I envy the globe trotters of old. Men and women who took boats up and down the Nile, Congo, and Amazon; who rode great trains of camels across the Sahara or Gobi deserts; who cut through dense rainforest in South America, Africa, Australia and South-East Asia with machetes. To them, to travel was to step into the great unknown, to forge a path where none before existed. Every land was the Undiscovered Country, every person met along the way was a new culture, and every experience was something new.
Where did that go?
When I travel, and when I think of travelling, all those connotations are gone. Today, if one wants to go to an exotic place we just pave to pay a few hundred dollars for a plane ticket and a tour package. If we want to meet strange peoples, we go to tourist centres where performers play their digiridoos, or bagpipes, or carved flutes, or dance a rain dance for a bunch of apathetic white people. Every experience sounds like something from a tawdry romance novel - "go to Fiji, go swimming with your ideal partner!" "Come to Australia, tan yourself on our beaches!" "America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave (and DIsneyland)" "Scotland! Come for the...rain, I guess? And hunt the wild Haggis!" Hotels! Tanning salons! Photo booths! Casinos!
We've romantacised travel for so long that all we have left of it is the romance. Where did we go wrong?
Where did that go?
When I travel, and when I think of travelling, all those connotations are gone. Today, if one wants to go to an exotic place we just pave to pay a few hundred dollars for a plane ticket and a tour package. If we want to meet strange peoples, we go to tourist centres where performers play their digiridoos, or bagpipes, or carved flutes, or dance a rain dance for a bunch of apathetic white people. Every experience sounds like something from a tawdry romance novel - "go to Fiji, go swimming with your ideal partner!" "Come to Australia, tan yourself on our beaches!" "America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave (and DIsneyland)" "Scotland! Come for the...rain, I guess? And hunt the wild Haggis!" Hotels! Tanning salons! Photo booths! Casinos!
We've romantacised travel for so long that all we have left of it is the romance. Where did we go wrong?
