Newsletter Number Eight
Back to surfing and a re-telling of the same old travel stories.
This week’s articles:
I’m sure you’ve all been hanging on the edges of your seats to find out when I can go surfing again (or maybe not); although I managed to get in the water I spent more time looking at the scenery and being grateful to leave the confines of town, as I got released back into the wilds of Mayo
This week’s travel piece is a reflection on the short week just over two years ago from which I managed to drag two months’ worth of stories out of. I’d noticed long before that my bike trips or holidays seemed to follow familiar patterns – and it turned out I was right, though certainly not original in the observation, or the experience.
Hi all,
Hope you’re all well and enjoying the build up to this unique Christmas, different to all others but potentially the same as every other week of the year now.
The only new place I’m going this week is Mayo. My bike trip in Vietnam has come to an end, so I’ve written an article trying to do no more than sum it up in retrospect. There’ll be more new places to visit soon enough.
The late travel writer Jan Morris once wrote:
“Now that nearly everyone has been everywhere, it might be thought that travel writers have lost their purpose… Ah, but what (foreign places) feel like is something else, and in a profounder sense the best travel writers are not really writing about travel at all.
They are recording the effects of places or movements upon their own particular temperaments—recording the experience rather than the event, as they might make literary use of a love affair, an enigma or a tragedy.”
The internet is full of travel blogs giving us lists and tips and tricks of things to do and see and eat and presumably fall in love with in the same way that the author has. I have written my fair share of them. My first non-self-published piece was a list of things to do in Hanoi, an ex-pat’s guide to a place I lived for several years. I’m happy with it, and feel it accurately represents a certain side of life in Hanoi for a foreign inhabitant or visitor.
But it is a series of lies. Factually accurate (I wouldn’t actually lie in anything I write), for sure, but the spirit of it is bullshit.
Although I did these things, and would recommend them to anyone who genuinely wanted to know a good place to eat or drink in Hanoi, or a place to visit that they might not otherwise have heard of or been drawn towards - the advice I would actually like to give would be to go there and find out for yourself.
I’ve tried before and since to write objectively about places, but I’ve always died a little inside doing so. I find it inhumane.
It reduces the experience, the whole purpose of travelling, to one of the rigidly objective, treats travelling and visiting places and life as a museum. Although I am a flaneur – a detached observer – at heart, there is a purpose of humanity to the flaneur and his observations.
The effect of travel blogging and Lonely-Planeting is to pre-define even day-to-day experiences as the correct, the best - or worst of all - the ‘only’ experiences worth having in a place, the only things worth seeing. To maintain perfect form, as it were, to not touch or damage anything by interacting with it. To treat a place and its people like a museum, to be studied, for intellectual entertainment and amusement. There are no people in the travel blogger’s world, including themselves; only salespeople, populations or crowds. Although they will tell you what ‘they’ love about a place, it is more what their camera loves, or what their employer or social media audience expects them to love.
Morris continues:
“It is not invention that you will find in these pages, but something subtler: the alliance of knowledge and sensation, nature and intellect, sight and interpretation, instinct and logic. It is more real than fiction, but more genuine than mere fact, too.”
I have no great advice to give anyone, whether about travel or anything else. I can only recount my experience. My travels have been painfully ordinary, often cliched - there is nothing more tedious than the one thousandth young 20-something westerner doing a motorbike trip from north to south Vietnam - though who am I to judge? I am one of those myself. Much travel has been inspired, fuelled by, and provided fuel for, social media over the last decade. And it has probably influenced more of mine than I care to admit as well. But that is why it’s interesting to me.
As Henry David Thoreau noted at the top of his masterpiece Walden:
“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”
I have studied human psychology objectively and scientifically, though I firmly believe that it must be studied subjectively also. To do so is the most useful way of understanding the world, or one particular side of it at least.
The first part of my story is done: a simple motorbike trip, a neat start-to-finish and cliched re-telling of the Hero’s journey. I want to show you what it actually feels like to visit Vietnam, or anywhere I go, of course, though also to capture the feeling of being a traveller itself, as it is impossible to have a truly objective experience of life or anything in it, if it is done with any sort of honesty.
This first part is aspirational. It is an Instagram post. The rest of it will not be so simple, nor perfectly realised.
Which isn’t to say this is going to be some sort of whistleblowing tale of filth and depravity and nihilism. No, it’s probably going to be more painfully ordinary than that. But that to me is the interesting part. As I’ve said before, travel is a celebration of the imperfection of life itself, it is not in the crazy stories but in the mundane events, the everyday, the people-watching, and journey itself – as is life. It is not about where you go, it is an ongoing relationship between yourself and the place in observe.
They say that wherever you go, there you are, and so it is with anything in life, including travel. And as I’ve discovered, far from being unique or special - my stories are the same as anyone else’s.
Fear not, for any of you who have been reading along so far will know that I tend to take an optimistic and overall positive view of life. I think the world is due some positive media for a change, so I’d like to contribute to that in some small way.
So let’s all see where we end up.
Thanks for reading and mind yourselves,
Gav
If you enjoyed this, then hit SubscribeNow for regular peace of mind, in email form. Essays, stories, blog posts and diary entries as I explore the west of Ireland, learn to surf, write philosophically about health and wellbeing, and reflect on how travel and our environment affect our minds. Completely free, zero spam.