Is Travel Dead?

[tom]

Sometimes I see the ranks of backpackers waiting to go on their white water rafting experience, the tourists clicking away at the monuments and the guide books that create the reality the traveler is looking for and I wonder if travel is dead.

The locals all around the world ape the Hollywood movies, aspire to eat American fast food and wear Western brands. The old religious rituals and traditions hold interest only for the travelers tracking them down, hoping to fill a hole in their own culture while the locals are quite happy to trade their ancient medicine for Pfizer, their music for MTV.

Check out the passion for something like Sufism in the West, the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz claiming millions of readers – yet head to Iran, Pakistan or Turkey and Sufi traditions only survive amongst the older people out in the sticks. Until Sufism meets Multimedia it’s unlikely to flourish again in its places of origin.

Or how about the romantic image of the Bedouin roaming the deserts with their camels, crossing the hypnotic dunes and living on dates and camel milk as in Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands ? A far cry from the Bedouin of today who hang on precariously around the edges of the cities, many of whom only head to the desert to smuggle drugs, guns and prostitutes…

The world is no longer a romantic playground for our adventures that might be navigated in 80 days. It’s a mixed up, over-populated place where traditions and technology and immigration overlap in the kind of sticky collage that only a blind artist could create. The travel industry sells the romantic images to the tourists and the travelers soon find that there’s a whole world behind the cliches that doesn’t match our two-dimensional expectations.

And nor should it.

Travel is about discovering this world as it is, not as we imagine it. And though the days of adventurers like Richard Burton are gone, there’s still plenty of opportunity to explore – in fact, travel is now all around us.

A few weeks ago I got talking to a Sudanese guy I met in the street in Tel Aviv and discovered that he’d just been released from jail for crossing the border illegally from Egypt. He was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war. I took him around town to show him where the cheap markets were and when we came down to the beach he paused in wonder.

It was the first time in his life he’d ever seen the ocean.

I grabbed some friends that evening and we went along to jam with a community of newly-arrived Sudanese and Eritrean refugees, dancing and singing and hearing stories that touched us to the core.

Travel will never be dead once we understand it’s all around us, whether at home or on the road. It’s not about how many bus journeys we endure or temples we visit, it’s about opening our eyes and finding ways to interact and communicate with those around us. Only then can we transcend our own personal worlds.

And what else is the point of travel?

[ohio]

nice post, man. Yeah, travel is far from dead, and if you've got the balls, there's still alot to be explored.

[jim]

It might just come down to how far you'll let yourself go.

The mindset of snap-snap-click-click I'd better get a photo as I'll never see these things again isn't so hard for me to understand in your average tourist. And I happen to like the fact that I can grab a Lonely Planet when I need to know how if I can get from Rio Dulce to Livingston in Guatemala in less than a day.

The travel you seem to describe, though, Tom is the travel of the mind beyond its usual limits of group identity. I don't think it's that it was so different 200 years ago - even then you'd have boatloads of tourists visiting the Pyramids, but the real travelers have always been the ones who left the safety of their own - like Richard Burton.

I believe that today there are groups of people who not only speak a different language but who are so radically different in mindset that it's still possible to have an old-fashioned 'Bedouin' experience, and I don't mean a LP-style hill tribes of Thailand tour. For instance, the mainland Chinese are an example of a people whose educational differences are such that even were they to speak fluent English you wouldn't get what they were saying. The real art of the traveler then is to have the patience to discover and connect with such groups of people - I'm reminded of someone I met who spent months as a fisherman in a small village in Laos.

And to be the last person on Earth, to travel the mountains and forests and jungles would be enough for me. There is majesty even in solitude.

[Ali Baba]

Travel used to be an alternative lifestyle for those who didn't fit into the consumer-capatilist system.

Those who left their countries had to endure culture-shock, unpalatable food, uncomfortable journeys, boredom and loneliness regularly. But they gained insight into different cultures and themselves.

It's nice to be able to carry a phrasebook to aid communication but I feel much of the adventure and free-spirited aspects of travel are lost if I carry a guidebook or hang out with other treavellers.

[ohio]

Travel isn't dead. Just because some places are overtouristed doesn't mean that you can't have weird experiences there or find new ways of looking at the world. I hitchhiked across Thailand a couple of years ago, and even in that country that is so full of foreigners I had a huge variety of strange experiences, from sleeping next to a statue of the king in a remote village to drinking blood soup with locals to getting groaped in a bar in Bangkok. With all that going down I rarely found myself talking with foreigners, but rather living my life in almost complete isolation... Khao San Road is the loneliest place I've ever been, i think. The point is that it doesn't matter where you are, a journey can change you

[Ali Baba]

Judging by the number of times I suffer culture shock I'd say travel is far from dead although I don't carry guidebooks, follow the backpacker trail or travel with other tourists.

Many gap years involve exporting ones current lifestyle to another country.