Green IslandWhat's the Point of Travelling?
December 1st 2008 10:42
'Where are you going, David?' 'Oh I thought I'd pop out for a spot of Nietzschen transcendence.'
I did some research on the net regarding this question and I found two types of response: one was the standard, yawnable stuff about experiencing new cultures, meeting new people, trying different food, not working and so on. The other response was to treat travelling as some type of psychological condition to explain in terms of transference, Derrida, Lacan and Baudrillard.
This article is not going to be a litany of praise for travelling or a condemnation of a frivolous past time. Rather I’m going to explore some of the contradictions inherent in many people’s ideas about travelling. My aim is to take the middle road in my approach – I hope to avoid the un-traversable mountain paths of academia; but, at the same time I intend to travel a more challenging route than those taken by adolescent intellects that focus purely on the surface pleasures and find comfort in the caves of cliché about ‘experiencing new things’.
Best to start with some definition: what is travelling? Well obviously it’s that A to B stuff. It’s moving in space (or moving without dribbling). In a more useful sense it’s making a journey. It’s a journey different to the commute to work and longer than the trip to the corner shop to buy rizla. The journey has a purpose – it’s a trip for a variety of reasons. The reasons range from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the practical to the rarefied.
Sex tourism is for both men and women
An immigrant travels to find a better life, a bored husband goes on a ‘mancation’ to get away from his wife, smoke cigars and play golf. Some people travel for health – take the waters or get a cheaper operation or seek out alternative therapies (medical tourism). Some travel to experience beautiful places and some to experience beautiful bodies (sex tourism). Some travel to mark a time in their life or get pregnant (honeymoon/procreation vacation). Some folk go to see those great things from history such as the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids; others travel to promulgate ideas such as missionaries and revolutionaries. Others risk their lives tramping to obscure spots to bring home knowledge (Dr Livingstone) or wealth (Cortes). In a similar vain some travel to further their nation’s colonial ambitions (Columbus and Marco Polo). Many move to get out of the way of conflict (displaced persons); to avoid persecution or simply to get over a broken heart.
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon come for a view of their homeland
A few turn travelling into art (Jack London, Jack Kerouac, Gauguin, Conrad); whereas millions turn travelling into a consumer product involving photographing World Heritage Sites and buying souvenirs. In a similar way, young people save up or borrow the cash to enjoy the extended jolly of a ‘gap year’, often involving a ‘round the world ticket’. Other more career minded young folk travel to a place to learn a language or simply become an English teacher and pay off their college debts. The odd one or two become a Zen monk for a while or experience the embattling inner journey of an extended sojourn in a cave or in the unforgiving wildernesses far from human settlements.
Christopher McCandless shunned middle class life and died in the wilds of Alaska
Perhaps some of the greatest travellers in terms of miles racked up are business people – that odd breed who attempt to travel the world without foreign contamination by occupying an orbit of stars of comfort, hotel lounges, gyms and taxis. There’s the yearly vacationer who wants to get a bit of sunshine, catch up on reading and flirt with foreign culture. There’s the hippy who wants to stay away for years, avoid work, discover cheap places to hang out and take drugs while flirting with foreign culture. There are also the party animals that flock to Ibiza, Aya Napa and Koh Phangan to get a dose of beats, sunshine, e and the clap.
Then there’s the pensioner traveller who races against time to do something interesting – a delayed gratification; a life time of toil to enjoy the sunset in style. In short the whole panoply of humanity can be found by dissecting the term ‘traveller’. And I haven’t even mentioned those colorful caravan-dwelling folk.
Far be it for me to judge the value of these different types of journey and varying types of ‘traveller’; rather I’d like to show the paradoxical nature of some of these common ideas about travelling and then attempt to collapse the contradictions by offering some ancient perspectives on the subject.
Firstly, travelling is moving but if you continually move then you can’t really stop to see anything (other than out the window). The journey needs a destination, a counterpoint of stillness. The destination is the purpose of the journey; although, maybe not the highlight.
Secondly, if we travel to beaches, mountains, cities of culture, places of overwhelming interest aren’t we just going to find out that our life back home is second rate and the place where we live is dull. Perhaps the hidden agenda of travelling is not to come back; which seems to be the case with Brits who visit Australia.
