The joys and pains of travel in the modern age
Questions and definitions
Eight months of travel through Latin America with my partner last year — from Havana, through Central America, down to Patagonia and back up to Rio de Janeiro — should have been enough time to do some thinking about life. It wasn’t. But at least I have a clearer idea about travel. In fact the topic casts forth many engaging questions, which somehow remain concealed to so many who view it as little more than one big holiday or vacation. What is travel and what isn’t? What is its purpose? How enjoyable is it really? What is it really about? Are there right or wrong ways to travel? Is it becoming easier or harder to travel? How can I get the best out of it?
These are not trivial. They also are not amenable to response without travel experience. At various points in our journey I wrestled with them, sometimes with the aid of other travellers (but too often at a late hour with a bottle of rum on the table). The common thread, I think, is how to think of travel in the modern age.
In its most basic sense to travel is to go from one place to another. Intuitively though it is much more. Driving to work everyday is not so much travel as it is commuting. Taking the train or subway to see a friend is not so much travel as it is transiting. Perhaps travel means moving across long distances — but flying home to see family for Christmas is not so much travel as it is passenger transport.
So travel is more than moving from A to B with the sole aim of arriving at B. Yet this also applies to holidays and vacations. But holidaying is often less about the way to B and more about enjoying not being at A. A holiday is defined more by not working, about respite from labour, than by anything else. And it tends to be tourism — packaged, curated, controlled, commercial experience — more than travel, that we do on holiday.
Hence travel seems easier to define by what it isn’t: it is not about destination — but journey; not disconnection from elsewhere — but immersion in the here and now; not pre-programmed pleasures — but unexpected adventure. I think at best it also needs to involve traversing if not exotic, at least unfamiliar territory. The French word dépaysement, that connotes change of scene, disorientation, escape, seems to chime well with the meaning of travel that is truest.
Expectations and reality
If travel embodies journey, mindful experience, unexpected adventure and escape then perhaps it demands no justification — it is its own purpose. Indeed this tends to be how many see it. It is often simply another ‘hobby’ that is entirely appropriate, indeed encouraged, to be listed in the ‘Other interests’ or ‘Miscellaneous’ section of a CV, like playing the piano or taekwondo.
Fittingly, when we announced our plans to travel across Latin America most friends offered congratulations and a small few feared for our careers — but all could see the point. Only one friend asked “What do you hope to get out of it?”, to which I answered “time” unconvincingly. I was unprepared, so sure I was of the self-evidence of the rationale.
I had been unimpressed with other reasons such as “to see the world”, “to experience new cultures”. It seemed they could quite reasonably be countered with “but why do you want to see the world and experience new cultures?”, to which I had no answer (even if few would dare to be so inquisitive). And I was repelled by the insufferably cloying and vacuous language of travel blogs — “travel broadens the mind/helps you find meaning/discover your inner self”. How could I be sure that it would make me more happy, more wise? My answer to this question today would be of no use, coloured as it is by my rationalisation after-the-fact — the purpose of travel is evident to the person who has travelled.
Part of my reluctance to offer further justification stemmed from the knowledge that expectations often fall short of reality. “Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. A proverb from the Roman poet Horace reads: “They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea”. I had always interpreted it to mean that there is little more to be gained from travel than a change of scenery. In his poem Le Voyage Baudelaire writes of travelling sailors: “We saw the sand, and waves, we also saw the stars: despite the shocks, disasters, the unplanned, we were often just as bored as before”.
Such warnings resonate with anyone who has booked a holiday only to find that unforeseen complications — overbooked hotels, poor weather, oppressive humidity, dishonest taxi drivers — are all too present and the pure bliss imagined while sitting at the office desk is all too far away. Travel brochures do us no service in depicting paradises without their inevitable imperfections. In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton suggests the problem is that we forget that we will also be bringing ourselves along with all of our worries, anxieties and quirks with us when we travel, which will inevitably condition our experience in unexpected ways.
