Why do we travel?

As a child, I went on a day trip with my father, Ramsgate, to Boulogne and a school French trip to camp near La Ciotat. When I began to travel abroad as an adult in my late twenties, an older friend challenged me. What was the point, he asked? A few years later, he discovered Greece, got the bug, and went every year.

I was reminded of this when I came across this poem by Elizabeth Bishop in The Atlantic. This is from the second verse:

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
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?

Chelsea Leu writing in The Atlantic dates the poem to 1956, she quotes it in an introduction to Paige McClanahan’s book, The New Tourist.

In the age of social media, selfie tourism has, for many, become a form of conspicuous consumption. The selfie is a trophy photograph, sent instantly to friends and relatives, look at me, having a good time, ticking places off on my bucket list. (I hasten to add that I don’t recall ever sending a trophy photograph.) In the old days, we purchased postcards, laboriously wrote them, sought out the stamps and sent them home. Generally, they arrived after we had returned. In a way, they were trophies too.

We talk of getting away from it all, as Leu asks, are we simple hedonists? Travel is much easier than it was, and many more of us are travelling with paid holidays and income sufficient to afford to holiday. That said only the relatively wealthy fly – the Eurobarometer statistics on the use of air transport and frequency of travel reveals this.

The question why we travel is one we all need to reflect on. As Leu points out: “Paige McClanahan’s book, The New Tourist, is a level headed defence of tourism that proposes a genuinely helpful framework for thinking about our own voyages…. we’ve largely forgotten ‘about the power we hold as contributors—however unwitting—to a vast and potent social force.'”

Jost Krippendorf, in his seminal text The Holiday Makers, reminded us that “every individual tourist builds up or destroys human values while travelling”.  We all make choices about how we travel, and about the tours and opportunities that we provide for our clients and guests.

Mark Twain famously opined hat travel broadens the mind: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

It may or may not. It depends how we travel, how we interact with ‘the other’, the people we encounter. Do we listen and reflect?

If we have the wherewithal, we have choices, about where, when and how we travel.

The why question is important too. This is one of the most powerful statements about why travel matters. It comes from John Coplin, FRAE, the man who delivered the RB211 aero-engine for Rolls Royce, expressing his optimism for hydrogen-powered aviation – it is a short video. Watch it to the end or skip to 4:00 where John argues passionately for the importance of travel. For “mutual trust .. we know what’s best.”