Unlimited Dream Travel

The ultimate holiday? You experience it in your dreams. Where everything is possible, free from all reality, fantasy as a guide. And that 100 percent eco-friendly and all-inclusive. Close your eyes and step in!

Why do lottery winners always laze around in a hammock on a tropical palm beach with a cocktail in their hand? Is that the ultimate holiday wish for someone who has everything and can do everything and doesn't need anything more? How unoriginal. It also shows a narrow-minded view of the unlimited possibilities that are available. Drinking and doing nothing in the sun, guys, come on, is that all there is?

Let's think beyond that when it comes to traveling. Let the imagination run wild, free from all time and reality: back in time for example, or far ahead, somewhere high in the sky or like Jules Verne to the depths of the earth (or moon, or Jupiter, you name it). And speaking of Jules Verne: why not take Shakespeare as a traveling companion, or Marilyn Monroe, Einstein, Napoleon, or even a Kardashian for that matter. I know, when the choice is unlimited, choosing becomes almost impossible (compare it to the range of shampoos, toothpastes or eggs that are on sale in the supermarkets). But give it a try.

We all travel in the mind from time to time. Wandering off into the world of a book or film, for example, musing in a chair, thinking of distant horizons and dream images full of 'if only' and 'if only' and 'could I'.

The other day I was sitting on an airplane reading Jacob Haafner's Exotic Love, a personal travelogue by the writer who travelled from Calcutta to Madras in the eighteenth century. Not on an airplane, but on a palanquin, 'a sofa in which one lies on a soft mattress and with pillows under one's head, just as one lies on a bed. The shoulders of the bearers are covered with a thick layer of calluses, caused by the bamboo poles. When carrying, they take turns making a soft, groaning sound, which is not unpleasant. The meter of movement and sound lulls me to sleep again and again.' Of course, those underpaid or perhaps enslaved schleppers of the past are no good, but yes, I still feel a sense of nostalgia for that slow journey from A to B, without the speed of the airplane today, the rush at airports, the long, long queues and the discomfort of the modern airplane seat in which sleep is almost impossible. Traveling slowly while the landscape passes you by and everything gradually changes is a beautiful thing. No jetlag, no culture shock, slow motion as a human measure.

So when I think of my unlimited dream trip, I first think of a slow pace, and especially without physical exertion, because that's not really my thing. A modern version of a sedan chair, with air conditioning and wifi and the seat from Singapore Airlines First Class. And a well-stocked minibar. During the trip south I also want to gradually go back in time, so I leave the Amsterdam of the twenty-first century, touch the twentieth at Utrecht so that I end up in the time of my great-grandparents around Brussels, the Belle Époque in which excessive beauty in all its facets was the adage among the elite. In short: go on a trip with all the ropes cast off. You don't even have to get out of your chair. How eco-friendly is that?