I've not written any thoughts on travel since December 2021.

Re-reading that post, I'm struck by how little has changed. I'm still very conflicted about our future travel plans.

Partly, that's because we recently attempted what must be one of the "safest" kinds of trips there can possibly be -- a road trip -- and yet we ended up catching covid, aborting the trip, and coming home to isolate.

But it's also because the mess we've made of the environment is becoming ever more apparent, and the contribution of travel to that mess -- particularly air travel -- is hard to ignore. ("If aviation was a country it would be between the 5th and 7th worst polluters in the world... Flying is one of the most polluting activities... In 2018, just 1% of the world’s population was responsible for 50% of global aviation emissions... [Figures show] only 11% of the world’s population taking a flight in 2018 and only 4% flying overseas." Which all makes aviation seem like another element in the climate colonialism that is already such an obstacle to attempts to find equitable ways forward.)

So our road trip was less destructive than if we'd flown. And we took longer doing it, and therefore spent our money in more places, than if we'd just jetted up to Miri for a "city-break" -- which are the sorts of things we have to consider if we want to contribute to "sustainable tourism" as opposed to "extractive tourism".

Nevertheless, you can't help thinking that it would have been better for the environment if we'd not gone at all...


Wat Mahathat, Sukhothai, 2012

What I do with travel -- and let's call any modest little journey "travel" for the purposes of this post -- is experience it (obviously), and then read and write about it. So, particularly since retirement and doubly so since the pandemic, I do make small amounts of travel go a long way.

But what do I write? I'm not a big important travel-writer or influential blogger, so in a sense it doesn't matter what I write. And yet it does...

I was challenged here by Lola Akinmade Akerstrom, who questions who has the right to tell any story: "If you’re white and have lived in Laos for over 20 years, do you also have the right to tell the story of Laos? More or less so than a Laotian born and bred on their own soil?" I would argue that you have the right to tell the story of Laos as you experience it (while doing your best to be self-aware, to awaken curiosity, and not to fuel stereotypes). But you don't have the right to do much more... (The arguments considered by Akerstrom, a Nigerian who has lived for many years in Sweden, are complex, and it's a piece that's worth reading in full.)

Food for thought... A good piece of writing about a place, like a good tour, should turn "preconceived ideas on their heads", and challenge "ill-founded beliefs"...

So easy to get it wrong, though... I don't think I'm guilty of all the solecisms listed here (I don't think you'll ever find the word "exotic" in my writing, for example, and I've always been suspicious of "authentic"), but I may well be open to accusations of "romanticising 'dilapidated buildings'", of noting that things are "cheap", and -- I'm sure -- of committing some of the other errors castigated in that article.

As Indonesian author Intan Paramaditha puts it: "Indonesian children know the song 'My ancestors were sailors' by heart. It is a celebration of travel within the archipelagic imagination -- sailing the vast ocean with delight, against the waves, without fear -- but here is the irony: Most of us do not travel, or even if we do, stories of our travel are insignificant. We have always been the place traveled, the people written about, the picture painted. We are the bare-breasted Balinese women in paintings, a paradise, a heart of darkness, a perfect setting for a thriller in The Year of Living Dangerously... Questions of travel must consider the unequal power relations that characterize present global encounters and how they are enmeshed in the historical processes in the past... Should we seize Prospero’s pen and write our own stories of travel and discovery? There is a problem there. What we will discover is determined by a map that already exists. We can read the map, but the map has read us first, locating us based on where we come from and the color of our skin... Travel was and will always be about exclusion..."



And while we're on the subject of voices, Emily Ding's interview with Wael Qarssifi, a Syrian refugee journalist living in Malaysia, will move you beyond words. Talk about immobility and mobility...

This is part of his testimony: "It’s interesting to talk about options, because as a refugee, you don’t have those, only uncertainty and limbo. Even simple things, like whenever I want to buy anything for my place, I think three times about it. Is it too heavy? Would it be hard to get rid of if I have to leave suddenly? At the same time, I don’t know if I will ever leave... I always say that I’m a rootless tree. I can’t move because my mobility rights are taken from me. But at the same time, I can’t plant my roots either." And ironically, he too struggles with what he has the "right" to say about Syria: "Even your own people inside your country start depriving you of your right to comment on things happening there. Because you are outside and privileged... Even family members, sometimes when you tell them things, they’re like, You’re not living with us, you don’t feel our pain. But I lived with that pain for seven years. I lost friends. So how can you claim that? I understand that now it’s way worse there, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have the right..."

So... where were we? Travel gives you covid, and wrecks the environment, and unless you're really careful, writing about it contributes to the vast chasms of inequity that already disfigure the global arena...



Not surprising, then, I suppose, that some are foreswearing this dubious activity.

Henry Wismayer is an interesting case in point. In June 2020, he wrote a piece entitled "A travel writer contemplates a less mobile future" (referenced here, in the first of my covid-era travel reflections). Just 18 months further on, he's writing "The end of travel"...

