Kingdom of Claudia

It’s important to travel when you’re young: you travel light and cheap, and your heart is like a sponge. The paths across the world make up a school which tempers the character and reinforces tolerance and solidarity. You learn to give and take, to keep the doors open in the house of the spirit, and above all to share. You learn to enjoy small things, to value what you have, to be happy in times of scarcity and to celebrate abundance. You learn to listen, to watch, and to love. Young people from wealthy countries should all spend a year of their lives, before family and work obligations tie them down forever, travelling around the world, from city to city, from village to village, with a pack on their backs. They’d lose a year in the race for success – but what’s a year? – and they would gain personally, because it would open their horizons, which are often limited to chasing marks in an exam, and the world would be a better place.”

I frequently wonder if the world might be a better place if some of our politicians had just done a little more backpacking when they were young. Would George W Bush, and his Australian camp follower, have led us down some of those blind alleys if he’d done a couple of spells in the developing world with an organisation like the Peace Corps rather than devoting himself to Yale fraternity clubs and Texas golf courses?