Fourteen months ago I left my Moms’ house and childhood home to travel around the world without using a plane. If you count all the false starts, the living in my various vans, the tree planting, pine cone picking, hitchhiking, WWOOFing, and general vagabondary that’s defined my life since I finished school – you could say that the trip lasted closer to three years. Now, after however long you decide to call it, I’m back where I started this whole thing: sitting on a reclining couch in my Moms’ living room reflecting on my temporary suburban existence and subsequent plans.
I’ve been procrastinating writing this post, mostly because I wasn’t sure what to write it about. I decided to go through some of my older posts in search of inspiration. Good idea! I struck inspirational gold in my very first post (dated January 4th, 2013) where I was confronted by proof of just how much my perspective has changed since the earliest conception of my trip. In case you can’t remember what I wrote three years ago, I started this blog with a long excerpt from Richard Haliburton’s 1925 travelogue The Royal Road to Romance. In it he wrote (and I quoted):
I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic. The romantic – that was what I wanted.
It’s not insignificant that I chose this passage. It meant enough to me to copy 605 words of it verbatim and publish it as the first post on my newly minted blog. I remember sitting in my university library and carefully scanning and cropping a photo of Haliburton standing next to Mt. Fujiyama. I remember the strong sense of recognition I felt reading his book for the first time, like I’d stumbled across something I’d written to myself from a previous life.
There is such a little time that your youth will last – such a little time. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty” – I was already a year past twenty – “becomes sluggish. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!”
I, too, was twenty one when I copied out that text. Now, at the wizened age of twenty four, and having more or less mirrored Halliburton’s flightless circumnavigation, I have very different thoughts on the romance of travel.
Halliburton’s writing comes from the romantic school, where the beauty of life and nature is extolled with a zeal that can be a little overwhelming to the modern reader: “Cool and clean, the wind, frolicking down the aisle of trees, tousled my hair, and set my blood to dancing. Never had I known a night so overflowing with beauty and with poetry.” That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.
But so many of us continue the tradition of romantic writing when we present and edit our lives on the internet. It’s something of a tired critique these days and there’s endless discussion in the media about the agony of instagram and facebook contributing to depression. We highlight the best and omit the worst. Could it be that my idol, the inspiration for my whole trip, Richard Halliburton, was involved in some sort of an archaic, pre-instagram version of image manipulation? That his adventure stories aren’t faithful representations of what long-term travel is like?
He was, after all, in the business of selling stories. He was good at it too – a best selling author during the great depression and practically a household name throughout the 30’s. Newspapers would regularly publish updates of his whereabouts and he was pals with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Douglas Fairbanks, and Ayn Rand. He owned a balling modernist home on the California coast.
But, success begets criticism and in 1930 Vanity Fair anticipated my cynical interpretation of Halliburton’s romanticism:
“because [he] has made a glorious racket out of Dauntless Youth; because his books are marvelously readable, transparently bogus, extremely popular, and have made their author a millionaire; because his invariable picture of himself (patent pending) is that of a diffident, romantic boy; because he is the most popular ladies club lecturer in America, and every knock Vanity Fair gives him is just a boost.”
Most people these days, unless they’re really geeky about travel literature, have never heard of Richard Halliburton nor his exploits. But the self promotional traveler and the commercial romanticization of travel live on. We’re told from a thousand sources that if we don’t drop everything and explore the world, #yolo, or carpe diem, then we’re impotent and close minded.
Travel isn’t a luxury, nor simply a fun thing to do with your free time – it is fulfillment, wisdom, and happiness itself. If you don’t travel, you’re only reading one page of the book of life.
A short video called 7 things everybody learns travelling solo popped up on my Facebook feed recently. It has over a million views and a few of my friends had liked it. The video is peopled by attractive young people drinking on beaches, jumping off waterfalls, swimming in the ocean, riding (possibly stealing?) a motorcycle, using a vintage camera. The whole thing is edited with the faux-vintage filters that instagram has popularized. It finishes with a bold call to action, asking us: WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?
On the surface, these types of things are about inspiring people to fully live their lives. Which, of course, there’s nothing wrong with. But what is the minimum wage worker, struggling to make ends meet, to make of the necessity to travel? Or those of us with family obligations – a sick relative or a child to support? And then there’s the many of us saddled with student debt? Should we follow the carpe diem mantra and bury ourselves deeper? Do we really need to visit a tropical beach or a Buddhist monastery to live a fulfilling life?
Don’t be thinking that I regret my travels. At times – feeling the wind in my hair in the middle of the Pacific, or waiting for a ride with an old friend on a dirt road in the foothills of the Himalayas – I felt alive, peaceful, and truly in the moment. Other times – walking down a never ending highway with no shoulder, hitchhiking alone, watching the Walking Dead on youku (the Chinese version of youtube) all day while waiting for a visa, meeting no English speakers for days on end – I felt lonely, isolated, and apathetic.
I’m not trying to say that travel is bunk, I just want to add my own voice to counter the pseudo-inspirational travel narrative that dominates the internet. If I’ve learned one thing it’s that the most meaningful moments in life have little to do with where you are. Beaches and mountain vistas make great backgrounds for inspirational quotes, but the novelty quickly fades once you’re there. Some of the most narrow minded people I’ve met were travelers talking about enlightenment on the beaches of Thailand.
Gnarly Travels 