Lu-Hai Liang

A few years ago, in the month of May, I took myself to Scotland. I went to the Cairngorms, Britain’s largest wilderness area.

I hiked mountains, rambled along wooded paths, and walked the shores of lochs. I was lucky to get fair weather and saw Scots sunning themselves, with some hardy individuals even braving the frosty waters of the loch.

Scotland is perhaps the only place in Britain where one can get lost in true wilderness, where the land rises and falls with a majesty and ruggedness found nowhere else on this compact island.

I remember walking through the woods, the beginning of a mountain path, and seeing a red squirrel, the endangered native squirrel of Britain, casually prance, like a bushy mouse-deer, across the sun dappled trail.

I remember buying a pack of sausages and a can of potatoes and cooking them in the hostel kitchen and swallowing it down with that fervid hungriness that accompanies a day’s hiking, when you eat with an enjoyment knowing that you’ve fully earned it.

I have to confess that for however long now I’ve been addicted to travel. Is it an addiction? That would imply that I can’t wean myself from it. That it’s a compulsion, a craving, even a dependence.

On the way to the Cairngorms, I was in Edinburgh, Scotland’s atmospheric capital. I stumbled on a little museum where within they had exhibits on the Victorian-era writer Robert Louis Stevenson.

He’s best known for novels like Treasure Island. We read it in school and (sorry, Rob!) I wasn’t that thrilled by the overly plotted story even if if featured a character like Long John Silver.

But in this museum I discovered that Robert Louis Stevenson was an adventurer; a man totally fixated on the horizon. Here was a guy born in 1850 who took himself far afield; a sickly Scotsman who stepped onto schooners and into the graces of foreign royalty, becoming friends with the King of Hawaii.

Stevenson died young, aged 44, suddenly stricken from a probable brain haemorrhage, and was buried on a hill, carried up by the locals, who loved him, in Samoa, in the South Seas.

It was an image that did it; that made me forever remember that visit to Scotland. More than the hiking and the sparkling waters of the loch, it was a photo, faded, and taken nearly 150 years ago, showing Stevenson standing on the ropes of a schooner, with his crewmates, looking at something out of shot. Looking at the image, I could suddenly feel the salty water, the thrill of the breeze, and the sparkle of the sea. It was a picture that seemed so utterly modern, like I could step into it and talk to them.

I leave you with Stevenson’s unimprovable ode to what we both adore

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and to find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.