Travel is Pointless
Hearing about how people travelled in the past often makes me think that going anywhere now is pointless, as we often appear to travel only to confirm sightings of things we've already seen on screen
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Sometimes it seems that all of this is pointless.
This week I’ve been watching Michael Palin’s original TV series, Around the World in 80 Days, which was first released in 1989 and so filmed in a time when everything about extensive global travel was a lot more difficult than it is today. He might have been backed by the BBC but seeing someone travel in that era reminds me that of how easy we have it to go to even the most remote places these days. Historically, one of the defining features of travel might have been that it was supposed to be a bit of a challenge, and much of that is gone now.
Flights are cheap, information is abundant, communication is instant and the entire world has been mapped out and placed in front of our eyes so that if we do get up and go look for it, none of it is even new or surprising when we actually get there. Instead of going to discover new things, we go to confirm for ourselves our expectations of things we’ve already seen, to tick boxes so we can display to others that we’ve done this, seen that, and know everything first hand.
“These days, young people want to collect experiences, not things”, so they say, as if this made them less consumerist than the people in those older days, not realising that the motivations for wanting to collect experiences – riding quad bikes in the desert outside Dubai, climbing to Everest Base Camp, standing at The Photo Spot above Machu Pichu, the one where everyone has to get their photo taken – are the same as many people’s motivations for buying expensive handbags, driving expensive cars and eating in expensive restaurants.
I’ve often wondered how people travelled before smartphones, acknowledging my own pathetic reliance on it as a navigational tool, booking assistant, dictionary and much more, perhaps less able to see clearly how not only does it make everything incredibly easy, but also makes the whole experience more rigid, more robotic, and a whole lot less purposeful – sometimes pointless, in fact.
Travel has always been a journey into the unknown, and even the most fastidious and anal of holiday planners wants to come home with some story of a totally random chance encounter with a stranger, a place of natural beauty, a dining experience that only they could have had, at that moment in time, in that place, with those people, and in a manner that could never have happened in their own home country, in the era they inhabit in time.
We know too much about where we’re going, and therefore itineraries are planned out to within an inch of their lives in advance leaving home. No more than our day-to-day lives, to plan our days and hours as such – before we’ve even stepped foot in the country for the first time! – is to strangle some of the soul of it, pre-birth.
There is the sad presence, always of someone who’s been everywhere, lined up and got their screenshot at ‘the place’, and done ‘the thing’ and ticked all the names off the places off the list, and yet has the air of someone who’s never been anywhere. With the ease and cost of international travel to once-remote places, there is little to differentiate us in these moments from someone who has saved up a few pay-checks to go in and buy a widescreen TV in the sales in Harvey Norman, or to queue up at Christmas to sit on Santa’s lap for an impersonal Christmas gift. All it takes is the mild effort of pressing a few apps and travelling on a few modes of pre-determined transport; and like the trip to Santa’s grotto, deep-down most involved know it’s all fake.
Things are supposed to go wrong. And in many cases, we shouldn’t even know what the thing we’re looking for is like in advance of actually seeing it. In reading accounts of travels such as Dervla Murphy and her bicycle trip to India in 1961, when medical treatments were still primitive, never mind communications technology, one wonders how much different such travels were in the past.
Now as we travel, real-time navigation and booking means we miss out on the opportunity to live a more instinctive and spontaneous life, surely a large part of the reason we leave our familiar environments in the first place. The planned itinerary of the journey shouldn’t be the purpose, even though it is – embracing this paradox and seeing each moment and choice of the journey as the potential beginning of the real journeys is the key to embracing adventure.
And there is an awful lot of the wisdom of innocence lost for use of the smartphone (though more like their necessity), for now it is a given, on the part of both ourselves and our would-be hosts, that we will be travelling through a mixture of online and offline modes of being. Bookings, reservations, taxis, looking things up and navigation by map are all assumed to be handled online, a smartphone as assumed an essential as the passport, and to not have one would not be an declaration of freedom, but an inconvenience for anyone dealing with us.
We grant ourselves the experience of experience, though when we travel like this, we float through distant lands as if in a dream world that we cannot touch or interfere with.
