a cynical theory of travel

as i transition into a more stable state of being

In the last four months, I lived in Singapore and then traveled to 7 different parts of Asia (Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam/Laos/HK/Japan), mostly alone, enabled by my membership in a social “paradise” of exchange students who did not see this sort of constant adventure and exploration-seeking as exuberant and overzealous. We talked about travel and tourism and visitation and vacation, and so consequently I found myself thinking more about this topic than pretty much anything academic.

Fun was the priority — I rode on motorcycles and learned how to scuba dive and went out and road a bike around a Japanese island, etc etc etc.

But I did end up writing a bit about my musings, particularly on community engagement. This piece will be more summative and abstract, as I attempt to bookmark these thoughts while transitioning away from the beautiful chaos of this last semester.

Also, calling this a “theory” of travel is a nice way for me to note to myself that I really miss formal mathematics.

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Travel vs. Tourism

My premise concerns the difference between travel versus tourism: namely, that they are merely different frames of the same general activity, one of them focusing on journey/process and the other on the destination/outcome.

Travel: “to go on a trip or journey: to go to a place and especially one that is far away” — Britannica

Tourism: “the act and process of spending time away from home in pursuit of recreation, relaxation, and pleasure” — Britannica

Both of these ideas reduce down to the general concept of “going somewhere” (I know, riveting).

I think a lot of travelers might bristle at what they might see as a conflation between these two concepts, as a lot of the travel ethos (“being a backpacker”) tries to create separation from “touristy” activities. Here’s a short romanticized video that approaches this idea:

Note that the motivation for a traveler to seek separation from tourism has nothing to do with the irreducible definition of tourism (who doesn’t want rest, relaxation, and pleasure?) but everything to do with its signaling value and downstream impact. That is to say, unabashedly admitting your touristic escapades might suggest a certain level of indifference — both in your ability to pay for your experiences and in your inability to recognize the damage it might cause. Both are required to “escape your life,” as one might say.

It’s obligatory to mention that these downstream effects are all magnified by commercialization. As tourists focus on experiencing pleasure and sightseeing, people have realized that if they can offer ways to make your experience pleasurable and devoid of embarrassment, then they can justifiably ask for compensation.

And by extension, it is not too hard to see how tourism, whether in the process of commercialization or not, creates impositions and inconveniences on the local community. Take this recent decision by a town located near Mt. Fuji, Japan:

The town of Fuji Kawaguchiko is known for its view of Mt. Fuji – but if local officials get their way, it won't be any more. After too many tourists flocked to the small town to get a glimpse of the iconic mountain skyline, local officials decided to put up a screen to block the scene at a popular viewing spot. 

Locals complained about tourists jaywalking, littering and crowding the area around a convenience store known for its view of Mt. Fuji — CBS

So what’s the point of bringing all this up? As soon as we start to see travel and tourism not as living in separate worlds, but as different reflections of the same idea, we allow ourselves to admit that there are plenty of similar material impacts. To show this, I’ll roleplay the platonic ideal of travel to make the exceedingly simple point that substantive differences in mindset between travel and tourism do not negate any of the downstream impacts for either activity.

An appreciation of struggle

What does it mean to focus on process over result? A traveler appreciative of the “journey” to a destination, who is content to sit in liminal space, by extension deifies fulfillment more than pleasure. Fulfillment is often presumed as an achievement despite struggle, and so reasonable struggle has become very strongly romanticized.

AKA:

struggle —> fulfillment —> “true” travel!

VS.

dopamine —> pleasure —> "true” tourism

There are a number of ways struggle is commercialized and might carry the same nuanced benefits and drawbacks of commercialization that tourism does.

• poverty travel, poverty as a characterization of the recipient community. This involves volunteering in marginalized regions of the world. As I discuss here, these communities must implicitly yet strategically decide how to share just enough of their struggle such that we might empathize (“feel” their struggle), without imposing so much as to disengage us.

