“Everyone wants to travel, but no one wants to be a tourist.”
– Bani Amor
This post is a bit of a hotch potch of thoughts about travel and place. Surface level observations and ideas which feels appropriate given you can never know a place deeply if you are only passing through. So follow me as we pass through a few topics about travel, tourism and place.
The journey
I could have chosen to include a cheesy image with some words about it’s the journey not the destination superimposed but I trust in the power of your imagination!
Obviously when we are thinking about travel, we are thinking about journeys, literal and metaphorical and these journeys change us. The expose us to new places with new sights, new sounds, new ways of seeing and being in the world and these inevitably transform us in some way, however small.
Buying sense of place
“Tourism is about the consumption of place. Like every other form of consumption, it is dependant upon brands… Majorca ad Amsterdam and Hawaii and New Zealand are brands, as much as Levi’s or Calvin Klein.”
– Scott Hamilton
One way of leaning into this idea of tourism as consumption of place is to consider spiritual tourism which, according to Amor, is “what happens when you take cultural appropriation on the road and call it a self-care journey.” The tourism she is talking of is white, rich, westerners travelling to south American to partake in ayahuasca or retreats to Thailand to engage in yoga or even “spiritual cruises” which seem to offer everything and nothing. Instead of colonising place, we are colonising ritual, beliefs and sacred practices. Picking and choosing what takes our fancy instead of committing to a particular path.
Just as consumption of ayahuasca or engaging in yoga in Bali are consumed as shortcuts to mystical experience, sublime spirituality or another life changing event, some versions of tourism are consumed as shortcuts to finding sense of place. You’ll note I say “consumed as”. I am not saying these are shortcuts. I don’t think there can be shortcuts in either case. But as we’re talking about place, it’s important to note that you build a relationship with place, it is not something that can be crossed off a checklist in a second. Without the work that the short cut evades, there can be no relationship, there can be no deep connection or understanding. Even if you buy into tours that offer a more authentic experience of place, you still cannot truly have that. It is not something available for tourists to consume as they pass through a place.
Travelling expands how we see and understand the world, ourselves and each other. And if we visit a place without learning about or leaning into the culture and the way of life of the inhabitants, can we really say we’ve visited? To visit without this, are we not just travelling around a museum of landscape and architecture? Moving from placeless space to placeless space? This is something that is particularly on my mind when I think of sites such as the pyramids, the taj mahal, anne franks house. These are often semi-museumified spaces, wrapped in cotton wool and kept frozen in time.
And the increased globalisation and uniformity of the world makes it easy to travel without engaging. You can go to a unique wondrous tourist site and pop into McDonalds afterwards. It is easy to see the sites without making much attempt at feeling the sense of a place. We will never, as passers through, get much of a sense of place, but it is worth the effort. The reward is that you feel you’ve known somewhere, even if it is just a little.
When I take photos, I try and get a glimpse of a different angle. Everyone else is taking a picture of the minster? Well, you’ll find me round the back looking at bricks or statues. This gives me a more intimate sense of the place, a more unique and personal experience. When I was at Angkor Wat before sunrise (not by choice), everyone was hustling and bustling to retake the iconic picture and in doing that they were missing the experience of being there. Knowing I couldn’t create that image any better than the million already online, I sat and watched the sun rise instead and then took my own, more personal photographs:
By happy coincidence, in today’s National Geographic newsletter there was an article about a photographer who takes the reverse photo at landmarks.
Looking back on my own travels, the places I’ve felt most connected to and enjoyed the most are those where I have spent more time and which have been smaller. I’ve been able to explore more thoroughly and had more time to sit and watch and talk and get to know the idiosyncrasies of the place.
Travel and belonging
We often think of travel as fun, enjoyable and something to aspire to, but for some people, travel is a way of escaping death. In a conversation between Porochista Khakpour and Alexander Chee in Bitch Magazine, they discuss forced travel.
“Your story of exile makes me wonder how we’re shaped by the trips we don’t get to choose.”
– Chee
Both are writers who have travelled and the article is looking at how travel has made them into the writers, and people, they are. They talk of trips which transformed them as well as trips taken with the intent of transformation and trips that didn’t really turn out the way they’d anticipated. The idea of travelling to figure out where we belong and how we fit into the world is another common theme.
“There are some trips that are actually about travelling inside, a journey you need to make in your own life that you can’t make if you stay in the place you live. The physical boundaries of our lives are also the emotional ones.”
– Chee
Alongside the idea of forced travel is the less dangerous but still unsettling travel that occurs without having a home base. To have somewhere to return to, to call home, offers stability and anchors travel. To travel without a home can leave us feeling untethered and insecure. There is a novelty in this but humans often crave both the adventure and the stable.
Leaving and returning
As humans, we are driven, in part, by a need to escape and paradoxically a need to belong. Exploration and novelty sit uncomfortably with our desire to know and feel comfortable.
“Amongst the great struggles of man, there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.”
– Salman Rushdie
“The lure of escape and wanderlust is just as deeply implanted as its polar opposite, the desire to anchor oneself in a particular place, to know and care for somewhere that isn’t just anywhere.”
– Alastair Bonnett
To know a place, it can be argued, we must leave. If we only ever know one place, how can we know what makes it unique, special, distinctive?
Feeling into the character of a different place highlights similarities and differences with the place we call home. Think about it in terms of people – we don’t do well if we have just one relationship, instead we have different people in our lives who fulfil us in different ways. We appreciate our sister’s kindness more because we’ve experienced our manager’s cruelty. It is like the concept that without light there cannot be dark. Can you have home if you have never left?
Travel gives us a break from our home ground and if you are lucky, when you return, you will refind and reappreciate those things that make it special to you. It is not quite the same, but having spent a while in hospital in the past year, coming back to my flat was so much more powerful than I could have expected. I’d forgotten how much I love my home, how great my bed is, how nice it is to have lampshades and tea in my favourite mug. All things I take for granted when I’m here day in day out. To leave and return reopens your eyes.
Illustration from Chambers Book of Days depicting a sow and her piglets being tried for the murder of a child. The trial allegedly took place in 1457, the mother being found guilty and the piglets acquitted.