Do You Believe In The Power of Place?
It has happened more than once that I have made travel plans, and once there, through sheer serendipity, I find myself at an ancient place that I had no prior knowledge of. Sometimes, it has been a place of worship for some community or religion, tombs of some type, or even places of archaeological importance. And that detour changes everything.
Italy, 2019
It all began with San Fruttuoso, near Porto Fino, Italy. We were on the train from Genoa to the tiny fishing village of Camogli, where a friend had invited us to join her and her family for a week-long holiday. We had done our research about Camogli and the famous tourist destination of Porto Fino, which was a mere ferry ride away. Anna, an Italian girl who happened to be returning home on the same train, started a conversation with me in English. It turned out, that she was a PhD. student in the US and was back home for the holidays. I wonder why she felt so but she highly recommended that we alight at the first stop on our ferry to Porto Fino and visit the medieval abbey of San Fruttuoso. However, I am glad she did.
The conversation my friends and I had at the beach in San Fruttuoso about Waldorf education changed the course of my family’s decisions about our future. That took place almost two years back. Since then, we have travelled with our daughters to pursue curiosity-led learning. I have read intensively about and experimented with Waldorf education, forest schooling and self-directed learning. We moved to Whistler, BC the smallest town we have ever lived in with a population of only 12,000 people and enrolled my daughters at the Whistler Waldorf School set amidst magnificent mountains.
USA, 2021
More recently, my husband and I set off on a trip to Long Beach, California. Sans kids, for the first time since our first daughter arrived. (I know, right!) Well, to be precise, Shashank had a conference and I decided to break some psychological barriers around being away from my babies for more than a couple of nights and having adventures just by ourselves once again.
While in Long Beach, I casually reached out to Amy, a classmate I had just spent six weeks hashing HKS public policy case studies with. It turned out that she was merely 40 minutes away in San Juan Capistrano, home to one of the oldest and most important of the missions in California.
Within a couple of hours, I found out that Amy lives five minutes away and has an annual membership of the museum that got us free entry and a free guided tour. Moreover, we had only fifteen minutes once we reached there since we had borrowed a friend’s car that he needed back in Long Beach so he could drive to his meetings. As the fifteen minutes came to a close and we had only seen part of the mission ruins, our friend messaged to say that his meetings were postponed by an hour! We re-entered the museum (free multiple entries, courtesy of Amy’s annual membership) and received a detailed, guided tour of the museum, the mission quarters, ruins of a cathedral (that never got completed) and a new cathedral next door.
Saudi Arabia, (almost) 2022
As I wait and watch the processes that visit may have set into motion in my life, another serendipitous visit that was nowhere on my radar was beginning to take shape. This time in the far-away Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia had never been on my bucket list, and so I knew very little about its touristic potential. However, when an opportunity to visit AlUla came our way through SimpliFlying’s work with Saudia Airlines, we thought this would be the perfect way to restart travel-schooling our girls. By taking them to the land where one of our family’s favourite fairy-tales “Ali Baba and the forty thieves” takes place!
To be honest, the chance to enjoy famous Arab hospitality and document the country’s brand new family-oriented offerings through our Instagram presence was an offer too sweet to be missed. So, off we went!
Once in Jeddah, our local concierge insisted that we consider visiting AlUla, an ancient desert oasis, hitherto unknown to tourists. Guess what? Yours truly chanced upon this article. It turns out, AlUla is home to the ancient ruins of Hegra, a sister city of Petra in Jordan, also built by the Nabataeans nearly two thousand years ago! How could this be a coincidence? Archaeologists believe that Hegra could hold the key to unlocking the secrets of an almost-forgotten ancient civilization. And until a couple of weeks back, I had no idea it even existed. More on our visit to Hegra coming soon.
I wonder these could be mere chance encounters that happen to almost every traveller, at some point or another. Or is there, perhaps, a master travel agent somewhere, planning my itinerary?
I have always noticed the power of meeting people. I believe that the right people show up in our lives at the right time for a specific purpose (not always a pleasant one, mind you!). I am now beginning to believe in the power of places. And you?
