“To travel is to discover everyone else is wrong about other countries”
Aldous Huxley
One of my biggest frustrations with our world is strongly held views that can’t be altered. If one of our politicians (having considered the facts, taken advice and listened to opinion) were to change their mind, they would be quickly labeled spineless, weak and indecisive.
We don’t learn anything by talking, we only learn by listening, and when we do, we should consider what we’ve heard and adjust our opinions accordingly. To hear a well-argued, opposing view from someone with more knowledge on a subject than you, and still believe you’re right — that surely is madness.
But madness runs fast and free on our little molten-cored rock at the moment.
Consider the quote at the top of this article.
It’s certainly not a new one (Aldous Huxley died in 1963) but it has done the rounds on social media lately. Quotes like this are staple of ‘motivational travellers’ on Instagram and are normally to be found superimposed on some high-resolution landscape photo.
A quote like this could easily have come from one of our ‘I know best’ politicians, patronising the other side of a polarised argument and not looking for common ground.
But was it meant to be as accusatory as it sounds?
We’ll never know the author’s true intent, but in my opinion it’s not to be taken literally. To suggest everyone could be wrong about other countries is clearly a provocative statement, but even the most opinionated of writers couldn’t have meant it as a factual one.
What was he suggesting they were wrong about?
The people?
The food?
The politics?
The places?
There’s alot to disagree on here, and it seems unlikely two different people would hold exactly the same views.
Despite the tone, it does resonate with me on one level.
I have already come out in protest against people who are nostalgic about ‘the real’ in travel. The real Paris, the real Thailand, the real Iceland. Newsflash guys, it’s all fucking real. Just because you don’t like it, or it’s not the way your remember it doesn’t make it unreal.
Things change.
Mr Huxley would seem to agree with that point.
The thing is about travel (and life in general) is that it changes. Change is life — the sooner you realise and embrace it, the happier you’ll be.
So let’s re-work that quote a bit.
How about:
“To travel is to discover no two people will ever have the same experience of one place”.
Yes it’s a bit more corporate bullshitty, but I feel it gets closer to making this quote work.
It’s that uniqueness that truly makes travel exciting.
One person, one day, one place …
...one hundred million (and possible more) variables.
Take the person.
A mixed up mess of emotions, experiences, memories. No two are the same. We will all experience a place with the baggage we carry around with us. The busker playing a tune in People’s Square, Split might take me back to a time and place that instantly makes me smile. The location will then be forever etched in my memory as having an association with that song. For you it might not. (If you’re interested, that busker was playing Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol).
Or the day.
It might rain, or be blisteringly hot. It might be a national holiday or the day of a riot. My memories of our first trip to Barcelona include turning off a side street right into The National Day of Catalonia celebrations. The city filled with yellow and red, street performers, chants — an intensity that a normal day just wouldn’t have had. I was hungover as hell, but I couldn’t fail to enjoy the spectacle, even if the noise had the same impact as an axe to the skull.
Or the place.
The planet has changed rapidly is the last few hundred years, but even the difference from decade to decade can be extreme. Visit Mostar in the 1990s and you’d see a very different city to the one in front of you now. The Zimbabwe I visited as a kid was tense, but safe. Large parts of the last two decades have made it a place from which most travellers would steer clear. Then there are the real explosions of growth such as Dubai, which has transformed from a desert to a modern city in just 50 years.
You could go on even further, and suggest that even the same person will never have the same experience of a place. Hell, I only noticed this week that there are murals on the side of the bridge at the railway station in my hometown (I have used this station four times a week for over a year!).
So maybe Aldous was trying to be a tad provocative, but the more I read the quote, the more I believe he was on to something.
It’s not about everyone being wrong, but it’s about finding out if they are.
The reason I travel is to learn and discover stories but, more than anything, to see things with my own eyes.
Flick through all the photos of Angkor Wat you want, but it’s not until you go that you realise its size, the detail of the bas-reliefs, the smell of incense blowing through ancient corridors or the humidity that the gets held inside the huge sandstone buildings.
That’s the point.
That’s why we travel.
So maybe everyone else isn’t wrong…
…but you certainly won’t know until you find out for yourself.
