I figure people like Maureen and Tony Wheeler would think I’m soft. Those two are the founders of Lonely Planet, the ubiquitous (and now completely changed) travel guide company. I relied on one of their earliest guides — India, 1981 — to get through travels in that byzantine labyrinth of a country back in 1982-83. Maureen and Tony did the trip without a guide, documenting The Hippie Trail, a truly epic overland adventure that went from London to Istanbul, across Iran and Afghanistan, and ended in Bangkok or maybe Goa. Reading Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar gave me the wanderlust to undertake part of this route, Lonely Planet in hand. I have recently been mining my memories of those travels for stories, about the time my travel companion and I got stuck in a small town in Greece, about the ridiculous walk we took over the Himalayas, about sleeping in bomb shelters in Israel during the first days of the war between Israel and Lebanon.
The narrative about independent travel at the time was one that I heard from other travelers on the road, only. In our hotel in Cairo, a place where the halls were lined with so much furniture that you could redesign your room at whim, there were two English guys who had their jeep commandeered by rebels in the Sudan. In Cyprus, there were more down on your luck English, guys who were lugging cement for holiday home construction companies. Information was thin, everyone had stories but rarely any useful details. Fellow travelers traded paperback novels, drank beer, and sometimes, went to grab a meal together. We talked about where we’d been and where we were going next and if we met again — like I did with the guys in Cairo, perhaps six months later — it was a huge surprise.
I do not remember thinking that my travel was hard, but when I mentioned that I’d been trekking in Ladakh in 1982, a younger traveling friend said, “What on earth made you think to go there, then? For that time, it’s like going to the MOON.” I had read The Man Who Would be King by Rudyard Kipling and I had this idea about traveling some very high mountain ground. The Khyber Pass was out, we knew that Soviet skirmishes with the US backed Mujahideen would make traveling there difficult, so we crossed into India from Pakistan and then went up into Ladakh, which was safe enough, and probably recommended in the 1981 Lonely Planet guide. Things sucked from time to time, I had travelers gut often, I’m sure was tired and fed up with the trials of being a very young woman traveling in the Arab world, but until I got quite ill, I don’t have any recollection of thinking, “This is too hard, I’m going home.” The guidebook was a good companion, it never steered me wrong.
This morning, I had the misfortune to read yet another profile of a highly paid professional who quit her job to travel the world. Said highly paid professional is no longer traveling and is now married to a man who owns a software development company. She is raising a child, and practicing law again. Reductive thinking immediately kicked in. “Well Paid Professional Takes Very Long Vacation,” is how I mentally rewrite these headlines. “Of course you quit,” said my not often outspoken mate, when I showed him the article. “You made six figures. Whatever. I’d quit too.”
But rather than veer into a rant about exceptionalism, this time I wondered about Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s era of travelers and what they would make of the current generation that follow the road they helped pave. And I can’t help but compare the wired, easy way they seem to travel compared to my early adventures.
Even while using the Internet to tell these stories, the online publishers — this one was on the BBC — present them as bold and brave and risky, as though we don’t live in a globalized world where it’s easy to connect to your clients, your employer, if you’ve got one, back at your home base. “Area Man Discovers Internet is Global,” I think, in an Onion-esque vernacular. Travel seems so easy now, even to the most exotic of places. There are cell phone towers in the Serengeti, I connected to upload photos from my very low budget safari camp. We didn’t have ice, but we had Internet.
But rather than get bogged down “When I started traveling, it was always winter and no one spoke English and you had to stand in line at the post office to get ten minutes on a bad connection just so you could tell your mom you’re not dead yet and then, pay $67.00 for the privilege” thinking, this latest round has led me to wonder: What’s next? What are the always connected, work anywhere, generation of travelers going to say about the people that follow them?
Besides, of course, get off my lawn. I got that covered.
They’re going to say, “We actually had to *travel* to go places, not like that virtual reality you kids have today!”
I don’t remember thinking travel was “hard” 20+ years ago either, it just was. Whatever we had to do; send post cards and letters, use traveler’s checks and exchange money, carry actual books, wait in line to use an international phone, it was all part of travel. Now we’re annoyed when the wi-fi isn’t working. I don’t think technology takes away from the experience, but yes, it changes it.
And really, if I never see one of those “I quit my job to travel the world” articles, it will be too soon.
You had guidebooks. Airplanes. Telephones.
“Easy” is relative and I’m sure when you traveled there were people who were your age now complaining about how you didn’t have to travel by steamer and letters didn’t take 6 months to get home.
I’ve never understood why harder is better.
I honestly believe that we are living in a Golden Age of travel right now. It has never been easier to see the world, and that is a good thing.
I’m sure every privileged person in their age thought they were in the Golden Age of [fill in the blank.] I don’t think harder is better either, did I imply that?
That whole “letters six months” thing is what I’m curious about, Gary. What will the next generation of travelers say was hard? It won’t be communication and it won’t be logistics. So what WILL it be? That’s what I’m asking.
If somebody ever invents a practical transporter a la Star Trek, we’re either saved or screwed as a species. Probably both.
A golden age of holidaying perhaps and regardless of the label, travel was always harder yesterday.
What’s next? Virtual travel.
Totally immersive headsets — bodysuits even — so you can enjoy a large part of the experience of exploring the Okavango Delta without leaving your living room — hell, don’t get off the couch.
