Does travel do more harm than good?
Questionable thoughts on Hawaiian Airlines
The man on the A bus in Honolulu told me I had a good energy.
I type this Sunday night while in the sky, flying out of Hawaii. I opted to stay in Honolulu based on cheap flights and poor judgement as I thought it would be a good pit stop to recover from jetlag. I now understand this is one of the most expensive cities in the world. I’ll write more about Hawaii soon, but for now I want to write about Cory on the bus.
I was riding from Waikiki to get to the Stadium where the new Skyline station starts. He got on the bus, sat down next to me, introduced himself and shook my hand. He told me he was originally from Idaho but had been living back on forth on Hawaiian Islands since he was a kid. He moved to Honolulu two months ago to start a business here. I don’t know if Cory will read this week’s Substack or not, but having him on my very first American bus ride felt like a good omen. He thinks I’ll be fine on my southern bus/train adventure.
I have been thinking about mobility, locomotion, buses, trains, planes and cars so much over the last few months.
The New Yorker recently published a controversial article, The Case Against Travel. Do yourself a favor and let this be your one free article per month from them. Or don’t. In a nutshell, the writer Agnes Callard uses opinions of philosophers like Socrates, Kant, Ralph Waldo Emerson and more to dismiss and look down on stereotypical tourism and travel. This means, most people set off to go somewhere with the idea in their head of grand travel, but in reality it’s just boring locomoting. Modern tourism is moving from one place to another without actually making anyone or anything better including yourself.
She quotes Fernando Pessoa “Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.”
She’s cynical about fun that comes with travel, which is interesting to me, especially as I think about all the joy I recently had on a trip with friends, or even the experiences I just had in Waikiki, shallow as they may be. (Waikiki in some ways felt like Las Vegas on the beach.) Yes, it was touristy, but now I know way more about Hawaii than I did before. And, I want to learn more!
Callard gets really dark towards the end.
”Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation. And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it,” she concludes.
Maybe Callard and her philosopher mates need to go chill out in Bali for a few weeks, but then again, I get where she’s coming from. I want to just travel forever, but I know that tourism, when done wrong is just another tool of mindless consumerism. Come pat the endangered turtle! Buy a $20 pineapple dream smoothie! Rent a helicopter to see the ravine! One of the harshest examples is Vang Vieng in Laos, a small humble village famously destroyed by debaucherous young backpackers.
Tourism can destroy culture, increase climate change and cheapen beauty in this world. Not to mention the carbon emissions that come from the flights to this transcendental experience. But some people travel to learn new languages, to fall in love, to never return to their original home. To uproot yourself is a fascinating choice. It will unquestionably change you. When you leave a place with intention, you get to reinvent yourself. You get a blank slate. You get to take a step back from who you are and put on new hat and glasses.
I take Callard’s point that wanting to escape your current environment for the sake of change has little to do with actual change. I’m guilty of regularly feeling a desire to leave. Whenever I feel annoyed with my current life situation, I fantasize about moving to Mexico. Here is where I need personal growth, and this article points that out. When I feel unhappy with my circumstances, it’s probably not the place, it just might be me.
Is my great exploration of Southern culture and public transportation really just a need to escape the mundanity of my current existence, while disguising it as a chance to meet people, learn things and improve my writing? How honorable!
Perhaps the New Yorker writer should have pointed out that not everyone can afford to travel, regardless of how shoestring the budget. When visiting Central America and Southeast Asia, I quickly and sadly learned that you can’t encourage everyone you meet to come visit you overseas. A return flight costs some people their yearly wage or more. This fact matters when we analyze why people travel and if it’s good or problematic. Ironically through traveling I came to see the extreme division of wealth within and between many countries. Is this an overlooked injustice? Is traveling a privilege? Does everyone deserve the right to travel?
The New Yorker article almost implied that common people can only enjoy life if they book a ticket somewhere, so this Substack is also a plea for more staycations. Seize the freaking day, y’all; you don’t even have to leave your neighborhood! The pandemic forced us to look for the joy in our surroundings. In 2020 I began enjoying exploring the Hunter Valley and other parts of NSW. My partner did up a van and we started seeing nature in ways I never had before. Just as much as I enjoy learning about cultures beyond my own, I want to learn more about the land under my feet. I look at the ocean while I ride my bike through Newcastle: bliss. Every time I connect with a traveler at the museum where I work: joy. Walking through the mangroves, I feel so lucky to be alive in such a special place.
One last thing on my Substack which has now turned into a rant, ha. To counter Callard further, I do defend tourism that’s not about cultural growth and just about having a nice time with some friends in a new place. We need to learn to do so in a sustainable way, no doubt, but even when you’re just having cocktails on the beach, you are taking time to live in the moment. And when you make time with people you love, you create memories. This is the meaning of life. What better thing to think about on your deathbed? Callard writes with disdain about her trip to the falcon hospital in Dubai, but surely she could have done the whole trip in a less superficial way and not supported questionable tourism.
And this leads me back to Cory on the bus and also Chavonnie, Travis and Denice I met Saturday on the new Skyline.
This makes me think of kind Mary who welcomed me warmly, picking me up from the Honolulu Airport at 6:30 in the morning and bought me breakfast. Later she took me on a the Aiea loop trail hike with several of her lovely friends.
You can approach every new experience as an outside observer, or you can be a part of it, and that is what I’m hoping to do on this trip. I want to meet a million Corys. It is fine to criticize tourism, and I want to hold myself accountable, and yet I push back on sweeping generalizations about it. We learn from all the different folks around us, and people make the place.
Thanks for reading. I’ve now made it to Austin, and I’m here with my dear friend Ivey, highly jet-lagged. I don’t know if any of this made sense, and I hope someone was able to make it to the end. If all goes to plan, my next Substack will be from Memphis.
So happy to have found your Substack home and follow along whilst you adventure Alex. A really interesting read that reflects a lot of the questions I’ve been sitting with around a desire to travel. Enjoy it all and keep the writing flowing, please!
That was a really good read Alex. Have a great trip!