Travel is awesome, but how can we experience real awe?

That feeling of deep connection and wonder is elusive and fleeting, but we can create the circumstances where it's more likely to strike

Waiting for sunrise on the rim of a volcano in Flores, Indonesia

Taking shelter from a sudden unseasonal rain storm in the Old City of Chiang Mai, I stopped at a cafe, ordered food and got talking with a teacher from Belgium who was on a year-long sabbatical. Emily was three months into her trip and newly arrived in Thailand after travelling through Indonesia and Malaysia. So far, so normal.

She beamed as she told me this was a trip of a lifetime, something she’d dreamed about, planned and saved up for over many years. It was every bit as marvellous as she’d hoped. Only there was one thing missing. “It’s that feeling, that deep sense of emotional connection, briefly forgetting yourself and your life. I’ve only really experienced that once in three months.”

Emily had been joined for the first six weeks of her journey by her newly-retired father. She explained that he was a perfect travelling companion - delighted by everything, unfazed by challenges, his sense of humour never failing. They bonded like never before and they both had wept when they parted ways in Jakarta.

One evening on the island of Sumatra they had joined a trek to the rim of an active volcano to watch the sunrise. At the peak they watched the sky and the lake in the caldera slowly infuse with light, the colours constantly changing, almost unworldly in their brilliance. “It was a feeling, so beautiful, I can’t really explain it,” she said.

Emily realised then that this sudden rush of emotion was like one she had felt as a child on holiday with her family in the Ardèche in southern France, surrounded by nature, enchanted and free. She had wanted all her adult life to recapture that feeling.

“This whole trip is amazing, I’m doing wonderful things, meeting interesting people, but that feeling is hard to find,” Emily told me. She had just returned from a two-day trek in the mountains north of Chiang Mai. It was fun, she said, but too short. She had never really felt immersed in nature. “It was very … organised.”

This got me thinking. When had I experienced that feeling? That sense of being fully immersed in the moment, unselfconscious, filled with wonder. In a word, awed.

I started to make a mental list, and it proved instructive. Although I profess to love cities, the times when I had that feeling were almost all in nature. In the Maldives I had swum a little too far from the shore and found myself circled by a huge pod of dolphins. Recently in Cambodia I cycled to a temple in Angkor in the misty early morning to find that I was the only person there.

Banteay Kdei, Angkor, Cambodia, early morning

Often this feeling of awe lasts for only a fleeting moment, an unexpected and profound emotional response to the environment and the people around me. I’ve had the feeling on a sleeper train in Thailand as I pulled back the curtain to see dense forests flash past, and when skiing fresh powder in a perfectly silent Alpine valley. And all those huge technicolor sunsets. But however practised I become in designing my ideal lifestyle, those moments remain rare.

Maybe that’s their point. A lot of people get themselves into trouble by chasing the feeling, wanting to gorge on it incessantly. They binge on drink and drugs, they fall in love again and again, they have risky sex with the wrong person, or engage in ever more dangerous sports.

But the feeling would lose its value - and maybe its meaning - if we could order it like room service. It’s elusive by nature.

As travellers, I wonder if we make it harder for ourselves to experience genuine awe because we’ve seen so much, both in real life and in the media we consume - film, TV, YouTube, Instagram and so on. Who now could be genuinely surprised to catch sight of the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu?

There are people who can take a walk around their own garden and feel the same sense of awe and wonder they might experience in the Serengeti or climbing Mont Blanc. I envy them. Only very occasionally do I get flashes of that. Recently returned to the gloom of London after two months in Asia, I was surveying the wreck of my own garden when the first hint of dusk bathed everything with a strange ethereal glow, a colour I can’t begin to describe.

Hiking along the Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland

Thinking about my own experiences of awe turns out to be surprisingly informative. Many of my most profound travel experiences have involved the sky and the changing quality of natural light. A meteor shower in the Canary Islands, a starry night in the Thar Desert of Northern India, an electric storm in Ko Lanta. I suspect I’m not alone in this: there’s something primal and universal about our fascination with the sky.

Wildlife encounters can also spark joy and awe, but for me they need to be natural and unexpected. Walking in Richmond Park in south-west London and coming across a lone deer, each of us standing still, staring at the other, before the young deer skipped off into the undergrowth - that was magical for me. But being taken to a farm in Thailand to feed and bathe a lumbering, indifferent elephant - that left me totally cold.

Time of day can change everything. In Vietnam, I felt overwhelmed by the crowds of tourists in the old town of Hoi An. But returning next morning at 6am on a rented bicycle, the streets were deserted and the light was luminous, the colour of ripe apricot.

Bucket lists have become commoditised, but ultimately we each need to work out what it is that lights our own particular candle. In his book, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, Geoff Dyer wrote a wonderful essay about a frustrating and miserable trip with his wife to Norway to see the Northern Lights. Now that the Northern Lights feature in just about every traveller’s bucket list, Dyer’s disappointment seems almost heretical.

Maybe Norway in winter isn’t your thing. Maybe elephant farms aren’t your thing. That’s okay.

As for me, it’s taken a while, but I’ve worked out where the magic tends to happen. I know I can’t force those moments of awe, but I can create the circumstances where they are more likely to occur. Being immersed in nature, getting up before sun rise, swimming in open water, going outside on a clear night far away from artificial light, travelling alone or with a small group of likeminded people. For better results, I try to combine two or more of these conditions. Swimming in the sea at sunrise, for example, is almost guaranteed to send shivers, in every sense.

Another sunset. This one in Krabi, southern Thailand

I’m also trying to resist the urge to respond to moments of awe by reaching immediately for my phone. Why break the spell by trying to capture something that by its very nature cannot be captured?

I don’t wish to tell other people how to enjoy themselves, but I think the world would be a better place if we all looked inward to find what brings us real joy. One of the many problems with social media is that it doesn’t just tell you where to go, it also tells you what you ought to feel when you get there. And when a thousand other people arrive in the same place because they’ve followed the same Instagram accounts, that feeling is almost bound to elude you.

Back in Chiang Mai, the storm had passed. I settled my bill and said farewell to Emily. Stepping out again on to the street, I noticed the lights from a temple reflected in newly-formed puddles, and an almost-full moon had appeared from behind the scudding clouds. Next day I’d get up early and go for a hike.