Through my eyes

Our recent visit to Cape Town allowed us to choose a more unconventional accommodation, a loft style apartment on the seventh floor of an old fruit growers building, which provided an unusual home for four days. While we struggled to adapt to the perched futon, located almost on the ceiling of our space, three meters off the floor. Getting to bed each night was an interesting gymnastic procedure, not to mention waking up for pee in the middle of the night.

A new Airbnb book, The New Art of Travel by Alain de Botton, was the catalyst for this out of the box experience. Author de Botton insists that we have fallen victim to an ideology of travel that doesn't take journeying seriously enough and therefore conspires to lead us to miss out on its true potential. The solution, and there is one, is relatively simple in structure. According to Botton, we need to do three things;

1. Work out why we want to go somewhere

2. Ask ourselves how our destination can help us to address our motives.

3. Plan how we can embed the lessons of our travel into our life on our return.

All of us have equivalents. Things we care about that aren't mentioned anywhere. Part of growing up, and learning to travel well, means daring to take our own interests a bit more seriously.

"Travel is considered a bit of a sort of light area of life; I think it is a very deep area of life. We see material hurdles, but often the hurdles are much more in our heads." de Botton advcised, "We should set out on a journey with big ambitions about what that journey can do for us. Travel has become so fatefully easy we book without thinking what we're trying to get out of it. We should, " de Botton added "be a bit more demanding about what we get out of a journey."

de Botton says that we need to be clearer in our minds about both what we're searching for inside and what the outer world could conceivably deliver for us.

I enjoyed de Botton's exploration of what we learn, and why, when we travel; and how it can seem simply overwhelming to be presented with historical building after historical building. For support he turns to Nietzsche, who argues, "The point of looking at an old building might be nothing more, but then again nothing less, than recognising that architectural styles are more flexible than they seem, as are the uses for which buildings are made. We might return from our journeys with a collection of small, unfettered but life-enhancing thoughts."

The New Art of Travel by Alain de Botton took us to Longmarket Street in Cape Town, a place that is so far removed from our comfortable beachside village of Ballito. It gave us insights into the vibrant multi-faceted culture of the CBD, the smells, the colours, the sirens and the filth.

Oh and while we're on the topic of filth, we must not forget the rodents. When choosing an old building in the thriving CBD, you might want to consider the cockroaches, which fall out of the rafters, still wriggling poisoned but resilient, littering the very trendy recycled parquet floors of our very hipster space in the centre of human psychosis.

Alain de Botton's The New Art of Travel is a great read, whether you are planning to go away or just daydreaming, according to de Botton, "Travel should not be allowed to escape the underlying seriousness of the area of life with which it deals. We need always to aim for locations in the outer world that can push us towards where we need to go within."