So in preparation I tried to adjust downwards my rose-tinted expectations. But part of the joy of any adventure is the thrill of anticipation, perhaps best described by the German word Vorfreude. Only an incorrigible cynic could resist exuberance at the thought of eight months off work to see the world.
And so I was still caught off guard in several respects. I can certainly dispel the myth that travel is one big holiday. Things that could go wrong did so more than expected (but perhaps this stems from a Western habituation to things generally tending to go as planned). We had less ‘free’ time than I imagined, with all the incessant planning involved. I felt less special about travelling when I saw how many others like us were doing the same. The travel community shares some of the debasing traits found in other hobbies like cliquishness, geekiness and status seeking. The haggling, constant surveillance of possessions, wariness of strangers and relative lack of information often created more stress than expected. And I did not glean life-changing insights about myself or the world, so am none the wiser as to my true calling.
But there were also many unexpected boons. We developed or renewed an interest in camping, exotic cuisine, fishing, hiking, motorbiking, mountain biking, mountaineering, paragliding, photography, Portuguese, salsa dancing, samba dancing, sand boarding, sand-buggy riding, scuba diving, snorkelling, Spanish, stargazing, volcano boarding, volcano climbing, wildlife, wine tasting, writing and ziplining. We made many new friends. We rekindled old friendships. We felt time pass slowly because all around us was novel. We met many locals who told us their stories. We were plunged into situations that challenged and strengthened our mettle, both individually and as a couple. We read many books (particularly on very long bus rides — one of the few situations these days in which people can still serenely go about their time without anyone making demands on them). We rediscovered simple pleasures like watching sunsets and playing card games. We realised we really could get by with very little stuff, and still today ‘need’ less stuff than we used to.
Privilege and humility
So perhaps the disappointment that stems from travel realities inevitably falling short of expectations is mitigated by the perks of unexpected interests and developments. But there is also a deeper effect: of better recognising privilege, which in turn begets more humility.
Fundamentally privilege means unearned social advantage. It abounds in many forms and cuts across many categories (like gender, race or class). And yet for many it is not obvious, often obscured by benefits mistakenly deemed to have been earned, like talent. Thus it has become convenient to label those less fortunate as lazy.
But it would be curious to suggest the same of the poor in the developing world. Indeed while trekking in the Amazon rainforest we witnessed human industriousness in its most basic form, from the manual construction of huts and boats to the carrying of food supplies on foot over long distances. Our conversations with locals revealed that, much to their regret and despite life-long toil, they had barely set foot outside their home towns, let alone their countries. This was especially true of Cubans, who are deprived not only of the financial means but also the right to go abroad.
These moments quell prejudice and make unearned advantage in life all of a sudden highly salient. A fortuitous roll of a die meant that the traveller was born in a rich country where even modest earnings are enough to live off for months in the poorer countries that make up most of the planet. Recognising such privilege might lead travellers to further support endeavours to improve the lot of the worse-off. But at the very least it should make them compassionate and humble, appreciative of their luck and respectful of others less fortunate. Thus while we were often embarrassed to reveal the true extent of our travels to locals, we did our best to inquire about and understand who they were.
Travel also prompts recognition of privilege in the deeper sense of having the pleasure to be a witness to the marvels of human and natural ingenuity. At home, routine responsibilities and commitments are too consuming to notice such things. But the slow pace of travel affords the opportunity to embrace them, whether man-made — like the ancient citadel of Ciudad Perdida (‘the Lost City’) in Colombia — or natural — the craggy mountain peaks and electrifying lakes of Patagonia, the never-ending salt flats of Bolivia, or the majestic condors in flight over the canyons of Peru.
