An Anti-Travel Point of View: ‘It’s a Staple, Like Soymilk’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 03.30.07 | 7:03 AM ET
We’re unabashed supporters of travel in its varied forms. Road trips. Heartbreaking trips. River trips. Surf trips. Naked trips. Virtual trips. Meta trips. We could go on. Even when a trip makes us sick. And we know why we travel. Now, some space for an opposing point of view: James Morris’s artful, funny take on why we shouldn’t travel in the Winter 2007 issue of the Wilson Quarterly.
I’m not proposing inertia as a permanent option; the economy couldn’t take it. But as a temporary measure, a counter to the ceaseless spin of our lives, lasting just long enough for us to get our bearings and sort out a bit more of what’s fantasy about the world from what’s purposeful, it has its appeal. Stillness, silence, the reflective pause—air and head cleared of noise—are about as welcome today as plague rats were in the Middle Ages.
For now, we’ll put aside the point that travel can provide that reflective pause. This is Morris’s time, and here’s perhaps one of the stronger parts of his piece: his criticism of travel media.
The travel pages tap into the same extremes of mad play, and with cost rarely an issue, the unreality is pure. Editors dream like drunken Coleridges, and hand subordinates maps. You don’t just take a trip to Germany anymore; you book a Third Reich tour of Munich. You make for “the uttermost part of the Earth: Tierra del Fuego.” You’re the first on your block with a tan from the Saint-Tropez of Turkey, Turkbuku. You’re off to an Ayurvedic spa in southern India, one of the “pilgrims with deep pockets” willing to bet that an ancient medical system can’t be any worse than our own. A recent issue of New York magazine featured an exhausting number of ways to relax: Track a wild rhino in Africa. Spend a morning at a Tokyo gym—with sumos. Nightsled down a torch-lit mountain in Slovenia. Windsurf in a rum-scented Dominican Republic paradise. Reef dive with whale sharks in Honduras. Shop for national treasures at bargain prices in Oaxaca. (Hmmm. Rhino or a shopping spree? For a New Yorker, not exactly Sophie’s choice.)
You can’t make this stuff up anymore. Or rather you can, but you’d better be quick, before a Sunday travel supplement staffer beats you to the departure gate, in search of the perfect sausage, or the planet’s 10 best gated communities, or the world’s most kid-friendly volcanoes. Every patch on Earth, no matter how distant, has its locating coordinates, which include an arrival time. In these fantasies, the world is spread before us as if it were a vast playground for Americans. But as playgrounds go, our world is, in fact, one of the old-fashioned kind, paved with concrete, where you can crack your skull if you lose your balance, and bullies lie in wait. The same newspapers and TV screens that promote the fantasies of travel put this rough world before us, too, and the allurements of the one contend with the dangers of the other. At the far end of the journeys abroad we Americans take these days, the arms that once opened to welcome us may be folded.
Again, we’ll put aside the point that individual Americans are generally welcomed around the world and that travelers can help unfold folded arms, and we’ll let Morris have his say.
Related on World Hum:
* Can Slow Travel Save the Planet?
* Should Travel Writers Discourage Flying to Reduce Global Warming?
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
Roger 03.30.07 | 10:37 AM ET
Mr. Morris can have his say, alright. Maybe he can travel as much as he wants. But I am among the many American’s who can only look on with envy, wishing we could travel abroad more often. Because of inflexible work schedules, unwilling spouses, or other limitations, we cannot travel one-tenth as much as we would like.
TambourineMan 03.30.07 | 4:20 PM ET
I agree with almost nothing this guy says, but he’s hit the travel media nail right on the head.
Michael Yessis 04.01.07 | 4:21 PM ET
I hear you, Roger. I wish I could travel more, too. And I wish more people were able to travel—for personal reasons and also to help unfold some folded arms.
And, Tambourine Man, I guess you’ve read too many stories about “kid-friendly volcanoes,” huh?
TambourineMan 04.02.07 | 7:32 PM ET
Read too many? Mike, as you know, I have to write drivel like that…regularly.