“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”- Blaise Pascal
I’m a travel planner. Or, should I say, I used to be. Because, Covid. Before you ask- I plan the type of trips that you can’t book on the internet (usually because these places are so remote an online booking function would never work), have cultivated enough relationships to make you feel like you’re getting an insider experience and generally put together itineraries so logistically intensive it’s just easier to simply let someone else handle it.
I love my job; keeping up with the latest luxury lodge opening, making that last remote frontier accessible to luxury travelers and designing itineraries I aspire to be the envy of every other traveler that’s not my client. And let’s not forget the extensive travel I get to do in the name of work.
At its most intensive I would have enough time in between two 10-day trips to just about get my laundry done before packing and heading back to the airport again (my #humblebrag in those days).
Falling asleep to the sound of hooves thundering past your tent and waking up to the tracker telling you that a leopard was chasing a herd of gazelles right by your tent the night before. Waking up to snowy slopes in the Burmese Himalayas or thundering down steppes with Kazakh eagle hunters.
I enjoyed it all- the hours spent in airports, the few seconds of not knowing where you are in the world each time you wake up in a foreign bed and the disorientation and confusion when you finally wake up in yours.
But as with any industry, there’s a certain one-upmanship. “Where did you last go?” “When was your last trip?” and the all-time favourite: “Where are you going next?”, sometimes barely a week from my last trip. People in my social circles ask the same questions, creating a pressure, both social and professional, to keep travelling.
It took some time before I came to these two conclusions:
- The only people I should be travelling for are the clients and myself.
- After a certain time spent recce-ing new destinations, client interests are better served by you staying grounded and focused on the product.
It was during this relative downtime of taking a step back from intensive travel that I began to see the cracks in the facade of the travel industry- the human zoos of ‘exotic tribes’, the promise of first contact, the self-serving nature of voluntourism and the fact that very little of the tourism dollar actually reaches the locals. I looked for ways and like-minded operators who are working to change this dynamic.
But, at the risk of downplaying these problems, I recognise that the adventure /exotic travel category is but a small subset of the larger tourism sector. Tourism, as a whole, has grown to be unsustainable and damaging to the environment. We *know* this but even people willing to give up meat for reasons of conscience are more reluctant to give up their holidays. In the age where travel is accessible to everyone, nobody wants to give up that entitlement.
During this travel ban we get the luxury of reassessing our attitudes to travel.
1. You should travel because you want or have to, not to satisfy the expectations of other people.
2. We need to stop thinking of weekend trips involving plane rides as a status symbol.
3. And start considering if we really need to make that business trip.
4. Spread out. No need to all flock to the same resorts and destinations. Mass tourism has destroyed entire ecosystems and bastardised local cultures whilst other under-the-radar destinations could benefit from the tourism dollar.
Travel in its exploratory ideal, builds character and puts things in perspective. It’s everything that every travel writer and Instagram influencer says it is put together and more.
But let’s not pretend that the most frequent form of travel- the all-inclusive holidays, the weekend jaunt- is anything more than a diversion for the rich.
Let’s not pretend that your trip to Antarctica is about raising awareness for climate change. Or that the labels- green, eco-friendly, sustainable- are anything more than band-aids to stem the conscience of the professionally woke.
Let’s be clear- there are many lodges out there built by those equally motivated by idealism and vision, that practice what they preach. Clean water for the entire village in undeveloped South East Asia, knowledge transfer and a return of land to indigenous populations in East Africa- that lodges like these exist is enough to make me believe that the net sum of travel can be positive.
There is no doubt that humanity will triumph over this virus, like the final episode of a Marvel franchise. I already see people making lists on social media of places that they will go to once the virus is over.
Let’s just hope that that list is a product of having come to terms with their conscience whilst sitting alone in their room.