While diving off the coast of Little Corn Island in Nicaragua, from about twenty metres depth I stared up at the celestial glistening of the water at the surface as the sunlight ricocheted off the ripples and filtered freely through to reveal the kaleidoscope of colours and intricate designs of the corals and the fish flutter past with insouciance. Suddenly I was very far away from home, caught in a trance, awe-struck, as if brutally awoken to and at the same time humbled by the contingency of existence. Something similar occurred when contemplating the stars in the Atacama desert in Chile, or after hours of slog in the dark with an ice pick and crampons up Huayna Potosi, Bolivia (a mountain over 6000 metres altitude) to be greeted with sunrise washing over and illuminating the vast Cordillera Real above the clouds. But on those occasions I was also humbled by the infinitude and raw power of the stars and lofty peaks against my own transience, an insignificant speck in time and space — in short, the feeling of the sublime. De Botton puts it best: “Beside all these, man seems merely dust postponed.”
Experiencing and recording
These realisations perhaps do not occur as easily to all travellers, though. Some are too busy taking photos — indeed scarcely a traveller today sets off without a camera. It has become the sine qua non of travel. Many now also complement it with a GoPro video camera or even, god forbid, a selfie-stick.
As a tool to visually record moments and create visual art, a camera is unparalleled. And there is much pleasure to be had in viewing and sharing these time and again. But the itch to snap can make travel deviate from a set of moments experienced to an exercise in recording moments, which are as a result only quasi-experienced. This is blatant in places like Machu Picchu, the Iguazu Falls or before the statue of Christ the Redeemer, where throngs of camera-wielding and selfie-stick-brandishing tourists jostle for the best vantage point. Once the photo is taken they move on; there is no longer a need to further view the subject — it is already forever captured. The maxim of photographer Garry Winogrand comes to mind: “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed”.
The temptation to record is compounded by the temptation to publish the recorded moment — on Facebook, Instagram or personal blogs. The value of both the photo and the publisher can then be conveniently evaluated and confirmed via the number of ‘likes’. Thus travel becomes an exercise in performance and self-aggrandisement, in which the traveller is a privileged itinerant recorder-publisher to an audience of hapless desk-job workers, who jealously swoon at the traveller’s exploits. At its most extreme this results in the curious notion that the traveller hasn’t really experienced things or been at locations unless he or she has recorded and published ‘evidence’ to social media as ‘proof’ — “pics or it didn’t happen” goes the motto. And yet even these are no more real, as they can be best described as what historian Daniel Boorstin coined ‘pseudo-events’: carefully choreographed and premeditated happenings that are staged to appear spontaneous.
I am far from immune to these temptations: I ruined a spectacular sunset on the shores of Lake Titicaca, Peru by striving for the best photo of it while it disappeared. Nonetheless, the urge to capture fleeting moments of joy or beauty and share them is human. Friends and family might quite legitimately demand to see photos as a heartwarming, if inferior substitute for the traveller’s absence. And an event can often be so fascinating by its novelty that it seems essential to record in order to better understand.
So it would be rash to throw out the camera altogether. The key thing, it seems, is to take measures to ensure we prefer the experiencing to the recording of moments, like learning the right time to take the camera out and put it away. Thus a perfect sunset and an imperfect photo is to be preferred over the perfect photo of a missed sunset.
Words and rules
A more laborious way to record travel moments is in words. Prior to our trip friends of ours, another couple of seasoned travellers, advised that we take up a blog to stave off an inevitable drop in sharpness of the intellect resulting from months of less than serious application.
But many thorny questions arose: How could we write anything that hadn’t been written before? Was it going to be just another one of those blogs — thinly veiled self-promotion? Would it be anything more than platitudinous enumerations of our activities — “and then we did this, and it was great, and then we did that, and that was great too”? Who was the target audience? How often would we have to update it and how much of a drag would that be on travelling? If so many other blogs seemed to fail mid-way through, why would ours be any different? How would we fairly combine my partner’s personal impressions, which she would best express in German, her mother tongue, with mine in English? Weren’t there other equally intellectually stimulating but less taxing pursuits? Would anyone read it anyway?
And we would have been far from the only travel bloggers — while a travel blog might have appeared creative to those at home, it was almost commonplace among other backpackers. The hundreds of professionally designed commercial blogs, all hungry for advertising clicks, all purporting to tell better than any other what the “trick to [insert landmark]”, also act as a stinging reminder of the mediocrity of your own blog.
