Mapping the Spark

There’s always a spark. An image that lingers a little longer than the others do. A phrase overheard by chance. A scent, a light, a season. A trivial detail that opens a door.

I think I started travelling long before I ever set out to do so. In my childhood bedroom, there was a world map pinned to the wall facing me. It was neither accurate nor up-to-date. But the words… the words were enough. That map was my most precious possession. My talisman, a true invisible gateway to endless possibilities. It stands alone as a relic of the old world. Stamped “Transport Beaugier,” it was a legacy from my grandfather’s trucking company and the world during the Cold War. An endless succession of thumbtacks was pressed into it, year after year, to keep fuelling my dreams. The names alone transported me. The words took me on a journey. Place names had become a passion of mine. Cities, capitals, seas, remote mountains… Everything had an exotic, unfamiliar flavour. With my index finger, I traced imaginary paths. It was good to keep some shadows, though, some unknowns to explore, places to wander mentally, without easy answers.

I can still see myself caressing those exotic names: the former Soviet republics that have since vanished, the countries evaporated from history. In my mind, I would set off, following the courses of rivers, memorizing names as mysterious as they were alluring, like Ouagadougou, Balikpapan, and Antananarivo, passing through Borneo or Novosibirsk. Names on the other side of the world from my native Brittany (though Plounéour-Ménez must surely have seemed odd to some), names that were sometimes elegant, that left me perplexed and took me on a journey. I read that map as if it were the greatest story ever written.

I travelled without moving. Books did the rest. Comic books, most of all. Tintin disembarking at Port Said in Cigars of the Pharaoh… In Bougainville, the chiaroscuro lines of Corto Maltese let the jungle and the silence nibble away at the sailor’s silhouette, as if the drawing itself were hesitating between dream and departure. Those impossible, untouchable islands, like Bougainville or the Solomons. Names with the scent of adventure, of the sea, of escape. I didn’t know exactly where they were, and it didn’t matter. What mattered was the elsewhere. The idea that there were places where life could be lived differently, according to other rules, other rhythms. I didn’t call them sparks yet. They were dreams.

Over time, images were no longer enough. My journey began to unfold through the senses, and through the movies, first and foremost. The lighting of film noir, the kind that gave me a taste for 1930s hotels, the hushed bars of New York or Paris, and cities with a slightly faded charm. There were also the rain-soaked neon lights, the slowness of movement, a stranger’s face lost in the crowd, and that way of filming silence, waiting, bodies drifting through an unfamiliar city… Hong Kong, Tokyo… That’s how they appeared to me, long before I had ever visited them: through Sofia Coppola, Wong Kar-Wai, stories of gangsters, night, and solitude. I didn’t want a real city. I wanted an atmosphere. Later, Bangkok would transform into the alley from the beginning of the film The Beach. Asia imposed itself there, without explanation, without justification. It would bring me that taste for light, bold adventure—that of a heist in the Petronas Towers—as a logical, almost inevitable consequence.

Then, the music. The notes from Indiana Jones. The deeper, more secret ones from the Well of Souls and the Ark of the Covenant, laden with dust, the sacred, and thrills. That immediate promise of mystery, forgotten temples, crumpled maps, and dusty roads. Those notes still haunt me; they point to enigmas, to places where anything could happen. In Petra, they lay in wait for me, buried somewhere, echoing at the end of the Siq, straight into my cortex. The sounds of Deep Forest made me fantasize about Eastern lands with ever-blurred contours, while Herbie Hancock’s pygmy instruments, followed by a few sweet notes from Jorge Ben Jor, opened other doors—warmer, slower—toward a diffuse elsewhere.

The sounds took over. As a teenager, long before I ever set out, I would play a CD of tropical storm sounds on repeat. The rain pounded, the rumblings rolled through the room, and I would disappear. It wasn’t a backdrop; it was a passage, a raw immersion into an ecosystem that fascinated me even before I knew it. Much later, in the Amazon, it wasn’t the landscape that struck me first; it was the squawking of the birds, the constant rustling of the jungle, the ants underfoot. The journey then became part of my body. The noise, the discomfort, the constant attention. You’re no longer really observing; you’re becoming a participant. The world would no longer be something to be looked at, but something to be felt.

There are always guides, mentors, figures who open doors without knowing it. There was my teacher at Jules Ferry School. Every summer, he would go to Burkina Faso to teach other children. When he returned, he didn’t just show us photos; he shared his watercolours and blurry images of an unknown world with us. He had us write letters and gave us pen pals. The journey became a relationship. The world ceased to be abstract. Years later, I found myself in Ouagadougou, almost by chance. But in truth, I had already been there as a child.

For their part, writers leave words for us, like breadcrumbs scattered in our hearts. From books, we draw the sap and all the wicks that ignite sparks within them. With Aziyadé, I dreamed of Istanbul before Istanbul, the minarets already standing tall in the mist of my closed eyelids. Reading is a little like chasing after a sentence you read years earlier, pursuing it through the streets of time, panting, your heart pounding as if on an endless road. There was Julien Gracq’s imagining of Farghestan in The Shore of Syrtes, where the sea had been silent for centuries, a land of mirages where one was always watching the horizon. Travelling to see if the words were true, with Henry de Monfreid and his Secrets of the Red Sea… Ah, those pages that smelled of dried fish and the sweat of dhow boats, those lines hastily scribbled under a sun that burns the eyes.

There are also sparks that lead nowhere, or rather, to nowhere yet. The ones that remain suspended, like unspoken promises. They demand nothing. They wait. Bougainville Island, for example. It still lives somewhere inside me, nourished by Corto, by old maps, by a very personal idea of adventure. Perhaps the actual journey would be too precise. Perhaps certain destinations must remain inner territories. There is Nevada, too, my grandfather’s America. The cowboys of my childhood, whom I almost thought were imaginary. And then one day, I met them. Realizing that what seemed to belong to folklore still existed. There, too, the spark took decades to take shape. It was in no hurry. Not everything needs to be accomplished. Travelling isn’t about going everywhere. It’s about remaining in a state of departure.

And then, one winter evening. A conversation. A woman tells me about Georgia. She doesn’t force anything; she simply tells her story. The words flow: landscapes with jagged peaks, roads winding between vineyards and clouds, meals where warm bread and cheese melt under your fingers, where the khachapuri smells of embers and life. She has stars in her eyes; not those theatrical stars, but small, genuine glimmers. Without warning, I recognize the call, that discreet shiver. The spark has emerged. Gently. Irrevocably. It settled there, in the hollow of our exchanged glances, on the edge of a knowing silence. I know that I won’t go right away, but I also know that I will. It’s a promise whispered in the cold of a winter evening.

Journeys always begin this way. Long before departure. In words. Images. Sounds. Scents. Encounters. Travelling with Voyageurs du Monde may very well mean accepting this: not forcing movement, letting ideas slowly germinate, and setting out not to check off a destination, but to finally answer what has been calling to us for so long.