Wismayer had a travel epiphany that is reminiscent of my own. My first exposure to "overseas" (the big overseas that lay beyond the little British overseas across the water from my Island) was a school trip to Switzerland. As such, it was massively more prosaic than Wismayer's initiatory romp round Thailand, Viet Nam, and Cambodia. But the conclusions we reached were very similar: "Home, increasingly, had begun to feel like a malaise; away seemed like an instant antidote. It was the escape hatch I’d been searching for." I think that silly little trip to Switzerland, for me, was what planted the seeds that drove me not only to holiday abroad, but to study abroad, volunteer abroad, and work abroad. And once we broke out of Europe (catalyst: our first trip to New Zealand, in 1992), the only thing that stopped us was the need to juggle two jobs. We ended up shifting home bases, again and again.

And of course we weren't the only ones on the move: "In the first 20 years of the millennium, international tourism arrivals more than doubled, from 700 million in 2000 to almost 1.5 billion in 2019. Over that period, travel, for those of us lucky enough to enjoy it, has become synonymous with wellbeing, a vital adjunct of a fulfilling life."

Wismayer, however, comes to recognize the pathological elements of his drive to travel, and recognizes that he was using travel in a "medicinal way -- to curate a narrative, sometimes at the expense of subjective joy". And then there was the increasing "ethical freight" of tourism... And then there was the pandemic. Plus, he'd had children by then.

All in all, he says: "Travel became less essential. I began to revisit places I loved and reconciled myself to the idea that there were places I would never see... The urge to move still lingers... But the imperative has lost its desperate edge... For the time being, there seems no way of divining what will become of our compulsion to wander, no clear indication of whether this pause represents an eclipse or an extinguishment of travel as it was before. If there is any lesson to glean from my journey, it is that a fixation on experience is like so many other addictions: gratifying, intermittently euphoric, but ultimately forlorn. Travelling is wonderful, don’t get me wrong. But it is not the same as contentment."



Ah yes, Henry, but you'd DONE a ton of travelling by the time you came to that realization...

We were only just getting going... Only just starting, with retirement, to have the time available "to travel not to go anywhere, but to go... [to] travel for travel's sake", as you quote Robert Louis Stevenson.

We'd already figured out by then, of course, that our travel would have to be very different going forward -- longer, slower, less ambitious, less flight-oriented.

But then it all ground to a halt from which it's really not yet emerged. You start to think you're finding a modus vivendi, only to have the rug torn out from under your feet again.

Some questions, to sum up:

Do I still feel I need travel?

Yes.

I'm lucky enough to live in a place that people come to on holiday, so I have a lot to explore in my own back yard (even though the logistics of that exploration have become a constant gamble with covid, as witnessed by our recent rout). And the pandemic has probably adjusted the ratio of "wanderer and homebody" in all of us.

A propos of which, this article by Billy Nathan Setiawan is very interesting. He describes Indonesians' recent co-option of the English word "healing" to refer to, or replace, words like "holiday" or "travel". You would use it, for example, when describing journeys or uploading holiday photos, or to ask: "Where will you be 'healing' to this weekend?" The point here is that "healing" doesn't mean anything ambitious or expensive. It can be a walk to the local park. Curious, no? This meaning shift points to the therapeutic (therefore necessary) qualities of travelling, while also emphasizing its potential simplicity.



Local joys notwithstanding, I still crave injections from time to time of the completely new (the way I felt about that month in Istanbul -- excited, delighted, enlivened -- was enough to make that very clear). I'm willing to trade everything down -- less, not so far, even slower, even simpler -- if I can somehow keep "travel" on the table to some extent.

I don't know how long it's going to be possible to do anything. The pandemic is not going anywhere. The planet is burning not just environmentally but also geopolitically and economically. Our lives, on the other hand -- witness all the illness this year -- are not burning with their former brightness. So infinitely postponing everything is a depressing prospect.

And yet... And yet... There's all that stuff I was talking about...



So you end up with lots of sub-questions that I really can't answer. How can we do safer road trips (eg, can we only stay in hotels that have balconies and/or openable windows...)? If staying a month in one place (as we did in Istanbul) is a great strategy environmentally, and yet short-term rentals are generally seen as part of extractive tourism, how do you square that circle? Will it ever again be feasible to do the kind of flight-replacing overland journey that we did when we went from London to Baku, or are you always going to risk being stranded with covid somewhere? Given that a lot of our travel is always going to be about visiting family, is it actually a good idea to live in a place we have to FLY out of?

I'm not sure quite why I've never come across this poem by Elizabeth Bishop before now. It's called -- so appropriately -- Questions of Travel, and it's an ambivalent little piece. On the one hand, you have the slightly jaundiced eye of the traveller ("there are too many waterfalls here"), and the questions that stab all of us wanderers: "Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theaters? What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?" On the other hand, the eye of the traveller, when fresh, is the eye of the artist, which can be captivated by some completely irrelevant little details, and the connection they may or may not point to; this being the case, would it not have been sad to miss all these things: "Surely it would have been a pity not to have seen the trees along this road"...

So the question at the end hangs awkwardly, unanswered: "Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?"...