So I wasn’t convinced of its merits until we underwent an absurd rigmarole in trying to hire a car in Havana, whose farcical twists I decided “just had to be written down” (while sitting in the back of said car — a rusty Chinese Geely — dodging potholes and careening down an almost empty highway en route to the cigar fields of Viñales). Thereafter I seized upon the blog as a personal exercise in understanding and investigating details of memory, including all kinds of impressions, perceptions and feelings, and attempting to capture them sincerely, without embellishment or ambiguity, in words. My partner would write in German and I in English and we soon derived much enjoyment from contrasting our differing accounts and emphases.
Critical to this investment was the realisation that the blog was bound by no rules — we had only ourselves to answer to. If not, the risk was that the audience dictate travel rather than the travellers; that the blog become the sole end of travel as ‘travel-performance’; and that, as with cameras, recording moments take priority over their experience. Instead, a blog is best considered primarily as a diary to aid future reminiscence, a window into a past self, which the traveller is free to write at length in on some days and leave aside on others, and makes no presumptions about, but is pleased to hear of, any readership. As William Zinsser cautioned in On Writing Well: “Never be afraid to write about a place that you think has had every last word written about it. It’s not your place until you write about it.”
Globalisation and authenticity
The Prussian geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt wrote prolifically about his exploration of Latin America at the turn of the 19th century — he was perhaps one of the first bloggers for the region. But his experience would have been vastly different from ours. His abilities to deal with the unknown would have been defied and his sense of exploration ignited.
Technology has now changed all of that. GPS does away with paper maps and getting lost. Ubiquitous wireless internet enables constant communication with friends at home (instead of new ones, perhaps). Booking.com and Airbnb allow accommodation to be booked without hassle or much knowledge of local languages. TripAdvisor precludes personal investigation and hard choices about worthy activities. Uber makes navigating local transport systems obsolete.
The Latin America seen by Humboldt would have also been highly uncertain but refreshingly different from Europe. Now globalisation, along with the pre-packaged make-sure-you-don’t-miss-ism that is the hallmark of tourism, have neutralised uncertainty at the price of freshness. Travel is thus increasingly commodified, uniformised, sterilised, banalised. Cafes and restaurants catering to Western tastes obviate culinary adventurousness. Overpriced English-language “guided” sightseeing tours jampack as many hastily explained visual curiosities and five-minute photo breaks from safe vantage points into the shortest space of time. Comfortable air-conditioned buses with fully reclining chairs, on-board service and entertainment insulate travellers from troubles and contact with locals. Global guidebooks like the Lonely Planet decree where value lies in their ‘top-ten highlights’ and hackneyed cliché-laden descriptions smelling of real-estate advertisements, in which all hills are rolling, mountains rugged, squares stately, cottages quaint, and views breathtaking. (Zinsser aptly coined travelese to describe “a style of soft words which under hard examination mean nothing.”)
The pressures for commercial success seem to lead less well-endowed regions and their hostels to create hitherto non-existent tourist experiences to compete for custom. Some, such as ‘volcano boarding’ in Nicaragua, elicit scepticism first but turn out extremely rewarding. But others seem little more than the result of someone’s decision that they be marketed as tourist-worthy, much like Marcel Duchamp’s public urinal the Fountain suddenly became art by putting it in a New York gallery. Thus if enough hostels list “getting up at 4am to watch people dig holes and fill them then go back to bed” as a popular activity, it might just catch on.
Achieving authentic travel experience, getting ‘off the beaten’ path — to paraphrase an unfortunate shibboleth — has therefore become harder. That so many other travellers are hoping to do the same — perhaps spurred on by so-and-so’s travel blog’s latest selection of ‘little known gems’ or ‘undiscovered secrets’ — exacerbates things. Thus like any non-conformist movement off-the-beaten-pathism succeeds in destroying its reason for existence, as the unbeaten path becomes the new beaten path. The northernmost point of South America, Punta Gallinas in Colombia, a dazzling desertscape touted by many a blog as an ‘end-of-the-world’ paradise, seemed to be befalling such a fate — an unlucky victim of its success, as made apparent by the horde of backpackers accompanying us.
