your ideal vacation?
A: I no longer crave the stunning, visceral travel experiences of my youth; now I look for quieter, simpler, more poetic experiences. The whole 1,000 Places to See Before You Die phenomenon makes me want to hole up in a monastery. The before-I-die part alone gives me the willies.But mostly the idea of spending my remaining active years racing from the Inca Trail to the Dead Sea is, as Cole Porter once wrote, “my idea of nothing to do.”
Q: Why is that?
A: Always journeying to someplace new gets old fast. I hope I don’t sound jaded,but I feel like I’ve already done “new” a sufficient number of times for one lifetime. To be sure, seeing Chartres for the first time was thrilling; ditto for the Grand Canyon and the bazaar in Istanbul. But there came a point when I no longer experienced a thrill from sighting a previously unseen site. That may be because I know that there is an infinite number of experiences I will never have, magnificent sites I will never see, and since there is an infinite number of them - heck, 1,000 is damn near infinite when you are 75 - each individual new sight ceases to add anything to my life. But what I think of as resonant experiences, particularly resonant travel experiences, do add something to my life.Deepen it, I guess. For me, that often means attempting to slip into the head of a person of a different culture and catch a glimpse of how he sees the world. That experience enriches my appreciation of life. Honestly, I’m OK about skipping the Pyramids.
Q: Which considerations should older adults make, if they want to get the most out of a vacation?
A: Most are practical. For example, many old people don’t want to be 18 hours away from a hospital or a pharmacy. Uninterrupted electricity may be a consideration if you are lugging along, say, a respirator - you’d be surprised how many spots that alone eliminates. The main idea is we don’t want to spend our away time feeling insecure.
Q: Could you describe a resonant travel experience you’ve had?
A: There is something about the Greek landscape and culture that has resonated with me since I first visited in my late 20s. The stark contrast between sea and rock, magnified by the crystalline Aegean sun, seems to answer some primal yearning for the marriage of opposites.
For me now, the peak travel experience is becoming a regular in a cafe, like at Dimitri’s taverna in the tiny village of Kamini on Hydra, the Greek island I have visited for over 40 years. And the ne plus ultra is having a regular chair in the regular cafe where Dimitri brings me my regular, a metrio (a sweetened Greek coffee), without my asking. This is traveling from one world to another by making the new familiar. This is the best that travel can offer.
Travel, Pages 51 on 04/06/2014