How to travel, lose money and enrich your cultural life

There’s a peculiar kind of financial ruin nobody warns you about: when a career in travel writing collides with a passion for literature and history. This costly combination results in every assignment becoming an elaborate excuse to chase ghosts from books and movies. The assignment is to test-drive a Porsche in Berkshire on the outskirts of London, and you end up standing by a curve in Dorset in the south-west, over a 100km away, where British army officer T.E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, crashed his motorcycle in 1935. They hand you a Skoda Yeti in Prague, and while the sensible journalists circle the suburbs, you’re tearing across borders, hunting down prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III in Poland where The Great Escape played out in 1944 during World War II. The assignment pays for the trip; the side quests drain the savings.

Here’s my modus operandi: I score a junket to somewhere sensible for something professional. I smile, and immediately start plotting. Because “somewhere sensible” is always near somewhere extraordinary—if you squint at the map the right way and are willing to add a few days you can’t quite afford.

The Porsche assignment is a prime example. I’d been given a 997 Turbo Cabriolet to experience English country roads. The sensible thing would have been to drive it and write about it. But then I saw a sign for the Bovington Tank Museum in Dorset, and something pinged in my memory. Two years earlier, I’d stood in London’s Imperial War Museum, staring at Lawrence’s Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle. The placard mentioned he’d crashed near Bovington. And here I was, a mere 40 miles away.

So off I went on a two-day self-funded jolly. I found the plaque marking the spot where Lawrence swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles and had a lethal crash. The road curves gently, unremarkably. Cars passed, drivers oblivious. But I was seeing that last moment before everything went wrong. The Porsche had become a time machine.

Sometimes the diversions are more extreme. That Skoda Yeti? I had it for one afternoon. I fed coordinates into my GPS and drove 187km to Żagań, Poland—to Stalag Luft III. Paul Brickhill’s book The Great Escape had taken over my childhood, and John Sturges’s 1963 film of the same name lived rent-free in my teenage imagination. Steve McQueen gunning his motorcycle toward the Swiss border, James Garner’s scrounging genius, Richard Attenborough’s desperate leadership. For me, McQueen’s final chase glorified motorcycling as a getaway. With a GPS and a test car, I could finally go there. I walked the path marking the tunnel where Harry ran underground. I stood at the exit point—the one that fell short of the tree line by just a few metres, the miscalculation that led to 50 men being executed by the Gestapo. Hope measured in inches. That’s not something you get from reading. That’s visceral.

The Netherlands have also done me in. I was on a group familiarisation trip by Dutch Tourism, which wanted to repaint Amsterdam as family friendly. But what I remembered was that this country was the theatre for Operation Market Garden in September 1944. An audacious plan by Allied general Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, it parachuted 35,000 troops behind enemy lines to secure bridges. The bridge at Arnhem proved to be a bridge too far.

Cornelius Ryan’s 1974 book A Bridge Too Far had me obsessed, as had the 1977 film with the same name and with its impressive cast including Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Robert Redford and Gene Hackman. So, I hired a car in Amsterdam and drove over 200km to Nijmegen, Eindhoven and Arnhem, visiting every memorial and every bridge. The John Frost Bridge in Arnhem, named in honour of the major Hopkins played, still stands, now hosting traffic jams instead of firefights. This was the one that proved to be a “Bridge Too Far” for the Allies.

More recently, while in London, Belgium beckoned from across the Channel. I had the Royal Enfield Classic 650 to try out. Before I knew it, I’d haemorrhaged a small fortune on ferry tickets and Airbnbs. I rode to Dover, crossed the Channel, and rode 175km from Dunkirk to Brussels and 160km from Brussels to Bastogne and the Ardennes, where the Battle of the Bulge happened during World War II. HBO miniseries Band of Brothers had made those soldiers real to me. I stood in a foxhole that’s still there, preserved, trying to imagine being 19 and freezing, waiting for Patton’s relief column.

The pattern repeated itself across the Atlantic. A fully hosted familiarisation trip to New York meant four days, every expense covered from Mumbai and back. But New York is perilously close to New England, and New England is thick with layers of history, music and culinary legends. So I abandoned financial prudence, rented a car the moment the official programme ended, and drove north.

It started in Boston, cradle of the American War of Independence. I walked the Freedom Trail and lingered in front of Paul Revere’s house. H.W. Longfellow’s poem Paul Revere’s Ride was a favourite of mine in school.

From there to Vermont, to the rolling hills of Stowe and the Trapp Family Lodge, still run by the descendants of the von Trapps who inspired The Sound of Music, which I remember watching in Eros, Mumbai, in the 1980s. The family that fled the Nazis, found refuge in these mountains that echoed their Austrian Alps. I wandered the grounds, humming Do-Re-Mi, feeling the weight of their real-life escape.

Southward to Connecticut, to New Haven and Louis’ Lunch. This diner is considered the birthplace of the hamburger, where they still cook patties on ancient vertical broilers and serve them on toast, no ketchup or mustard allowed.

Then the final push into Pennsylvania: to Pottsville for the Yuengling Brewery, America’s oldest, founded in 1829 and still family-owned, its caves and vats whispering of prohibition-era ingenuity. And finally to Nazareth, home of C.F. Martin & Company, where guitars have been handcrafted since 1833 for legends like the Beatles and Eric Clapton. I toured the factory, touched the wood that became instruments that shaped rock history. These were the guitars Lennon and McCartney strummed in the Rishikesh ashram in India while composing White Album.

Even missed connections become opportunities. Seven hours in Zurich? Enough time to hire a car and drive 122km to Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls, where Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty plunged to their deaths in The Final Problem. The climb is steep, the water thunders down with such force that conversation becomes impossible. Standing there, I understood the grandeur of that fictional death.

Of course, Conan Doyle had to resurrect Holmes due to popular demand. In London, I’ve stood at Burleigh Street off the Strand where the offices of The Strand Magazine used to be. It was exactly there that Victorians gathered in 1893 to protest Holmes’s death, demanding that Arthur Conan Doyle conjure his return.

London itself is a treasure trove of cinematic and literary connects. I’ve eaten at Simpson’s in the Strand because Holmes did so in The Dying Detective. I’ve touched the third column at the Lyceum Theatre (today home to the long running musical The Lion King), where Holmes, Watson and Mary Morstan rendezvous in The Sign of Four. I’ve ridden to Gordon Square, where a World War II secret agent and a direct descendant of Tipu Sultan, Noor Inayat Khan, lived. Radhika Apte played her in A Call to Spy.

I hate lazing in the lounge during long layovers. Seven hours in Helsinki between Dallas and Delhi, and all I could think about was Jean Sibelius. His music had been a constant during my formative years. So, I took the train from Vantaa Airport to Helsinki Central, then walked to Hotel Kämp, where in 1903 Sibelius sat with quinine, oysters, and soda water, treating influenza while his ears rang. He started tapping the table to a rhythm, and Valse Triste was born—a death waltz. Then I raced to the Sibelius Monument and stood before those 600 steel pipes that sing in the wind before catching my flight.

Each place teaches the same lesson: the extraordinary hides in the ordinary, waiting for someone who knows the code. Most people walk past these places daily. They’re just roads, just bridges, just buildings. But if you know the story, they transform. They become doorways into the past where the printed word and celluloid become tangible.

This hobby empties my pocket. Every work trip costs more than it should because I add days, rent cars and motorcycles, stay in hotels. But these experiences equate to the best money I’ll never have. Because when I stand where the story happened, no matter fictional or real, I stop being a tourist and become a witness.

Rishad Saam Mehta is a Mumbai-based author and travel writer.