Award-winning travel writer CATHERINE MARSHALL reflects on how a lifetime of adventure, from Kashmir to the Arctic Circle, has altered her perspective.

Author Catherine Marshall with Nenets reindeer herder in Siberia. © Catherine Marshall

I’ve only just arrived in Kashmir and already a soldier is striding towards me, rifle slapping his thigh, eyes boring directly into mine. The throng pouring off the plane and through Srinagar Airport’s cramped arrivals hall parts like an ocean before him. His face is a storm, his expression so menacing it skewers me in place beside a pillar painted forest green. Almost upon me now, the soldier smacks a sheet of paper against the column. “Fill it in!” he commands.

It’s a foreigners’ registration form. How was this soldier able to pick me out as the only non-national from among all these new arrivals, I wonder fleetingly? But the clue is before me, trembling ashen around the ballpoint pen he’s jabbed into my fist: my fingers, clad in gloves of white skin. Of course -I’m the only foreigner arriving on today’s flight from Delhi, for my face glows like a ghostly lightbulb amidst this communal flow of brown-skinned people.

Oh horseback in Kashmir. © Catherine Marshall

It’s a profound lesson, being publicly identified as ‘other’, for it subverts the platform of privilege my ethnicity has always afforded me. Stripped of this unearned, default position, I experience (though without any real threat) the sense of fear and alienation that must arise when one’s difference is questioned. As an obvious interloper, I’m forced to adjust the viewfinder, to refocus as the telescope’s prisms invert the known world and subvert my place in it. Such torment is an everyday occurrence, I remind myself, for prejudiced peoples navigating their way through a white-centric world. This idea of perspective – not just accepting it as an abstract concept, but intuiting it viscerally – will persist in my psyche like the kaleidoscope’s mirrors: multifaceted, ever-shifting, revelatory.

Receiving a blessing from a Brahmin in the Himalayan region of Uttarakhand. © Catherine Marshall

Years later, trundling across the tundra high above the Arctic Circle, the kaleidoscope is cranked and shaken yet again. We’ve spent days camping with the Nenets, nomadic reindeer herders who roam the Yamal Peninsula. On the journey southwards to Salekhard, we offer a lift to a 13-year-old Nenets boy; he’s returning to his parents’ campsite, still many hours’ walk away. We pepper him with questions through our translator: what is it like to live on the tundra? Which season do you prefer? How soon until you pack up camp again and move to another location?

He answers patiently, then volleys his own questions in return: where is your country? How cold are your winters? Do you construct your houses from brick? My world is every bit as exotic for this boy as his is for me; his curiosity just as demanding. But more than that: this journey is not entirely for my own edification. I’m not here to consume the Nenets’ culture and give nothing in return. I must honour this ambassadorial freedom by offering something of myself to those I encounter. Though I’ve travelled the world and have large chunks of it lodged in my memory, this boy can see it, as yet, only in his imagination.

At Thajiwas Glacier, Kashmir. © Catherine Marshall

Conversely, as the world expands to accommodate my wanderings, I must gather the lessons it has gifted me and carry them home. In the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand, I absorb the bucolic sounds arising from the valley as the sun begins its languid descent and sets flame to the Nepali Himalayas. My heart swells at this miracle; I want to freeze this frame and my place in it.

But travel is by definition impermanent. I must return to that place that tethers me even as I wander. And so I safeguard the virtues these journeys have inscribed upon my soul: perspective, humility, wonder, joy. At dawn, I greet that same Himalayan sun as it rises beyond the eucalypts at the bottom of my Sydney garden; at dusk, I farewell it as it sinks behind suburbia’s eaves. I give thanks, always, for the most priceless of travel’s lessons: the capacity to be content, to be satisfied with the landscape lying in ever-faithful wait at my own front door.