Indeed the number of people we share travel experience with seems decisive: one or a few companions make it better, as with the cinema or theatre. But too many tend to detract from it; it becomes more like a school excursion. There is no better sign of the uniformisation of travel (or unimaginativeness of one’s travel plans) than running into the same backpackers over the course of a couple of months following the very same trail, the gringo trail, as we did on several occasions.
In Latin America other tourists are perhaps best avoided by going to those countries least endowed with famous natural landmarks, like Paraguay or the Guianas (French Guiana, Suriname and Guyana), as a couple of our travel companions did with great success. With a little bit of daring and creativity though, fresh travel experiences can be had without straying too far. We chose to take a boat up the Amazon from Colombia to Peru rather than go via Ecuador, for instance. We returned from Machu Picchu not via the overpriced train from the village at the base of the citadel, Aguas Calientes, but instead — and strictly against the recommendation of the Peruvian train officials — by walking 28km in one day alongside train tracks through stunning mountain gorges and valleys (many of which feature on the famed Inca Trail) to the nearest train station accessible by road, negotiating a taxi to a nearby village and from there another one back to Cuzco (but these routes will doubtless also be beaten paths in a few years).
Still, the paradox with the unfamiliar is that sometimes it is all too lacking in the very tourist infrastructure being escaped — as we discovered on the almost deserted Isla de la Juventud in Cuba. Or we simply miss the habitual comforts of home — good coffee, fast wifi, warm water. And thus we too were guilty of accelerating the slow displacement of foreign unfamiliarity with Western familiarity.
Status and competition
Not only has it become harder to authentically travel, but also to be an authentic traveller. This isn’t obvious until the initial encounters with other travellers, which tend to follow a recurring structure of questions. The first, innocuous enough, is “Where are you from?”. The following ones are almost invariably “How long have you been/will you be travelling for?”, “Which countries have you been to so far/Where will you go next?”. They are natural, well-meaning inquiries. But every so often they appear as thinly veiled challenges to outbid the duration or number of countries travelled. Even if they don’t, curiously people are almost apologetic about breezing through only one country and regard with awe those travelling to several continents over many months — the real travellers.
The subtle, perhaps unintended, one-upmanship sometimes manifests itself as the conversation progresses: “We couldn’t get more time off work so we are packing in as much as we can into these three weeks”; “Oh, that’s a shame” says the other, with a slightly affected tone of understanding, “We quit our jobs to travel around the world for a year”.
It is as if a new social pecking order had to be established to fill the void left by people’s jobs and incomes suddenly meaning nothing. (In fact 70-hour-a-week bankers and lawyers ‘giving it all up’ to ‘get back to basics’ are praised like recovering alcoholics in the travel community). That this is in effect a conversation among privileged makes it all the more absurd — “We couldn’t afford to buy the latest Ferrari so we had to settle for an older model” “Oh that is a shame”.
The notion of competition arises in some travellers’ race to see as much as possible in a given timespan, like ticking boxes off a laundry list. Often it seems more about getting things done (and showing others to be doing so) than doing them; about getting excited about the next thing rather than the current one; about submitting to others’ judgements about value rather than making one’s own; about preventing rather than encouraging the unexpected. John Ruskin, the English art critic, is instructive: “No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than man could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast.” The mistake they make is to believe that the value they will get out of Machu Picchu is precisely as the guide book describes, and to neglect the possibly greater value of a chance encounter of a local who shows the hidden side of town or tells a riveting story.
