By Franck Laboue, Business Development Director, Voyageurs du Monde
Extract of the article published in Volume 22 of Strøm Magazine
The spark is ever present. An image that lingers a bit longer than the others. A phrase heard in passing. A smell, a light, a season. A mundane detail that opens a door.
I believe I started travelling long before I left home. In my childhood bedroom, reading the names on the paper map pinned to the wall. It was not accurate nor recent. But the words… that was all I needed. I was transported just by the names. Toponymy had become a passion. Cities, capitals, oceans, and remote mountains… it all had an unfamiliar exotic flair. I traced imaginary routes with my index finger.
My mind wandered, following the course of rivers, memorizing mysterious and seductive names like Ouagadougou, Balikpapan, Antananarivo, even passing through Borneo or Novosibirsk.
I was an armchair traveller. Books did the rest—especially comic strips. Tintin disembarking at Port Said in The Cigars of the Pharaoh… On Bougainville Island, the brooding silhouette of Corto Maltese’s chiaroscuro lines let the jungle and the silence nibble away at the sailor’s silhouette, as if the drawing itself hesitated between dream and departure.
The pervasion
Eventually, images were no longer enough. Travel pervaded the senses. First, it was the movies. The lighting in film noir that gave me a taste of 1930s hotels, the plush coziness of New York or Parisian bars, and slightly faded cities. There were also rain-drenched neon lights, the slow movements, an anonymous face in the crowd, and the way they filmed the silence, the waiting, the figures drifting in an unknown metropolis… Hong Kong, Tokyo… this is how they appeared to me, well before I travelled there: through Sofia Coppola, Wong Kar-wai, through stories about gangsters, dark nights and loneliness. I was not craving a real city. I was craving an atmosphere.
Then there was the music. The Indiana Jones theme. These notes still haunt me, evoking enigma and places where anything could happen. In Petra, they waited to ambush me, buried somewhere, echoing at the end of the Siq, directly into my cortex.
The sounds took over. As a teenager, well before my travels, I would play a CD of tropical storm sounds on repeat. The rain would beat down, the rumble of thunder rolled through my room, and I drifted away. It was not a backdrop; it was a passage, an untamed immersion into an ecosystem that, even knowing little about it, fascinated me. The journey then became part of my body. The noise, the discomfort. Being constantly at attention. More than observing, we participate. We do not just see the world—we feel it.
The passers-by
There are always passers-by. Mentors. Figures who open a door unknowingly. Writers leave us words like breadcrumbs scattered in our hearts. In books, we draw the sap and all the wicks to light the sparks. Reading is a bit like chasing after lines read years ago, pursuing them through the streets of time, winded and heart pounding as if on an endless road.
There was the trade. The flight attendant. The stopovers. Pilots who talked about their lives back home, their crazy adventures in Tchad, their dreams of faraway places. A conversation could open a new world. Each story stirred the embers in me, opened the horizon. And the women… A Taiwanese woman, one day. Her way of inhabiting the world, a culture, a smile. Taipei was born this way—not from a map, but from an encounter, a graze that shifts a continent with one outstretched hand.
I eventually understood that these sparks were never isolated. They shaped an intimate constellation. They spoke of what I was seeking, of what I was willing to leave behind. A faded Air France poster in the window of a travel agency. A dog-eared photograph on my grandparents’ wall. An old Geo magazine forgotten on a coffee table. One day, without fanfare, travel then becomes reality. Not yet booked, but inevitable.
The unrushed departures
Some sparks lead nowhere. Or rather, not yet. Others remain suspended, like unspoken promises. They demand nothing. They wait. Perhaps the actual journey would be too precise. Perhaps some destinations are best left inside of us. There is no need to achieve it all. Travel is not about going everywhere. It is about being in a state of readiness to leave.
The journey always begins this way. With words, images, sounds, smells, encounters. Travelling with Voyageurs du Monde could mean accepting this: not forcing movement but rather letting ideas slowly germinate. Not going somewhere to check off a box, but to finally respond to what has been beckoning for a long time.
And this call does not speak of geography. It speaks of who we are.
