Another stack of covid-related reading has been accumulating in my Velvet Cushion virtual intray.

Much of what catches my eye still has a journeys theme, just as it did back in June.

Many people are still ruminating on how travel and its associated phenomena -- if we ever manage to do any of them again -- need to be different.

Stuart McDonald, from Travelfish, for example, argues the need to reconceptualize travel writing "as a means to encourage travellers to have a more positive effect on where they travel, or a reduced impact". He elaborates: "Before you write anything, think, what are the pros and cons of me writing this. What effect will it have on local communities? ... Travel for too long has been about the traveller, then the destination. Right now it feels like the planet has been turned on its head, and it is time to flip this one on its head too."

I agree, although I think this ideal would be very hard to implement. Even experts, it seems to me, have a highly imperfect grasp of the intricate socio-economic/cultural complex that is a "destination".

In another piece, McDonald appeals for an end to the "you should have been here yesterday" discourse. He's right -- it's easy to get the impression from some travellers that, even before covid, everything was already wrecked: "Spending as much time as I do in Bali, if I talked to some old hand, they’d tell me Bali hasn’t been worth going to since 1972. If I hung out with more centenarians, I’m sure one would tell me it has all been downhill since 1934."


As we've mentioned Bali, all the pics in this post are from Denpasar in 2010 (from the trip that's recorded here, but sans photos)





Yet, even in places that have seen tourism develop in a less than exemplary way (Sapa in Viet Nam is the one that McDonald discusses), there have been upsides. A cafe owner tells him how his kids are getting a much better education than he ever received, for example, and though not rich, he is comfortably off: "He was proud of what he had built. His parents were farmers -- and he would have been too -- if Sapa had not become what it had."

Which is why it's not enough, in covid times, to just lecture people on the need to give up this unreliable tourism lark, and "go back" to another state, whether it's "the land" or something else. Besides being extraordinarily patronizing, how could such counsel be workable? "If my cafe owner had instead grown up on the land, what future would have been on the cards for his kids?... The opportunity in Covid19 isn’t to re–calibrate tourism out of people’s lives, but to do it better... How can me being a traveller help rather than hinder?"





Some commentators are quite upbeat about the opportunity covid has given us to rethink our travel along more sustainable, inclusive, and quality-oriented lines. (And I empathize with Gabby Beckford: "Road-tripping has shown me that the core of travel --curiosity, exposure to newness, and wonder -- [is] a perspective, not a destination.” True, that.)

Any analysis of where the travel phenomenon has gone wrong must surely admit that a lot depends on the attitude of the individual traveller. 

Back in 2014, Ted Scheinman was ruminating on the "Grand Tour" -- that "tradition of temporary migrations among England's moneyed classes, a voyage into Europe and also into antiquity, which was modish between the 17th and 19th centuries".

He is right that we can recognize the descendants of this tradition in study-abroad programmes, gap years, and -- yes, the Big OE... But I disagree with the notion that "exchange-based study and summer travel and relief work in Haiti or Uganda is utterly different from the self-regarding jaunts of the 18th-century Grand Tourist". A lot of what passes for exchange and volunteer work is incredibly self-regarding, it seems to me...

Where I completely agree with him, on the other hand, is in his recognition that "not knowing" -- not because we have not tried to know, but because we simply cannot know -- is an essential part of the travel experience: "Globe-trotters in the 21st century must be prepared to be foolish and to be made fools of, to be foreign and to feel alien, to accept that when we seek most to be a traveller we will sometimes descend into the role of tourist -- to realise, finally, that a failed traveller is better than a complacent tourist."

I guess we're lucky in that our daily lives in Sarawak still offer us plenty of room for such foolishness....







Claire Baxter similarly reminds us that as well as rethinking tourism from the point of view of carbon emissions and overcrowding, we also need to deal with its "colonial problem": "Just as many museum collections and archaeology have their roots in colonial exploration, so too does tourism."

You don't have to think very hard to see where she's coming from. When travelling, we often intrude on those who themselves have no opportunity to escape. We exacerbate the divide between the privileged and the disadvantaged. And we see destinations as "available for the tourist to 'take' rather than lived in spaces. When locals are pictured, they are icons of exoticism, which the influencer is using to try to give their travels the notion of authenticity. Where they are not pictured, it is to give the impression that the landscape is empty and pure, and available to be enjoyed by the travellers." Come on, which of us, in all honesty, has never been guilty of a bit of this?

Along somewhat the same lines, this piece by Michael Press discusses the problems inherent in the idea of "cultural heritage" -- the kind of thing tourists prioritize when they travel. While at first glance it seems incontrovertibly good to preserve what remains of the past, closer inspection shows that heritage can be very much "a top-down idea", and unexpected side-effects have emerged both from the direction of nationalism (with governments turning "to remains of the distant past to bolster national identities and a sense of greatness, or to marginalise disfavoured groups") and from the direction of universalism (with the laudable idea that cultural heritage belongs to all translating in practice into "a one-way flow of expertise and standards-setting from Western powers to developing countries").







Finally, this piece by Jason Wilson -- who describes himself as "a travel writer who cannot travel" -- picked up on many of the things I've been thinking about since this torment began.

Firstly, he lays out an intriguing challenge: "At its most ideal, the worth of the [travel writing] genre lies in exploring the tensions of our interior journey vs our exterior itinerary, in examining our expectations (and hopes and biases) of a destination vs the reality of what we found, and by measuring the person we are at home against the person we become abroad." Definitely an approach worth thinking about in my Vintage Travel posts...

Secondly, he expresses very cogently a feeling I've long held: "Part of the education of travel lies in seeing things with fresh and ignorant eyes -- and in being wrong. Which is why it's important to check in with that younger traveler [ie, your earlier self] from time to time, to retrace the journeys that remain vivid in our minds, to ask new questions of where we've gone before...

"What travel has taught me is that the things of the world are only ever temporary... I hope that we will be able to travel, to interact with and witness the world again in the near future. When we do, it will certainly seem strange. But when has travel not been strange? ... The pause we're experiencing can highlight a basic truth: We may or may not walk this way again, and even if we do, we will never be precisely the same people who experienced that journey in the first place. Travel is only ever about a moment in time and space, but it's also about how we choose to hold that moment in our memories. It is always both present and past."

Which is a good note to end on...