We celebrated our wedding anniversary this year in French Polynesia, with a helicopter ride over Tahitian volcanoes. Maneuvering through the valleys of the caldera and over turquoise coral waters, mesmerized at the demigod-like sister island Moorea glistening in the afternoon sun, we hovered on in our “dragonfly” for nearly 20 minutes. Yet, what could be more fascinating for my two little girls than spotting two birds playing catch mid-air?
My thrilling experience was only deflated by my observation that my girls didn’t find the helicopter ride anywhere close to as fascinating as I had imagined. After the first five minutes of scenery, they seemed partly nervous and partly disengaged.
During our travel-schooling experiement, I am realising that geography, landscape and a sense of space-time is yet to become established in the kids’ minds. When we take modes of transport, their minds make sense of the movement as ‘teleportation’ instead of ‘locomotion’, unless they interact with or participate in every step of that journey. We were in point A, after some hours, we appeared in point B, rather than we traveled over a path of points to get to point B. Memorable landmarks become intermediate points on that path, but in their absence, especially on high-speed journeys, my kids tuned out.
