More travel means broader minds

Experience of visiting other countries has been a joy for me. It's a passport to understanding.

Travel, goes the old adage, broadens the mind. In my case, the mind-broadening began in a typically bizarre Peterson fashion.

Picture this - a 14 year-old grammar school boy, upstairs in the family home in Oxford, struggling, as usual with homework.

The next thing I know, I'm summoned downstairs by my slightly bemused mother, who said, "Come and see Great Aunt Percy" (actually her name was Olive, but for reasons lost in the mists of time, we always called her Auntie Percy).

I'd never actually met her, but there she was, sitting by the fire. Think Maggie Smith as the dowager duchess in Downton Abbey.

"Ah, so this is the boy," she boomed - and then handed me an envelope with an airline ticket and an itinerary in it. "Your mother agrees with me you need to broaden your education. So you will accompany me to Switzerland and Italy."

At this point in my life, I'd never even been to London, let alone flown on a plane. Travel was restricted to twice-yearly trips to Dad's family in Hartlepool and the obligatory family caravan holiday in Wales, Devon or Cornwall.

So in July 1961, clutching my first-ever passport, the redoubtable great aunt and I boarded a British European Airways Vickers Vanguard bound for Zurich.

My first impression? The Swiss drank tea, without milk, in a glass with a silver holder. Weird.

The rest of the trip is a kaleidoscope in my mind, save one highlight. By the time we reached Lugano, on the lake of the same name bordering Italy, the great aunt announced she was tired and would rest there while I went on to Italy on a 10-day coach tour of Milan, Florence, Rome and Naples.

Alone.

Of course, what the crafty old girl wanted to do was spend 10 days in Lugano's famed casino while I bettered myself.

That trip was a smorgasbord of culture to my senses, and planted a desire to travel that has enriched my life over the past 50 years or more.

Which brings me to China. As a dedicated Asiaphile, I am delighted by the huge numbers of Chinese people taking advantage of new economic freedoms to travel.

Statistics for 2015 show a staggering 120 million outbound Chinese tourists spent $104.5 billion (100 euros; 84).

Now those are impressive statistics in anybody's money.

What does impress me, and I'm trying not to seem condescending about this, is the vast amount of knowledge that Chinese young people are soaking up as they pose with their selfie-sticks in front of places such as Rome's Colosseum, Milan's Duomo, the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the myriad of tourist attractions in my home city of London.

I know from my own experience that these are things that will stay in the mind forever.

Which brings me to a final statistic that always impresses, and depresses, me at the same time.

According to the US State Department, only about 46 percent of US citizens hold valid passports. Compare that with the UK, where 76 percent of the population hold a current passport. OK, we're an island nation, used to travel - don't forget it was a certain Briton, Thomas Cook, who invented the package tour in 1872.

I think we can deduce from all this that the newly discovered Chinese thirst for overseas travel can only enhance China's standing in the world today. And that's to be welcomed.

Chris Peterson is Managing Editor, Europe, for China Daily. Contact him on chris@mail.chinadailyuk.com