Then there are those who do the opposite and spend weeks or months in a far-flung Andean village, mixing with the locals and avoiding other backpackers. Ostensibly they are there to ‘get away from it all’, ‘find themselves’ and ‘reconnect with nature’. There are those who categorically refuse to go by plane, even if it means insalubrious 72-hour bus rides. There are those who are bent on getting from the northernmost point to the southernmost point, from the easternmost to the westernmost, from the lowest to the highest. Noble endeavours, but for whom do they pursue them? Themselves — or other people, status, clique membership? Is it to be able to say that they did it — but then why so much trouble to do something with the sole end of declaring its accomplishment? Isn’t it smarter to recognise crowd pleasing as futile — or simply lie? Or do they already lie to themselves? Perhaps the culprit is the need to have a great story on returning home: it is not acceptable for a long journey to be just ‘okay’ — it has to be the ‘best choice ever’, ‘life-changing’, ‘absolutely fascinating’.
Endlessly extending travel, months or years on end, presents other problems. Before long the defining cultural and historical traits, impressions, reasons for going here or there coalesce and dilute in one messy haze; South America was ‘just great’ they might say– but is the accent in Bogota different from in Cartagena; does the pisco in Peru or Chile taste better; is Montevideo really just a smaller Buenos Aires? The value of each additional place visited tends to decrease: the tenth cyan alpine lake or white-washed colonial town doesn’t quite have the same sheen or splendour as the first. Eventually a few finicky existential questions boil to the surface: What is there really to be gained from seeing this umpteenth country? What fresh insights about the world do I stand to reap? Don’t I have enough photos of people wearing traditional dress? Haven’t I seen enough mountains, fields, forests, beaches, towns? What, if anything, am I providing of use to the world now? Is it, just maybe, time to go home?
Return and reminiscence
Paradoxically, it appears part of successful travel is knowing when to stop. Indeed maybe travel is only good until the traveller has forgotten what it’s like to not travel. We actually began to look forward to going home as it go drew nearer. Whether this arose from travel weariness and home sickness or simple mental preparation is unclear — the mind adjusts well to forgone conclusions.
Blogs talk of gloom that sets in once the reality of home with its routine drudgery crystallises. This didn’t befall us, though. What helps stave it off is beginning something novel, like a job or place to live. But memories help most. It fascinates me that my recollection of our travels are much richer than the months that directly preceded and followed them. It is revealing of the nature of memory: we remember more vividly novel and emotional experiences over routine and mundane ones. We often remember better our feelings at precise moments than objective details. Indeed at times I made notes of happenings to be later expanded upon in the blog lest I forgot, only to later realise they weren’t needed: my memories of each day were as vivid as ever.
The reservoir of reminiscences can be a source of joy over the course of a lifetime. Inevitably the hardships will be papered over — as the pithy aphorism of Paul Theroux recalls “Travel is only glamorous in retrospect”. But this is true of the memories of happy people in general: they have difficulty recalling the bad times.
Yet while they may remain intact, opportunities to access them may be more fleeting over time. Photos play a role here of course — but only a limited one, as anyone who has felt estranged from their former selves in childhood photos would know. The hope is that the blog, on the other hand, with its narrative that runs a thread through the photos and revisits my impressions and feelings in words, will plunge me right back into the dread of the dank alleyway in Santa Marta, the roar of the samba hall of a favela in Rio de Janeiro or the serenity of the ripples on Lake Nicaragua.
For this reason, still today we are determined to complete the blog (with a somewhat diminished zeal) despite returning home months ago (it could not be done in the process of, and thus at the expense of, travelling). It is a testing exercise of diligence and self-control for which the pay-offs occur much later, like saving up or dieting. We write not for ourselves but our future selves, in the hope they will be grateful.
On top of newfound life-interests and humbleness, then, perhaps what makes travel so valuable is its elongation in the mind. Beyond the experience itself, there is considerable joy both in anticipation — ‘beforejoy’ or Vorfreude — and in reminiscence — ‘afterjoy’ or ‘Nachfreude’ (although this word does not exist in German). Part of me wants to close this episode and move on to more practical endeavours, whatever they may be. But whenever I look back or revive moments with my partner over dinner, another part of me wants to eschew the routine and relive that same cycle of anticipation, experience, and reminiscence.
Where will we go next? Asia, Africa, Antarctica? …
