do we really all want to travel?
i ask this question directly, not metaphorically
are we really all curious about what is abroad, let alone on the other side of the world?
Travel is a limited good, and let’s not be fooled by the apparent ease of buying a ticket and appearing on the other side, many thousands of kilometres from home, in just a few or a dozen hours. We board in rainy Europe and disembark on the sunny beaches of Sri Lanka in just over ten hours of air travel.
It would seem that tourism, with its access to ubiquitous and relatively inexpensive means of transportation, should be available to anyone willing to travel
but this is just an illusion…
I grew up behind the Iron Curtain; in order to travel abroad, even to Eastern Bloc countries, one needed a passport, which was a rare possession, issued jealously by the authorities, under strict conditions and only for the duration of the trip.
The citizen would report to the internal affairs post, submit a sizable application and wait for the authorities to be gracious. He had to surrender his ID card when he received the coveted glibness. At the appointed time, upon his return, he would appear again and return the passport, thus releasing the ID card hostage.
The simple thought of having a passport in a drawer, available anytime, was like a dream of space travel
Getting a passport was only the beginning; there was still the whole arduous process of applying for a visa. Queues in front of embassies of Western countries. That humiliating ritual, the desire for the big world. Waiting for hours to then confide in the most deeply private matters in front of an official heralding the coming opportunities: to present letters where information about grandma’s intestinal problems is mixed with notices of weddings, births and deaths, where a house under construction is interspersed with a recipe for Christmas cakes, where confessions of longing, pain and heartbreaking sadness are drowned in banal information about vacations, problems at work and banal assurances that all is well, but could use some money.
The clerk reads into these strands of thoughts written on pieces of paper, often in clumsy letters and rough language, a meeting of the realities of two worlds; he tries to trace between the letters a trick, a deception, or at least a mistake, to once again this time personally confess the supplicant, who waits with trembling for that moment when the official seal in the passport will open the gate to the coveted world.
To this day, realizing that I have a passport in a drawer and can go to many countries without going through this humiliating procedure because I live in a country belonging to the Schengen zone gives me a sense of complete freedom and independence. Even if I were to never venture out into the world again; and travel would be limited to this small patch of my space that I can traverse on foot.
There is also another, much more perfidious limitation
I have a passport, and no one requires me to get a visa. I am welcomed in most countries with little official resistance. Still, I will never be able to afford a ticket anywhere, even beyond the nearest spit of land. The income is only enough for bare subsistence or not.
I remember once my dreams of faraway travels came true, as in Cambodia in Phnom Penh, a young tuk-tuk driver with undisguised curiosity and envy inquired about my country, my travels, where I had been, and where I intended to go. I realized that only twenty years ago, I was on his side, greedily inquiring those who had managed to get where I wanted to go, but at the time, there was no chance of that. These were gods with supernatural powers, moving between worlds.
And now I was such a goddess. In my European arrogancy, I deigned to set an example that, after all, I too once wanted to travel and couldn’t, and now look, young man, voila, and here I am!
However, the fact that I have achieved something cannot be an example or proof that someone else will achieve it as I did
supposedly, the circumstances are the same, but even the poorest country in the Eastern Bloc was an oasis of prosperity and security compared to Cambodia after the conflagration caused by Pol Pot. Political and economic transformation in Middle Europe was becoming a reality under the caring umbrellas spread by the EU, the US and the IMF (regardless of the price societies had to pay for it).
Cambodia is not the fall of the Berlin Wall and the absorption of the poor eastern brother into prosperous Germany; it is not the Velvet Revolution; it is not Solidarity in Poland; it is the war in Yugoslavia and the coup in Romania and all the consequences that followed.
I hope the young tuk-tuk driver fulfilled his travel dreams, but I don’t hold much hope for it.
It’s easy now to make travelling the world a ritual we can all indulge in, a bacchanalia for the senses, the excitement of that vibrant anticipation within us of the unexpected, especially when it’s dressed up in beautiful photos, videos perfectly edited, with atmospheric or stimulating music in the background.
Zero poverty, zero dirt, and even poverty are colourful and smiling
A selfie with a Buddhist monk, a photo when we give candy to a child on the street, seemingly leaning over him with care, but in reality making sure that the lens captures this more favourable profile of ours, and then showing the photo to friends will toss up a “wise” thought, that travel broadens horizons, that seeing poverty makes us realize the smallness of our own problems, we’ll end it with some uplifting quote from Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the Dalai Lama, the Pope or some other current icon at the time.
And then we’ll go back to spending money on meaningless items. Which we will throw away after a few days. They cost as much as it costs to support one family somewhere in a world we were in a while ago but never really moved from home.
