I’m one of the lucky ones, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Travel, for me, is a life-long love-affair. Something I was born with, something that was bred into me. It is a family tradition and a birthright, a gift bestowed upon me by my parents from a very young age (and for that, I will be eternally grateful). Of course, everyone has a right to choose their own priorities, but I’ve not known life without it, and for me, an existence without the promise of travel, is not worthy of living at all.

So, you can imagine the bewilderment I experience when I hear someone utter the words, “Oh, I’ve done Europe already“, or ” I’ve gotten travel out of my system“. I can’t help but wonder; were these poor souls born without wings, or are they simply ignorant? Do they live in a turvy-topsy world? Have they attached themselves to a turvy-topsy drip in a turvy-topsy hospital, siphoned the passion for life out of their beating veins and fastened the padlocks on their caged spirits? On second thoughts, perhaps I do not want to know how these automatons tick, what dreams – if any – their mechanical cogs may conjure. It frightens me to imagine a world without wonder, without discovery, without the many exquisite pleasures that travel brings.

What I love most about it, is the phenomenon of air-travel. I boarded my first plane before I had taken my first step, and seen the interior of a cock-pit before I started school. Soon, the dreams began – always the same – I would run and jump and bound into flight, soaring through the skies, feeling the wind wrap around my bare limbs. Carried by the currents, I would float like an eagle on the undulating tides. I felt like Superman, invincible, free. I was five or six, and ever since, I have been drawn to the musty smell of old suitcases, the buzz and clinic-clean of airports, the functional routine of airplanes. The scent of the international terminal is electric, exciting, pure adrenalin. There is adventure within those air-conditioned walls; I love to watch people greet and farewell each other with open arms and free-flowing tears at both Departures and Arrivals, I love the chocolate shop that promises hours of indulgence for the long flight ahead, the bad coffee, and the expensive last-minute bookshop. I love the anticipation while I wait, sitting amongst the rows of identical seats, listening for my flight to be called. I muse on the adventures to come, savouring every memory before I’ve made them.

But my absolute favourite moment is when I sit back, buckled into my tiny seat, braced against the inevitable… when the jet engines begin to roar, and the power of the turbines force the plane into a sprint down the runway, inertia pulling me back into the cushioned wings of my seat. My heart pounds with exhilaration as the ground drops away and we are weightless, like eagles, kings of the sky, flying into the horizon.

When I fly, I will fight tooth-and-nail for the window seat, and am prepared to brace my bladder against twelve hours of recycled water and miniature drinks, to secure that view. I’ll allow my legs to surrender to the bane of economy class seating, let my back seize and feel the cramps creep up into every muscle, let every every fiber of my frame ache for a soft, hotel bed to stretch out in, just for the glory of that prize. And what a sight it is…

To gaze beyond the pretty lane of arched windows and witness our world laid out below us, a delicious spread of sparkling cities like fairy lights, the neat green patchwork of farmland, and blue, blue, blue… impermeable, mysterious, bottomless; the expanse of ocean that divides our cultures into a tantalising menu, ripe for the picking, ready for me to devour, city by city, nation by nation.

Vaporous clouds float on by, across the lagoon of sky.

Watching dusk fall on the world below, I know nothing in this world can beat my front-row seats to this show. No miracle of nature, no drug-induced sensation, no human emotion, no religious experience. We fly through the middle of a sunset, and I wonder, one day, when I have been to every pocket of every corner of the world, what will I do?

I already know – fear – that the world is too small for me.