Yesterday I mused about the theme of movement and belonging, as represented in some of the reading I had been stockpiling in recent weeks.

Well, the other theme that emerged very clearly from this cache was "movement after the plague"...

There are plenty of useful sites tracking the opening of borders and the easing of restrictions (and the reverse of those processes, of course).

But there are also a number of interesting articles that discuss how -- as we emerge from this current hiatus -- we might do this whole travel thing differently.

Foreign Policy carried a raft of short pieces on the future of travel by experts in different fields.

Good ideas: continuing the trend of working remotely; creating bubbles and green lanes; taking fewer trips and staying longer (more on this one in a minute); and creating a better passenger experience "by moving people through airports more efficiently and increasing confidence in health safety" (what a pity that aspiration had to await the arrival of the plague...).

Bad ideas: thinking virtual travel will ever replace the real thing...

But it was James Fallow who put his finger on the nub of the problem, especially for people like us:

"Because the process of travel was so routine and often so aggravating, people of the pre-pandemic era rarely concentrated on how fundamental that process -- high-volume, high-speed, relatively low-cost human movement -- was to the very idea of being modern. Students took it for granted that they could aspire to an academic program in a different region, country, or continent -- and still go back to visit their families. People who had emigrated permanently, or left their countries for a few years of work or adventure, knew that their homeland was still in relatively quick reach... Before the lockdown, it was easy to recite all the harm mass travel had done... What might be lost with a long interruption in easy connectedness is only now becoming evident."

We're all going to have to come to terms with this loss, I think.

But it was obvious -- long before this global scourge happened along -- that change in our travel patterns was well overdue.

Early this year, I was contemplating how we might take a different approach, and this article sums up the same dilemma:

"Long, long ago in the times BC (Before Covid), when 2020 was the start of a new decade rather than the dawn of the fire-flood-locusts-plague-unrest end times, I started thinking both about finding a purpose and decarbonising my life.

"Naturally, flying came up...

"I can’t, yet, entirely give up flying: Like lots of people around the world I have family in one country and a home in another...

"But there are things all of us can do. Plan our travel in long blocks, rather than as weekends, and make shorter trips by land or ocean transport only; pay the extra to travel by train (or book well in advance while tickets are still cheap); go overland wherever feasible; and query whether that face-to-face work meeting is really necessary or can be done by Zoom. Because if we’re going to exit Covid in the right direction -- rather than ramping up fossil fuel use in the face of climate doom -- we can’t go back to the way we were. We need to travel, and to live, a very different way."


Planes: always a problem

I also appreciated this long think about the future of the travel industry. As we all know, tourism and travel grew into monsters, in terms of the economic dependency they created, and the environmental, social, and cultural damage they wrought.


The perils of overtourism: Boracay in 2012 (we hated it)


Sihanoukville, 2009: Another example of how not to do it

Now "we have a rare opportunity to extract ourselves from this destructive cycle, and do things differently".

But will we take this chance? There's a danger that the current unprecedented pressure on the industry -- rather than opening up new pathways of sustainability -- will undercut any moves that had been in the works before the virus.

And are we willing to pay for a less destructive tourist industry? Maybe not: "According to a survey conducted by travel company Tui in 2017, while 84% of European holidaymakers consider it important to reduce their carbon footprint, only 11% are willing to shoulder the additional costs of a sustainable holiday over an ordinary one." I can't imagine this changing much, given the way virus-related budgetary pressure is going to push holiday-makers towards the cheap and cheerful.

But perhaps there is hope: "The absence of tourism has forced us to consider ways in which the industry can diversify, indigenise and reduce its dependency on the all-singing, all-dancing carbon disaster that is global aviation... More broadly, tourism must be valued not as a quickfire source of foreign exchange, but as an integrated part of a nation’s economy, subject to the same forward planning and cost-benefit analysis as any other sector. In places where tourism is too dominant, it needs to shrink. All this needs to happen in tandem with wider efforts to decarbonise society."

At the nub of the matter is definitely the need for a change of philosophy, and in that regard I found this piece by Henry Wismayer very thought-provoking.

Like Wismayer I have grown increasingly concerned that "so much of what we call travel is extractive, the commodification of someone else’s sunshine, culture and photogenic views".

Like him, the lockdown forced me to find beauty in the quotidian, the local, the small, the slowly changing. There's no way on God's earth that I would have volunteered for so many weeks within such a limited radius. But it has not been dull or uninteresting. There's always been something to wonder about, research, write about, photograph -- both in the real world around us, and in the "shadow journeys" I've embarked on.

As Wismayer puts it: "Thoreau didn’t need to traverse the globe to enjoy 'the tonic of wildness.' A waterhole two miles from his hometown served just as well. 'Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you,' he wrote in Walden, 'opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.'"

The prospect of always being so restricted fills me with pure dread, but I too want to learn from the lockdown experience, and be prepared to travel differently in the future.

How? Doing fewer trips, staying longer, adopting a smaller radius, going deeper? I don't know. But I want to try.

And if you need an entirely different take on travel, you can't go further than this profoundly moving account of the role played in the pandemic by India's Parle-G biscuit.

Not only is the movement of biscuits in the time of coronavirus a fascinating business in itself, but the experiences of India's informal workers made me salute the extraordinary courage of humanity, and give thanks again for our own very privileged pandemic experience:

"The sudden loss of income and the shutdown of public transport forced huge numbers [of informal workers] to leave the cities for their distant homes on foot. In one survey of more than 11,000 migrant workers, almost 80 percent reported having less than $2.60 on hand; half had food for less than one day; most had not received food assistance from the government.

"Three days after the lockdown was implemented, Ram Prajapati, a construction worker in Gurgaon, a major commercial center of shimmering office blocks, extravagant malls, and opulent apartment towers near New Delhi, ran out of food. The contractor who hired him and other workers wouldn’t answer his calls. He and his wife had 100 rupees, or a little more than $1, left. They bought flour, tomatoes, and two packets of 2-rupee Parle-G biscuits for their 3- and 7-year-old sons...

"As it became clear that work would not resume for a while, Prajapati decided to walk with his family back to his village, 600 miles away... Three days later, through a combination of walking and hitching rides with essential-goods trucks, the Prajapatis reached home, having survived largely on food from volunteers along the way, as well as Parle-G biscuits."

That's what pandemic travel means for millions. How brave they are.