Cheap Philosophizing

Let's say this: Most Americans don't seem to get travel. We won't say that we're culturally ignorant - let's just say that we're a little culturally isolated.

Most Americans want vacations, nice comfy trips in luxurious surroundings, where they don't have to worry about a thing. This is pampering.

People will say "I work hard, I want to enjoy myself" on my vacation. Granted, we understand this, and we've had some nice four-day stays in the Caribbean doing just this. But we don't think you work hard to go and blow it all on needless luxuries and pampering - you should work hard to have a nice life with your friends and family. Not so that you blow all your money on some five-room suite with a view somewhere. Take that money, and treat a big group of your best friends to a bare bones camping trip. You'll remember that a lot more fondly than some luxurious suite somewhere.

We have to agree with Arthur Frommer, one of the grand-daddies of the travel business when he says that it is unconscionable what the commercial travel operators try to pass off as travel. And they do this very effectively, with lots and lots of ads on TV, with slick magazines like Conde Nast Traveller, and with articles Travel sections in newspapers that read like they came straight from a resort company's PR firm.

So Americans especially spend too much money chasing a "sanitized" travel experience, one that emphasizes comfort and oppulence at the expense of knowledge and experience. Too many people go to foreign countries, and don't speak or interact at all with a single local. Might as well stay home, as far as we can tell.

So what is Travel about?

Travel is nourishment for the soul. It's pretty good for the mind, too, but mostly for the soul.

Here's what you learn:

How you do in strange surroundings (i.e. how adventurous you really are)
How dependent you are on familiar people things in your day-to-day life (makes you appreciate them more!)
What makes a culture - you see from how people differ what their culture is made of
A little bit about "human nature" - i.e. what's the core humanity below all the cultural baggage (everyone wants love, they want to take care of their children, to have friends, to feel good about themselves, their families, their home, and their work; they want respect and love etc. etc. etc.)
What it's like to be an outcast - gives you a little more humility
The role of "stuff" and money in life - it's really important, but not everything; here we go into how poor people are often happy, how travelers sometimes totally drop, (but, see 2 above - it's hard to break the ties with the familiar!)
About cultural imperialism - i.e. what "baywatch" is doing to the world

We travel to leave what we know behind, and to see how we do in strange surroundings. We travel to see how others live, to gain perspective on ourselves, and how we live.

We travel to see how people are everywhere different, yet everywhere the same. In doing this, we see what is elemental in our lives, and what is just an adaption to our local surroundings.

We travel to make connections with people with whom we seem to have nothing in common. And when we make those connections, we realize that we do have things in common, important, powerful things.

We travel to learn what it is to be human. Not American, not French, not Russian, not Pakistani. Human.

In a way, we travel also to experience being an outcast. To be without a home, without all the support provided by our friends, family, acquaintences, and familiar surroundings. This separation is important for a couple of reasons. First, it toughens us, it provides many of us with our first real taste of independence. We know several young travellers who have said that when they hit the road it was the first time they truly felt adult. (Till then, they had been sheparded from family, to college, to job, whatever, without ever being truly independent.) But more important, travel may may you appreciate for the first time what's important about home, what your friends and family really mean to you.

American's are brought up with the myth of the rugged individual, and that myth is certainly promoted by our society's mobility. But travel has really opened our eyes to the fallacy in this myth. Man is a social creatures, and having a home, friends, family, a society that we belong to is important, maybe essential for our sanity. Even the most outcast people - bums, hobos, homeless people, usually organize into little groups, little social support systems. (icky)