There are pros, of course, and the availability of the internet and the online mapping of the world means I’ve gone places and experienced things in the last decade that I might never have even known about in the past. Moving to live and work as a teacher in Vietnam, for example, was an experience facilitated almost entirely through online facebook groups – finding accommodation, jobs and things to do all done through rather informal social media. And once I’d navigated my way there, well… the experiences I had were not really diminished, nor was their surprise and impact lessened, by the fact that I had wi-fi or google translate, or had been able to research life in Vietnam on message boards in advance of taking what many still consider the batshit move to go and live there.
Life moves on and the world evolves, always, and it’s same, same but different.
Still, seeing and reading older accounts of foreign adventure does invoke much nostalgia for a time before I existed, and a desire to go off the beaten path when you do go somewhere next. It’s not just about going into the deepest jungle you can find. Just maybe making your way about life without the safety net, and more importantly, the blinkers (even, say, hikers in this day and age would recommend carrying a mobile phone over going without, health and safety etiquette and consideration for your family in the event of your demise aren’t going to ruin your attempts to ‘get away from it all’).
My Camino journey was one aided and recorded by technology, though there were plenty of times I rejected it and relied instead on instinct, the events of the day and human interaction to guide my way. I do have a great urge though to travel some great distance with little advance research, no phone or internet use and guided only by human connection and whatever happens on the road.
The pervasion of information in our lives through technology means we have so many facts about places we know nothing of, that it’s all noise, and to travel without technology would be an exercise in living without bias and the sort of modern intellectualisation that more often than not reduces us to idiocy.
We travel to live as fools, and our head and phone full of facts, answers and solutions blinds us to this fact, and distracts us from our mission.
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There is Nothing New Under the Sun
But sure who really cares? Life has always progressed, and it is merely a reflection of yourself if you spend too much time moaning about ‘kids these days’, especially if you are the kids these days, and you’re pining for a time before you were born, that you’ve never even known.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” – Ecclesiastes 1:9
This timeless quote from the bible was probably a cliché when it was written.
I’ve never claimed to be an adventurer. I’ve never sailed down the Amazon, or joined an expedition to the South Pole, or been to a war-torn country.
A horseback ride in outer Mongolia is entertainment to me, not warfare or even survival against nature.
You’re not competing with Ernest Shackleton, and it’s important to take people and places you meet as they are now. Plenty of fat fools took chartered trips to British Burma with not a smartphone in sight, having their arse wiped before they sat on the elephant, and surely everything so new as to blind them, and they’d have come home with nothing but contempt for those they found there, and themselves.
There is something patronising also about lamenting that people you come across are inauthentic for having been touched by the same progress you’ve been blessed with, for overly-romanticising somewhere just because no-one else has been there, or for resenting it because it’s not new.
And I suppose you have to remember that old things are filmed with a built-in nostalgia filter by virtue of their contemporary technology, retro-fitted with rose-tinted glasses by the passage of time.
“See that old film they used”, they say, we marvel.
“And listen to how we revere the past, the before times, before your times”.
When you’re not planning, tracking and tracing life through your phone or the lens of the modern graphic design emblazoning the shops you frequent and the products you spend all your time and money on, so iteratively sleek as to have flattened our faces and view of the world out into nothingness, if you turn off your phone and stop seeing life as an extended shopping trip, and people as fashion models with decade-defining outfits, whether peaked caps and waistcoats and jackets, or skinny jeans and leopard-print alpaca fleeces and white socks, life actually looks much the same as in the before times.
Focus on the faces, the air in the street, the spaces in between the details, the energy in the atmosphere. Even many of the shops and buildings are the same, with a pleasing layer of filth and grime splashed over them to make you feel like you’re in the good old days.
I’m not even talking about ‘going out in nature’ – sure half the bloody countryside is gone now, they took it from us, not to mention the fact that every other clown around you now is going on and on about going out in nature, God forbid you go out and find yourself running into one of them.
I mean that the energy of life itself remains eternal, hanging in what we still call the air, if you look into people’s eyes and shake their damn hands.
Look at the old, faded photos and then look up. And look back at the photos and realise that when you look up again, it’s all still the same. There was no filter over life back then, and the only filters now are the ones we place ourselves.
We have brainwashed ourselves into believing the past is a different, superior place. A foreign country, though the beauty of it is that a form of the pasts still exists, always, as long as you do – and you’ve been there too. Like any foreign place you’ve ever visited, time stays with you in ways that can never change.
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