TRAVEL + L E I S U R E / A P R I L 2 0 1 7 97
that most of us don’t know what to look for until we see it.
One reason people love Paris, I suspect, is not the Louvre
or Notre Dame, but that ‘forgotten’ backstreet café they can
believe they’ve ‘discovered’ while getting lost on the way to the
Eiff el Tower. And to me, the monumental stone heads of Easter
Island could never be as impressive as the utterly unexpected
replica moai that guard my health club in Japan. What really
ravished me on the island was the sleepy Polynesian beauty of
the main street, down which locals in pareos sashayed with a
laidback ease I’d never witnessed in Tahiti.
The whole point of travel, for me at least, is to have my
sense of possibility expanded, to see every box in which I
like to put things exploded—and to be reminded that life
generally has plans for us much wiser than the ones we might
have concocted ourselves. One of the main things bucket
lists teach us is the folly of treating places and experiences as
collectibles. I have friends, not hugely wealthy, who dream of
visiting Dublin in hopes of seeing Bono, or of fl ying to eastern
Tibet to meditate with a sage. But Bono has surely off ered
us far more already in his constant interviews and concerts
than he could ever do when surprised by a fan in his favourite
pub. And the sage, if he’s the real thing, will surely tell anyone
who asks that the whole point of meditation is that it can be
practiced no less usefully in East Orange, New Jersey.
Yes, there are worthy souls whose bucket lists involve
working with the dispossessed in Haiti or building houses
for the poor in the Philippines. But the fact remains that the
third law of travel is that happiness is very often commotion
recollected in tranquillity: Alice would never have come
away with such a funny and memorable story of her visit
to Jiro had everything gone according to plan. Monks in
both East and West have always seen the wisdom of asking
yourself what you most want to do if you have very little time
left—and maybe such ideas can be inspirations, so long as
you never count on realising them. I’ve been longing to visit
Mount Athos, in northern Greece, ever since a school friend
described his trip there 40 years ago, but I realise I’ll be no
poorer if I never get there.
One of the most indelible and exhilarating places I’ve
seen in recent years was Little Rock, Arkansas—in part
because I’d never dreamed of wanting to go there. After
experiencing the irony on display in its museums, the
kindness of the Zen students I met, and the wit of the
Graham Greene–loving Harley riders I ran into on the main
drag, I found myself urging friends to put Arkansas on their
itineraries. Besides, wherever you disembark, you’ll soon
learn that the curious and magnetic people you meet have
dreams of their own—dreams of freedom and peace and
the chance to see San Francisco. My bucket list these days
consists mostly of empty space.y spirited friend Alice was overjoyed
when she and her husband, Scott, scored
a reservation at Sukiyabashi Jiro, the
hyper-exclusive, 10-seat Tokyo sushi bar
inside a subway station that was featured
in the 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. A concierge
who had a special relationship with Jiro had actually walked
Alice and Scott’s request over to the restaurant two months
in advance. After my friends got off their fl ight from San
Francisco, they reminded themselves that their 20-course
feast would begin at 5:30 on the dot, and, in keeping with
house rules, they would not be allowed to wear strong
perfume, collarless shirts, or sandals.
But lunch with colleagues the next day ran unexpectedly
late and proved unexpectedly large. And 5:30pm was, of course,
after midnight for their Californian stomachs. By the time
they arrived, they already felt overstuff ed, even as they were
reminded that they had to complete their 20 courses in roughly
20 minutes—house rules again! As one dish after another
arrived, Alice began, quite literally, to fear she’d throw up.
Ye s , t h e y w e r e a w a r d e d a p r i n t e d s o u v e n i r m e n u a n d a
snapshot with Jiro, three weeks before President Obama ate
there. But by the time they returned to their hotel, US$600
poorer, sushi was no longer their favourite food.
I was still chuckling over Alice’s hilarious account of
her mishap when my wife reminded me about my visit to a
gorgeous Moroccan resort I’d been dreaming of ever since its
opening 15 years earlier. Not long after I’d been shown to my
private, US$1,400-a-night villa—which came with a private
pavilion, private swimming pool, and private fountain—the
handle to my private gate clattered to the ground. Soon after,
the electricity gave out across my mini-fi efdom—because of
the private fountain, I was told. The second time this happened,
at 4:16 am, the staff declined even to answer my call.
“You remember what the Dalai Lama says every time
someone asks him why she hasn’t realised her dream of
changing the world overnight?” asked my wife, who is
Japanese and devoutly Buddhist to boot.
“Yes,” I sighed. “ ‘Wrong dream!’ ”
I get the idea of a bucket list, I really do. I was as inspired
as anyone by the movie that popularised the term, in
which Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman resolved to do
everything they most wanted to do after being diagnosed with
terminal lung cancer. We all need dreams—of ballooning
over the temples of Bagan, in Myanmar, or airboating across
an alligator-infested swamp, as a website specialising in
bucket-list itineraries touts one of its adventures—to sustain
us. Bucket lists provide a clarifying sense of direction.
When my mother, recently widowed, turned 67, I started
saving up to take her once every year to all the places she’d
been dreaming of since she was a little girl. At Angkor Wat
and Easter Island, in Syria and Jordan and St Petersburg,
she came away exhilarated.
But bucket lists fl y in the face of the fi rst two laws of travel:
that on any good trip our expectations will be upended, andM
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