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y spirited friend Alice was overjoyed when she and her husband, Scott, scored a reservation at Sukiyabashi Jiro, the hyper-exclusive, 10-seat Tokyo sushi bar inside a subway station that was featured in the 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. A concierge who had a special relationship with Jiro had actually walked Alice and Scott’s request over to the restaurant two months in advance. After my friends got off their flight from San Francisco, they reminded themselves that their 20-course feast would begin at 5:30 on the dot, and, in keeping with house rules, they would not be allowed to wear strong perfume, collarless shirts, or sandals. But lunch with colleagues the next day ran unexpectedly late and proved unexpectedly large. And 5:30pm was, of course, after midnight for their Californian stomachs. By the time they arrived, they already felt overstuffed, even as they were reminded that they had to complete their 20 courses in roughly 20 minutes—house rules again! As one dish after another arrived, Alice began, quite literally, to fear she’d throw up. Yes, they were awarded a printed souvenir menu and a snapshot with Jiro, three weeks before President Obama ate there. But by the time they returned to their hotel, US$600 poorer, sushi was no longer their favourite food. I was still chuckling over Alice’s hilarious account of her mishap when my wife reminded me about my visit to a gorgeous Moroccan resort I’d been dreaming of ever since its opening 15 years earlier. Not long after I’d been shown to my private, US$1,400-a-night villa—which came with a private pavilion, private swimming pool, and private fountain—the handle to my private gate clattered to the ground. Soon after, the electricity gave out across my mini-fiefdom—because of the private fountain, I was told. The second time this happened, at 4:16 am, the staff declined even to answer my call. “You remember what the Dalai Lama says every time someone asks him why she hasn’t realised her dream of changing the world overnight?” asked my wife, who is Japanese and devoutly Buddhist to boot. “Yes,” I sighed. “ ‘Wrong dream!’ ” I get the idea of a bucket list, I really do. I was as inspired as anyone by the movie that popularised the term, in which Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman resolved to do everything they most wanted to do after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. We all need dreams—of ballooning over the temples of Bagan, in Myanmar, or airboating across an alligator-infested swamp, as a website specialising in bucket-list itineraries touts one of its adventures—to sustain us. Bucket lists provide a clarifying sense of direction. When my mother, recently widowed, turned 67, I started saving up to take her once every year to all the places she’d been dreaming of since she was a little girl. At Angkor Wat and Easter Island, in Syria and Jordan and St Petersburg, she came away exhilarated. But bucket lists fly in the face of the first two laws of travel:: that on any good trip our expectations will be upended, and
that most of us don’t know what to look for until we see it. One reason people love Paris, I suspect, is not the Louvre or Notre Dame, but that ‘forgotten’ backstreet café they can believe they’ve ‘discovered’ while getting lost on the way to the Eiffel Tower. And to me, the monumental stone heads of Easter Island could never be as impressive as the utterly unexpected replica moai that guard my health club in Japan. What really ravished me on the island was the sleepy Polynesian beauty of the main street, down which locals in pareos sashayed with a laidback ease I’d never witnessed in Tahiti. The whole point of travel, for me at least, is to have my sense of possibility expanded, to see every box in which I like to put things exploded—and to be reminded that life generally has plans for us much wiser than the ones we might have concocted ourselves. One of the main things bucket lists teach us is the folly of treating places and experiences as collectibles. I have friends, not hugely wealthy, who dream of visiting Dublin in hopes of seeing Bono, or of flying to eastern Tibet to meditate with a sage. But Bono has surely offered us far more already in his constant interviews and concerts than he could ever do when surprised by a fan in his favourite pub. And the sage, if he’s the real thing, will surely tell anyone who asks that the whole point of meditation is that it can be practiced no less usefully in East Orange, New Jersey. Yes, there are worthy souls whose bucket lists involve working with the dispossessed in Haiti or building houses for the poor in the Philippines. But the fact remains that the third law of travel is that happiness is very often commotion recollected in tranquillity: Alice would never have come away with such a funny and memorable story of her visit to Jiro had everything gone according to plan. Monks in both East and West have always seen the wisdom of asking yourself what you most want to do if you have very little time left—and maybe such ideas can be inspirations, so long as you never count on realising them. I’ve been longing to visit Mount Athos, in northern Greece, ever since a school friend described his trip there 40 years ago, but I realise I’ll be no poorer if I never get there. One of the most indelible and exhilarating places I’ve seen in recent years was Little Rock, Arkansas—in part because I’d never dreamed of wanting to go there. After experiencing the irony on display in its museums, the kindness of the Zen students I met, and the wit of the Graham Greene–loving Harley riders I ran into on the main drag, I found myself urging friends to put Arkansas on their itineraries. Besides, wherever you disembark, you’ll soon learn that the curious and magnetic people you meet have dreams of their own—dreams of freedom and peace and the chance to see San Francisco. My bucket list thesee days consists mostly of empty space.
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