Travel has a way of making you imagine yourself living alternate existences. Sometimes these daydreams are the result of genuine cross-cultural empathy. Just as often, however, they are pure fantasy.
I saw this little island on the high-speed ferry to the Mentawai Archipelago from the Sumatran mainland. It seemed perfect somehow, with its white-sand beach, and its green-palm fringe, and the turquoise waves churning off of its shore. It looked just big enough for a person to build a house, clear out a little garden, and life an idyllic, self-contained life.
I don’t know what this island’s name is, and in a way I don’t want to. I’ve seen versions of this island off the coast of four different continents, and I’m always drawn less to facts and data than to reveries of what it might be like to live the rest of my life there.
Such inchoate longings are certainly not unique to me. Nearly 800 years ago the great Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta spent 24 years wandering through Asia and North Africa, and the most poignant moment of his travel memoir comes when he spots an island not dissimilar to this one during a journey through the Maldives.
Battuta writes: “We came to a tiny island in which there was but one house, occupied by a weaver. He had a few coco-palms and a small boat, with which he used to fish and cross over to any of the islands he wished to visit. I swear I envied that man, and wished that the island had been mine, that I might have made it my retreat until the inevitable hour should befall me.”
I’m certain it’s not permitted to live on this Indonesian islet – and even if it were, it would probably make for a primitive and hardscrabble life. But my imagination doesn’t care.
I’m sure I’ll spy an island a lot like this one on some future journey and have the exact same fantasy.
Such reveries are, in their own silly way, one of the subtle joys of travel.
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. For more full-formed writing, check out my book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, or the Essays or Stories archives on this site. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
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