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“The question remains: does travel writing have a future? The tales of Marco Polo, or the explorations of “Bokhara Burnes” may have contained valuable empirical information impossible to harvest elsewhere, but is there really any point to the genre in the age of the internet, when you can instantly gather reliable knowledge about anywhere in the globe? Certainly, the sort of attitudes to “abroad” that characterized the writers of the 1930s, and which had a strange afterlife in the curmudgeonly prose of Theroux and his imitators, now appears dated and racist. Indeed, the globalized world has now become so complex that notions of national character and particularity — the essence of so many 20th-century travelogues — is becoming increasingly untenable, and even distasteful. So has the concept of the western observer coolly assessing eastern cultures with the detachment of a Victorian butterfly collector, dispassionately pinning his captives to the pages of his album. In an age when east to west migrations are so much more common than those from west to east, the “funny foreigners” who were once regarded as such amusing material by travel writers are now writing some of the best travel pieces themselves. Even just to take a few of those with roots in India — Vidia Naipaul, Pico Iyer, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and Pankaj Mishra — is to list many of the most highly regarded writers currently at work.”
–William Dalrymple, “Home truths on abroad,” The Guardian, September 18, 2009
“Authenticity was a buzzword in travel, but what exactly did it mean? At its purest form you could make the argument that the only really authentic places were ones that had never seen contact with the outside world at all. There were still a few of those left — in the Amazon, perhaps in Indonesian New Guinea. But they were hardly representative; they were freakish vestiges of a changed world, and authenticity was simply everywhere; it was all authentic in one way or another. But if you were on a train with a lot of backpackers, it got too easy not to meet locals, not to get lonely, not to feel scared, and I wanted all of those things.”
–Carl Hoffman, The Lunatic Express
“Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half of our domestic troubles. The fear of an unbroken tête-à-tête for the rest of his life should, you would think, prevent any man from getting married.”
–Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels
“I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You’re going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It’s not what Tom Friedman writes about; I’m sorry. You’re going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people—Americans and Europeans—come back and go, Ohhhhh. And the light bulb goes on.”
–Henry Rollins, “Punk Rock World Traveler,” World Hum, November 2, 2011
“Taking someone’s picture doesn’t cost them anything, not in any Western commercial sense, yet the picture has value. The picture has no value for the ‘primitive’, yet the tourist pays for the right to take pictures. The primitive receives something for nothing, and benefits beyond this. Doesn’t the fame of certain primitives, and even respect for them, actually increase when the tourist carries their pictures back to the West? It seems to be the most perfect realization so far of the capitalist economists’ dream of everyone getting richer together.”
–Dean MacCannell, Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers
“Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of traveling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living — indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor.”
–Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
“Europeans may sneer at Chinese tourists who pursue Beethoven, Bordeaux and Hugo Boss with the same undiscriminating avidity. But Europeans used to tour their own continent in a similar way. The original Grand Tour was also a display of relative economic power, as the gilded youth of northern, industrializing Europe headed to France, Switzerland and Italy to pick up a veneer of continental ‘polish’ and crateloads of antique souvenirs (many of them fake). Those tourists, too, had less fun than they let on: they grumbled about the food, their rapacious guides and the discomforts of travel.”
–”Chinese Tourists: The New Grand Tour,” The Economist, December 16, 2010
“In the years after Edward Said’s Orientalism, the exploration of the East — its peoples, habits, customs and past — by travelers from the West has become a target for scholarly bombardment. Travel writers have often come to be seen as outriders of colonialism, attempting to demonstrate the superiority of Western ways by ‘imagining’ the East as decayed and degenerate. This has always seemed to me to be a narrow and prescriptive way of looking at what is, after all, one of the world’s oldest and most universal forms of literature: it takes us right back to man’s deepest literary roots, to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the wanderings of Abraham in the Old Testament, and the journeyings of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata. Over time, like poetry, but unlike the novel, the travel book has appeared in almost all the world’s cultures, from the wanderings of Li Po in Japan, through to the medieval topographies of Marco Polo, Hiuen Tsang, Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta. Only with the multi-volume travelogues of the Victorians do we enter colonial territory, and hence arrive at the birth of the modern comic books of travel, invented two generations later by such writers as Peter Fleming and Evelyn Waugh — bright young things who passed lightly through a colonial world mapped, subdued and opened up by their Victorian grandparents with their Gatling guns and survey equipment. But the attitudes of today’s travel writers are hardly those of the Brideshead generation, and as Colin Thubron has pointed out, it is ridiculously simplistic to see all attempts at studying, observing and empathizing with another culture necessarily ‘as an act of domination’.”
–William Dalrymple, “Home truths abroad,” The Guardian, September 18, 2009
“There is nothing exclusive about tourism. Quite the contrary: it is primarily inclusive. It is an industry determined to embrace you. It wants you to check in to the right hotels; it wants you to spend as much as you can on fatuous souvenirs; it wants you to do Machu Picchu or the Taj Mahal; it wants you to have the Rainforest experience or the Mysterious East experience or the Rose Red City Half as Old as Time experience and it doesn’t terribly mind if you also have the fleeced-by-muggers-on-Copacabana-Beach experience. And when your fifteen days are up it wants you to bugger off, taking with you no local currency and maybe the odd disgusting parasite or two.”
–James Hamilton-Paterson, “The End of Travel,” Granta #94 (2006)
“When a person says, in a foreign place, “I feel right at home here,” he is making a statement about the nature of travel, not in the texture of the place he’s in. …I don’t belittle this sort of travel, which I regard as Traveling As A Version Of Being At Home; but it is wrong to mistake it as the sort of travel that allows a person to make discoveries. Many people travel in order to feel at home, or to have an idealized experience of home: Spain is Home-plus-Sunshine; India is Home-plus-Servants; Africa is Home-plus-Elephants-and-Lions; Ecuador is Home-plus-Volcanoes. It is not possible for people to travel in large numbers and have it any other way. In order to process and package travelers in great numbers, a system has to be arrived at. This system, in an orderly way, defeats the traditional methods of travel and has made true travel almost obsolete. In order for large numbers of Americans to visit Bangkok, Bangkok must become somewhat like America. The change in China, since the arrival of foreign travelers, has been enormous; and the result has been some very un-Chinese-looking hotels, food, buses, and so forth. It seemed to me in China that these holiday-makers would, in the end, bring about a different sort of cultural revolution.”
–Paul Theroux, Sunrise with Seamonsters
