Over the past two weeks, I have witnessed the great transition of landscapes, cultures and languages known as Europe. I came through the historiette of London suburbs to the cultivated planes of north France, then I was among sprawling craggy horizons, somewhere underneath which there was a border, and then I stopped in the villages dotted through the shade of the Alps, and eventually I skirted the bow-shaped coast of the Gulf of Venice. It's a lot of ground to cover, so naturally it took a while.
But where is that sense of movement at sea?
It's certainly taking a while – no doubt about that aspect – but I feel no more orientated than I would in an aeroplane. It is like limbo because surrounding this boat is an endless space without direction and without even a surface, and nothing to tell me I'm making spacial progress relative to the time it's taking. There is none of that transition that you can enjoy from a long journey on land. What benefit then, apart from the novelty of life on-board, does a traveller get from crossing distances by boat?
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