With an enabled full body suit you could feel the breeze, the splashes of the water, the people bumping into you in the market (and lifting your wallet – oh wait the tech provider beat them to that) — NatGeo Channel on steroids. Is the tech really that far away for this?
This would allow many people to travel without getting out of their PJs, could relieve pressure on fragile developing destinations and, if done right, siphon a portion of the fee (yes grab your wallet back) to support sensible development in said body of water.
These people could stay in their home country (something some travel snobs like me may rejoice at a little), keep their jobs and so on and just go get a Balinese traditional rubdown over their lunch break.
It sounds far fetched, but during my pre internet poste-restante queues in India, getting mail from my Mum on a hand phone (a hand what?) seemed far fetched too.
Stuart, you and Katrina are in the same mindset, I guess. “Kids today. When I was young, we had to actually go places, literally move our bodies there. (Also, literally meant literally, you little ungrateful so and so.)”
P0rn is the great disrupter, right? As soon as they get it right, it’s ripe for transition to travel.
And after paying said $67, you calculated (in your head, not on your smartphone, or heaven forbid not on a pocket calculator because that took up too much space and weight and you might have to ditch that meaningful shell you picked up on the beach in Matala in honor of Joni Mitchell) that at your allotted overland budget of $5 a day, you’d just spent 13 days of travel. Meaning said phone call just cut short your travels by nearly 2 weeks. At least said mom knew you were alive, sigh.
You totally saved this article with your last paragraph. 🙂
I think that travel will be always evolving. Yes, we have it much easier these days, but people are still pressing frontiers, and still having adventures. I prefer mine to be of the more emotionally self-challenging variety, but I’m not above physical challenges as well.
The bottom line is that travel is always good. It makes people better world citizens. If you share this with others, all the better.
Coyote
Actually, you make an interesting point about emotional frontiers, Coyote. I’m not sure what those are, exactly, but I suppose give that geopolitical frontiers are so easily crossed nowadays, the emotional ones are the more challenging.
“Oh yeah? You all were paying so much attention to the external difficulties of your travels, you barely paid any attention to your own hang-ups. You might have gone some places, but you might as well have stayed put for all you evolved.” Kids will say that to travelers of my ilk, perhaps.
I didn’t first go abroad until 2006. So, in the last 9 years I have amassed these that I bust out on occasion in the right setting:
-When I first started travelling, you couldn’t even use a cell phone abroad, you had to go to a convenient callshop to call home!
– You know, I had to go to the internet cafe to e-mail and Skype my family, now people just sit in their hotel bed and do it!
– When I met someone on the and I wanted to meet back up with them again, I had to swap e-mails, now you just become Facebook friends right then and there!
– I wouldn’t have even known where to start to rent an apartment in a local neighborhood off the internet, there was no such thing as Airbnb!
Maybe these suck actually, but I think the point I am making is that revulsion of how easy people have it now is always changing and this should give you a hint of what is coming down the line. I imagine the crew that “broke free of the cubicle” will moan that too many people are taking their freelance jobs and their apartments in Chang Mai nowadays.
That’s my point too, Scott. That what’s easy next — well, who knows what it’s going to be? As a person who’s been freelancing for 15 years already, I’d say the shark has jumped on the “freelancing from Chiang Mai” crowd, though they do like to think they invented it.
I think you’ve touched upon something deeper here Pam, and that is that communication collapses distance. I was recently in Guam — a speck in the middle of the Pacific — and yet I felt (almost) just as tied to my employer and my daily life as if I were in DC. That impacts the travel experience hugely. As you have documented well here on NEV, travel is as much an internal experience as an external one. But if our mindset never changes, if our way of functioning is the same no matter which border we cross, then a huge part of the experience of a place is lost, in my humble opinion. I won’t pretend that I don’t use Yelp to find local joints, check Google maps to occasionally get my bearings, or benefit from being able to make travels arrangements from my phone; some of that certainly enhances my access to places that I otherwise would never have seen. But I admit that it distracts from the full absorption in a place. The next generation may travel more easily and to farther reaches than we could have thought, but what the experience will mean to them is the question.
I remember being in Ladakh – in Turtuk which is fairly remote even for Ladakh – and people were asking me about the latest US news and reality TV drama. The world is quickly changing. We increasingly watch the same TV, read the same Internet, and act similarly. The IT professionals I met throughout Africa had lives that were basically identical to my IT life in the US.
Which leads me to two realizations;
– Value of travel is quickly disappearing. It is mostly entertainment these days. Let’s get drunk with other foreigners on a Thai island.
– Sometime during my lifetime, most of the world will turn into a New Jersey suburb. The cultural differences are becoming very small.
“Sometime during my lifetime, most of the world will turn into a New Jersey suburb.”
Ouch. And I fear you might be right.
My first day in Nairobi, I went to the mall. While certainly there were fewer white faces than here in Seattle, I was immediately struck by how much like home it was. I wandered past a Starbucks-esque cafe where nicely dressed people tapped away on laptops. I cruised the snack aisles of a shiny supermarket with a juice bar. And I stared into the upholstered void of what could have been a Bed, Bath, and Beyond where two young women were squeezing throw pillows. This was my first day on the African sub-continent. It kind of freaked me out.
There were a lot of other things, of course there were. But globalized shopping culture was exactly the same as it was at home.