Thirdly, middle class society often informs us that travelling is good for the character – it builds resourcefulness, understanding of different cultures, it helps you understand who you are and where you come from, in short it makes you a more ‘rounded person’. However, to prolong the experience for too long is viewed by the middle class as unseemly and shirking responsibility. In my case I’ve become so rounded I no longer fit in the square holes available to me back home. It’s that old dictum of everything in moderation which stands starkly at odds with William Blake who gnomically declared that, “The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom”. It’s a good poetical notion that shouldn’t be discredited by Jimmy Morrison’s drunken excesses. What is more to the point is that travelling is addictive and society is hypocritical in the way it hides this truth. The analogy that springs immediately to my mind is the last two legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Society offers us these things and allows them to be marketed and sold for vast profits but at the same time we aren’t allowed to fall under their sway. The government says you can buy fags but it will kill you; but the tax money is handy, as are all the jobs and revenue created. Bars want you to consume their expensive booze but they don’t want you to get drunk. And so the middle class encourage their kids to go to Peru and India but not to get too interested in those places or to get too wrapped up in the idea of dedicating their life to discovering new places.
Tourism meets Globalization meets Arab oil dollars.
Another contradiction is that travelling is good not only for the individual but also for the world. The meeting of ideas and people from all over the globe gives us a tolerance of difference and an understanding of the differing priorities of other cultures. Yet travelling has been followed by that demon called globalization. Tourists and so called ‘travellers’ alike have polluted the places they have visited. They change economies, they set bad examples, they demand foreign consumer luxuries, and they trample all over history. Machu Picchu is going to be closed because too many hiking boots have eroded the place. Hippies turn local lads into shiftless drug dealers. German men create a demand for prostitutes. Package tourists create swimming pools. Just as modern physics points out the observer changes what is observed, so the traveller is destroying the culture he/she observes.
Finally, travelling is often connected in people’s minds with freedom. Go where you want, do anything you want to do. No work or responsibilities, no children to take care of, no house to clean, no more living life by the clock. It sounds really appealing in the abstract, but the reality is that most travellers have a budget. They can’t go where they want when they want. Instead they have to queue and wait, spend countless hours in waiting lounges and on slow trains and bumpy buses. They are very much restricted by where they are and what is available. And of course when the money does eventually run out then its back home and back to square one, and that freedom feeling soon fades until it is but a distant dream. For the ex-pat and those women who get pregnant to stay in Thailand, the dream of freedom seems to get forgotten and be replaced by a continual self indulgent grumbling about the locals and the local food.
So what is good about travelling? What is true and valuable about the experience of going to new places? What is free from paradox and hypocrisy? Well the place to start is with the widest point of view. Jack Kerouac claimed, “All of life is a foreign country.” I have no idea what he meant by that, but to me it means that the notion of home and abroad is a false dichotomy. Where you were born is just another bit of dirt parceled off for a while by history as some specific nation. Birth is an accident, nationalism a prejudice and ownership a temporary state. Just as the Australian aboriginals believe we are custodians of the land, so I believe we are the custodians of the world, everywhere is at once a foreign country and a home; everywhere is our temporary shelter. Borders, visas, cultural differences, languages are just a smoke screen to stopping us seeing our shared humanity and shared responsibilities to the planet. Environmentalism is the latest exponent of this ancient knowledge.
Another wider perspective is that travelling is a metaphor for life. It’s such a hackneyed phrase that ‘life is a journey’ but there is a kernel of wisdom to be found under the calcified surface of mindless repetition. Life is a journey from the cradle to the grave and many believe the true purpose of life is to attend to the journey of the soul. Christianity weighs in with the journey to judgment, the East propounds the journey to escape the endless circle of reincarnation and get to a no-where place of self-realization and abnegation (Moksha, Nirvana, and Satori). Humanism focuses on the journey of progress, whereby we can regain the Garden of Eden through our own efforts. Science, often under the wider umbrella of humanism, is the journey of discovering the secrets of the universe. These metaphorical journeys all have inspirational destinations – ‘true knowledge’, ‘enlightenment’, ‘blissful, effortless existence’ or ‘mastery of our environment’. These journeys of discovery and improvement are more than metaphors: they are symbols of our need for progress. They are the driving forces for our evolution. We must evolve and we must travel in order to evolve. It may be a fallacy that there is a goal to be achieved, a transcendence to realize. They could all be pitiful Towers of Babel; but nevertheless, it’s what makes us interesting. And perhaps that’s the real reason for travelling. It confirms our humanity. It is our unconscious desire to participate in mankind’s greatest goal, which is to get to somewhere better.
A modern Tower of Babel, again in Dubai
The picture of the Palestinian refugees is taken from
Really Long Link
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