If you do not travel “for real”, you can go abroad by reading the travel accounts of journalist and writer Gabriel Anctil. Travel the paths of the world is a collection of tourist reports published mainly in the pages of To have to, but also in magazines Spaces and Evasion. Press took the opportunity to talk about travel with the author.
The pandemic has forced us all to put overseas travel aside. Did you have a little pang in your heart while collecting these travelogues?
On the one hand, it was a bit like watching the last five years of my life go by. It was impressive to see all the places I went, everything I absorbed in terms of food, nature, culture. But at the same time, it made me realize that I need to start traveling again. Everyone is hungry for travel. What I hope is that this book makes people travel mentally, through their imagination, that each little text is like a mini-journey.
By reviewing these texts, did you fall in love with some of them?
These are the texts where I felt there was the most emotion, the texts that talk about the trips I made with my boys. I am thinking in particular of the text in which I recount the ascent of Mount Cascades, in the Adirondacks, with one of my sons. It’s called “Walking to get closer”. It was the first mountain we climbed together. It was summer between his elementary school and high school. It was a pivotal time in his life and mine as well. I felt like I was going up the mountain with a little guy and, on the way down, he had become a teenager. Our lives go so fast, it’s often difficult to capture moments like that.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY GABRIEL ANCTIL
A street scene in Taipei
Did other texts strike you when you reread them?
There is the text on Taipei: I went to the night markets, an experience that I loved. These are places where we are crowded, shoulder to shoulder, with hundreds and thousands of people. It was special to read that in the context of a pandemic. I hope to relive this in the near future.
How did you experience the pandemic, this lack of travel?
There is a positive and a negative side to the pandemic. I am a writer too. When you travel a lot, it’s difficult to bring long-term projects to fruition, like a novel: you need constant concentration for months. The pandemic allowed me that: like many, I wrote a lot. I have four or five books coming up in the next year. The pandemic has also made it possible to realize that travel is important. We took that for granted. I think I will enjoy the next trips I take even more.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY GABRIEL ANCTIL
A typical Amsterdam scene
When it comes to travel, what do you miss the most?
There is like an opening to the world, super wide, which has closed completely. There is something that is impossible to find, a state of mind that you only have when traveling: maximum stimulation of all the senses at the same time. In a new city, we taste new things, we look, we listen, we smell, we touch. This is something that we completely lost during the pandemic because even inside the cities, we were locked up, we couldn’t see anyone.
Where do you want to go when travel restrictions ease?
I dream of going to Mexico City. I’ve never been there. It’s a city that seems to me to have so many things that I love. I would go to a soccer game in the biggest stadium in the world. On the cultural side, there is Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera. Food wise, I watched a taco series on Netflix: I want to go eat street food tacos. I would also like to travel to Japan, but it is more about going to the Grand Canyon. It would be perhaps the first trip that I would make, the most accessible. I will assess the situation.
Travel the paths of the world
Gabriel Anctil
Overall editions
256 pages