• cheap travel, cheap as a characterization of us, the travelers. We romanticize the challenge of a 14-hour bus ride instead of a 2-hour plane ride, because otherwise we can’t afford to travel for 6 months. We make fun of our tendency to choose the most affordable and communal accomodation. We are happy to take the hike to the viewpoint instead of paying for the ski lift, feeling that we have to earn the view.

  • An entire industry has responded to this phenomenon by advertising hostels like budget airlines: the base price is cheap, and every add on (towel, toothbrush, lock) costs extra money. Hostels further organize between each other to advertise “local” experiences and travelers oftentimes oblige (my cynicism is on fullest display here).

If you find yourself identifying with the spirit of some of these trends and the emotional highs that they chase after, you might infer that travel feels more like going to the gym than it does going on vacation. A strong level of discipline and maturity and consistency are prerequisites to travel in its platonic ideal, which is how travelers can travel for long periods of time without the same flavor of burnout as tourists.

Yet no matter how different travel may feel to tourism, I allude above to the reality that their actual impacts are pretty similar as they are merely reflections of the same activity. I would even go as far as to say that travel creates a mimicry of struggle for us too privileged to otherwise experience “real life”, and that not wanting to escape your life (as tourists allegedly do) is . . . pretty rare.

Further, this sampling of struggle is the base for any recipe producing an interesting life story. Travelers are interesting people because of their diverse motivations to travel, but they are undoubtably also interesting people because they have invested in interesting life experiences — learning Spanish from scratch in Costa Rica for 6 months or riding around Laos on a motorcycle for four days.

I can’t help but note the weird, almost repulsive irony to the idea that directly creating struggle and adversity makes someone more interesting — we are clearly lucky when we do not experience struggle (financial, educational, etc.).

Where does all this cognitive dissonance leave us?

1. Despite budgetary constraints, many people are willing to invest (financially or otherwise) into experiences where struggle will be a necessary component, which is one vehicle through which travel is commercialized.

2. Travel creates imposition just like tourism.

I haven’t actually justified this second part, so let’s do that now.

Travel as imposition

As struggle is holy in travel, asking someone for help is celebrated — a genuine nexus for local engagement, but more importantly, fulfillment. Who doesn’t feel great when a random person that you’ve never met is willing to help out?

This feeling only occurs because we implicitly understand the inconvenience for someone to help you, especially when the favor is substantive. Why we might fear asking help is for the inconvenience we would cause.

My point is not that those fears are justified, but that just because we decide to ask anyway (which we often should) does not vanish the reality that we’re creating an inconvenience.

Tourists, travelers might argue, do not systematically position themselves as equals asking for a hand in the way travelers do, and more often see the locals around them as a means to an end (this claim presumes that travelers seek more meaningful help than tourists, in pursuit of achievement despite struggle). In reality, the difference is really quite minimal.

The thought experiment is this: imagine you are a traveler who experiences emotional high exactly when helped by random locals to your next destination, your next off-the-beaten-path activity. These are the stories you and others tell your fellow travelers, and you convince them that the people here are just the most incredible and welcoming and kind. Several magnitudes more travelers visit the same areas to search the same experience of being helped?? Is this really a more enlightened way to experience the world than sightseeing?

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I was inspired to write this piece by a wonderful trip I took in Japan, cycling around the entirety of Shikoku Island in two weeks time.

source

I did this 1000km loop without proper training, and I didn’t even know how to fix a flat tire. So of course I got a flat tire on my third day biking, biked 10km to the next town, and spent a few hours asking around until someone was kind enough to fix it. The next day I went to a bike shop to ask how I might be able to fix a problem like this in a future, in response to which the shop owner gave me a lecture in Japanese on how to replace an inner tube — I probably processed 10% of what she was saying. I spent the next few days wondering how I could consider this a highlight of my trip, because it really was the first story I gravitated toward when people asked me about my experience.

really had no idea what i was doing

Process over outcome, I guess?

I am not here to minimize the way that travel has expanded my emotional range and capacity to experience being. There are plenty of wonderful lessons I’ve learned from traveling, and one of those musings I’ve spelled out here: the beautiful insight gained by reinterpreting ‘separate’ concepts as two sides of the same coin.