The Hills Had a Waiting List

I found out I was late for my own holiday on a weeknight, sitting on the edge of the bed with a booking page that had turned every date grey. The boat ride on the lake at Thekkady was full for the next three months. The jungle safari had sold out even earlier. It felt like reaching a wedding buffet at 11:30 pm, with the vessels scraped clean and one caterer looking at me with pity. I had wanted a few quiet days in the hills, and the hills, it turned out, had a waiting list.

I put the phone face down and did the arithmetic every tired traveller eventually does. How hard am I willing to fight for the right to rest?

~

The question is older than the internet. In the spring of 1790, a twenty-seven-year-old officer in Turin fought a duel the law had forbidden. History kept no record of what happened to the other man, which is either great discretion or very bad news for him. It did record the sentence. Forty-two days, confined to his own room.

His name was Xavier de Maistre. He had a dog called Rosine and a manservant called Joannetti, and for six weeks that was the whole of his social circle. A young officer with that much energy and that little floor space could have spent the sentence pacing and sulking. De Maistre chose the stranger option.

He planned a voyage.

He toured his furniture as if it were foreign territory and held imagined conversations with figures from the ancient world, writing the whole expedition down like a proper travel book. He called it Voyage autour de ma chambre, a voyage around my room, and it came out in 1794. Its argument fits on a postcard. The pleasure we chase across the map was available all along, in the room we already had.

~

Back to my grey calendar. My first instinct was to blame the crowd. There are more of us than ever, and every one of us seems to have watched the same thirty-second reel of that boat gliding across that lake.

But the booking site only shows us the queue. We joined it much earlier, on the day we decided a holiday was a to-do list with better weather.

Watch how we plan. A flight at dawn to save half a day. Three sightseeing points before lunch and two after, a light-and-sound show at 7, and a group photograph beside every signboard carrying the name of the place, in case we forget where we were. We come home with every box on the itinerary ticked and a lower back that wants a word with us. The trip was completed. Whether anybody rested on it is a separate matter.

I have planned trips exactly like that. By the second evening of planning, the holiday had a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet looked more rested than I did.

~

Picture a viewpoint in any Indian hill station at 10:15 on a Sunday morning. A family has been on the road since before dawn. The father stands at the railing with his phone held high over two strangers' heads, trying to fit the valley and his children into one frame. The mother is checking whether the boating counter opens at 11 or 11:30. The younger child has found a monkey and is, at this moment, the only person on the railing looking at a living creature. Behind them, cars crawl up the ghat road, each carrying another family with the same railing in mind. Every one of them saved for this morning, and every one of them deserves it.

Hill stations in our part of the world grew up as places to escape the plains in summer. Today the hills need a court to decide how many of us may escape at once. A status report found that at peak season more than twenty thousand vehicles were entering the Nilgiris every day. So for the summer of 2025, the Madras High Court set a ceiling. Six thousand tourist vehicles on a weekday. Weekends got a little more room, and Kodaikanal got a quota of its own. When hoteliers took the matter to the Supreme Court, the bench refused to interfere, and put it in words any Indian parent would recognise: "6000 vehicles you can take there, still you are not satisfied!"

Japan has it worse, or funnier, depending on whether you live there. In 2024, crowds kept gathering on one stretch of pavement in Fujikawaguchiko, a small town at the foot of Mount Fuji, to photograph the mountain rising neatly behind a convenience store. Traffic suffered, and so did the neighbours. So the town put up a large black screen to hide its own mountain. Within about a week, holes had appeared in it.

I understand the person who poked those holes completely, and that is exactly the problem.

De Maistre, for the record, got through forty-two days in Turin without standing in a single queue.

You know the Monday after a holiday. The bag still half-unpacked in the corner, and a body quietly asking for a holiday from the holiday. A Dutch researcher named Jeroen Nawijn went looking for that feeling in numbers. His team tracked more than fifteen hundred Dutch adults, measuring their happiness before and after the holidays many of them took. The happiest stretch of the whole affair came before anyone left home. It was the looking forward. Once the travellers were back, they were no happier than the people who had stayed put.

One group was the exception. Those whose holiday had been very relaxed came home carrying a small lift. It showed mostly in the first two weeks. By eight weeks, it had gone completely.

Read that again with a booking page open. All our racing for slots happens during the one part of the holiday that could have come home with us. We trade the only souvenir that lasts for a better seat on the boat.

~

So where does a person begin? I have no plan to boycott Thekkady. The lake will still be there in a few months, and I intend to be on it. I have simply started planning differently, and a few of the changes surprised me.

The first is embarrassingly simple. Go when the crowd goes home. The Nilgiris cap was aimed at the peak summer months, because that is when everyone arrives at once. The same hills stand open the rest of the year, with the mist still sitting on the tea gardens and a fraction of the honking. A Tuesday in a hill town and a Sunday in the same town are two different countries.

The second I learned at sea, long before I understood it. I saw thirty-five countries before I turned thirty, and most of them arrived as a few hours of shore leave with no itinerary at all. You stepped off the ship and walked until your feet got curious. I have forgotten a surprising number of the famous sights from those years. The unplanned afternoons I remember in colour. So now I leave one afternoon of every trip unbooked. It gets no purpose and no plan. It usually turns out to be the best part.

The third lives on my phone, which holds a photograph of a waterfall I have no memory of standing in front of. Linda Henkel, a psychologist in Connecticut, would find that perfectly normal. She led students through her university's art museum and asked them to photograph some objects and simply look at others. The next day, they remembered fewer of the photographed objects, and fewer details about them. The camera had done the remembering, so the mind took the afternoon off.

Then came the twist I love. When students zoomed in and photographed one specific detail, the head of a statue, say, their memory held firm. They remembered the whole object, including the parts that never made it into the frame. Attention with a purpose did what the camera alone could never manage. So now I pick one detail per place and look at it properly. The pattern of one row of tea bushes on a slope. The sound a boat makes as it pushes off. The mind quietly files the rest of the view around it.

~

This is where every travel problem finally lands, because it is where every trip actually happens. The lake and the elephant on the far bank reach you as light and sound, and your mind decides what they become. Two people can sit in the same boat on the same morning. One of them sees a lake. The man beside him is working out whether they can still make the spice plantation before lunch.

At the heart of Mind Flow sits one sentence I keep returning to: Mind Flow opens your universe to you through your mind. Travel makes that sentence almost too easy to see. A stranger with faster Wi-Fi can sell out every boat on that lake. Your attention has no booking window. Nobody can reserve it three months ahead or take it from you at the counter. The only way to lose it is to hand it over, which most of us do cheerfully, to the itinerary.

That is what I mean by authoring your own life, in its smallest and most practical form. Either you write the trip, or the booking engine writes it for you and emails the confirmation.

De Maistre knew this with only a dog for company. His room measured the same on the forty-second day as on the first. He had simply learned to walk it slowly.

~

When the forty-two days ended, Xavier de Maistre wrote that he was sorry to go back out into the world. A man had been handed the smallest map in Turin, and he came out reluctant to leave it.

The boat at Thekkady is still sold out, and I have made my peace with it. The lake will keep. When I do go, I intend to leave one afternoon empty and let the phone stay in my pocket while the boat pushes off.

You need no booking to begin. Tonight, before you open another travel app, try the voyage de Maistre took. Sit in the chair you sit in every evening, the one you stopped seeing years ago. Look at the room around it as if you had waited three months for the ticket.