Most of the places in my travel notes are in Bangladesh. That was not a plan. When I listed where I had actually been, I noticed how much of the list was close to home, and how little attention I had been paying to that fact.

There is a habit, when we talk about travel, of treating distance as the point. The further you went, the better the story. I understand the appeal, and I have been lucky enough to go further too. But my own country keeps proving that distance is not what makes you pay attention.

One country, many landscapes

Bangladesh is often described by what it lacks in elevation: a flat, green delta. Then you go to Sajek or Bandarban, where the hills fold away behind each other and every ridge is a slightly paler colour than the last. The weather can rearrange the entire view.

Go northeast to Sylhet and the green becomes a pattern, tea planted in careful rows that follow the shape of the ground. Go south to Cox’s Bazar and it is the reverse: almost nothing in the frame except sand, surf and a horizon. Further on, Saint Martin’s Island sits out in the Bay of Bengal, a place where everything depends on the crossing.

Familiar places are not less interesting. We have just stopped looking at them.

What close to home is good for

Travelling near home takes away some excuses. You cannot put your interest down to novelty. You also cannot pretend you are simply passing through: you share a language with the person selling you tea, and a place’s problems are also your country’s problems.

The Chittagong Hill Tracts are a good example. They are often presented as scenery, and they are beautiful, but they are also home to communities with their own languages, histories and concerns. Getting that right matters more when it is your own country doing the describing.

Going further, seeing better

I do not mean that nobody should travel far. Maafushi showed me a side of the Maldives that the brochures leave out, and Makkah and Madinah are in a category of their own. But I think it is easier to see far-away places properly when you have practised at home.

The skill is the same in both cases: slow down, and look at what is actually there. It costs nothing to practise, and you do not have to go far.

Photo: Hopeoflight, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.