You’re going on a cross-country trip. Airplane, train, bus, car, or bike?
Every trip says something about the person taking it. That’s what I think. Not in a grand psychological sense. Just in the small way choices reveal us. The pragmatist books the plane. The romantic takes the train. The free spirit wants the car keys. The heroic idealist chooses the bike. The people-watcher gets on the bus and settles in among everyone else. Like most things, travel becomes more complicated once geography enters the room.
In Australia, the plane often wins before the argument has properly begun. The country is too large, the distances too blunt. Sydney to Cairns sounds adventurous until you picture the long hours of highway and the succession of servo coffees and motels and roadworks. There are people for whom that is the point, of course. People with time, with caravans, with a fondness for the inland. But for most of us, the plane is not surrender. It is realism.
Europe is different. Europe makes romantics of people who are not romantics at home. The train does that. You step on in one city and step off in another and somehow the movement itself feels meaningful. Amsterdam. Munich. Salzburg. Ljubljana. Venice. Milan. Luxembourg. Paris. Brussels. Even saying the names feels like being carried along. On a train you are not cut off from distance; you feel it passing. You watch roofs change, fields widen, station platforms appear and disappear. The journey keeps offering itself to you, gently, through glass.
A car is another thing altogether. A car is less about romance than permission. Permission to turn off. Permission to take the road that looks less important. Permission to stop at a beach you had not planned to visit or follow a sign to a village whose name you do not know how to pronounce. There is a certain kind of happiness in that. Not speed exactly. Not efficiency. More the happiness of looseness. Of not being entirely claimed by the timetable.
And then there is the bike, which belongs to people who want to feel the trip in their bodies. The bike is earnest in a way the others are not. It asks something of you. Your legs, your lungs, your patience, your stubbornness. A person who cycles Route 66 or through the French countryside in summer or all the way up towards Cape York is not simply trying to get somewhere. They are trying to experience the distance honestly. They want the wind and heat and ache of it. They want to arrive having earned the arrival.
The bus is easier to underestimate. It lacks the glamour of the train and the autonomy of the car. But sometimes the bus gives you the richest version of a place because it places you among other people and keeps you there. A flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh is quick and forgettable. A bus trip is slower and more porous. You stop where others stop. You eat what appears at the roadside. In Cambodia, that might mean fried spiders, sold as a regional specialty. The bus does not just move you through a country. It places you, for a while, inside its ordinary life.
That is why these choices matter more than they first appear to. They are not only practical decisions, though of course they are that. They reveal appetite. One person wants efficiency. Another wants beauty. Another wants freedom, or hardship, or proximity, or surprise. One person wants to arrive. Another wants to notice.
We do not only choose how to travel. We choose what kind of encounter we want with the world.
The Afterword 
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