‘Has the Romance Gone Out of Travel?’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 01.15.07 | 9:17 AM ET
Michael Bywater argues it has and Alexander Frater says no way in a he said-he said debate this week in the pages of The Observer. I stand with Frater, a former chief travel correspondent for the paper, who writes: “To those who say the excitement has gone out of travel, I say ‘cobblers’. Curiosity continues to tug us around blind corners and over interesting hills, so that even something as innocuous as a sightseeing day trip in Ladakh can become a small adventure, a genuine golden moment.” The Atlantic has a similar story this month, as Virginia Postrel explores how glamour has been eliminated from air travel.
Today air travel is just a more or less enjoyable way to get from place to place, not an emotionally resonant symbol of something greater than itself. We frequent flyers forget how unnatural it is to zoom through the air in a metal tube, and we imagine that airline glamour was all about real silverware and perfectly coiffed stewardesses—the experience on the plane. But glamour is always an illusion, an imaginative picture with the blemishes removed. With experience comes disillusionment, no matter how luxurious the reality may be. The glamour of twentieth-century air travel helped to persuade once-fearful travelers to take to the skies and encouraged parochial Americans to go out and see the world. The crowds on today’s planes may have destroyed that glamour. But they also demonstrate its power.
Postrel’s story is available online only to subscribers of the Atlantic.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
Michael Bywater 01.16.07 | 9:15 AM ET
That’s very interesting… an “I said, he said” debated might have been really worth doing, but hard to organise for obvious logistical reasons. How it worked was they rang me up and said “Write 1750 words on how travel is rubbish these days” and I said “Fine.” That sort of opinion journalism is partly showbiz - you want to divert or entertain or annoy the readers—and partly like being a lawyer: you represent your case as strongly as possible.
The thing is, I didn’t know Russ Frater was going to be put in opposition to me, and he quite possibly didn’t know I was in opposition to him. So it’s not really a debate, just two people putting opposed arguments.
And on one hand, I thoroughly agree with him about the urge to see round the next corner or across the next hill. But, on the other hand, I don’t think a simple day-trip in Ladakh is part of most people’s regular experience; the hideously pointless, scorching flesh-roast in a package hotel is more like it, and that really IS pants…