Life

End of the Go It Alone Adventure

People used to travel to discover things for themselves. Facebook changed that. Everyone else gets to look in now.

By Nick Smith, 31 Aug 2010, TheTyee.ca

Feet dangling off a cliff

Even here, connected to the folks back home.

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Recently, I asked a good friend how his daughter's travels in Australia were going. For the past couple of years I had listened in as she and her high school sweetheart planned their year-long, antipodal adventure. Since I had spent a good chunk of my 20s wandering the globe but had never made it to Down Under, I was genuinely curious. After a brief catch-up, he suggested that I add her as a friend on Facebook if I wanted to see the daily pictures and get in on the latest adventures.  

Laptop travelling came easy to me. As soon as she accepted my friend request, I logged on to her page and could see that she was in Perth and had updated her status just hours before. There she was on Scarborough Beach, smiling in shades in the late-November sun. This was so much more immediate than a generic postcard received two weeks later, already past its best-before. This was fresh produce, I thought, still succulent and crisp. In the next frame, her boyfriend stood on the same beach, clad in an Australia-emblazoned t-shirt. Though her thumb partially obscured the frame, I could see that he was now sporting a scruffy travel-beard. Already, her younger sister had commented. "The water looks so pretty... want to surf... now." Though Facebook was urging me to "write a comment," also being a friend of her parents, I held off.

As an observer, it was interesting to check in every few days, as the young couple headed off to hike the Bibbulmun Track, rode camels in the desert, snapped images of kangaroos lounging in the shade of Australian pines, and dove out of an airplane just outside of Sydney (OK, just he did the skydiving. She stayed back at a café and updated her Facebook status).

Eventually, I joined the crowd taking part in the journey, first by "liking" a couple of photos, then by leaving comments, to which she responded. As much as I enjoyed the process of travelling by proxy, I could not help but feel that collectively, we were holding them back from leaving home.

I wondered if, while discussing their adventures with their friends, they were really able to leave behind their everyday frame of mind, if they would be able to think outside of the constraints imposed by a Canadian, suburban upbringing. Were they able to use travel to broaden their worldview, or did it remain narrowed by the digital lens that followed them?

Virtues of a lonely planet

During my vagabond days I took in large swaths of Europe, Asia and Central America, by foot, bike, train, bus and boat. I remember well how it took a while to get into the "travelling groove." First, I had to pass through the initial excitement, where all of my surroundings were more detailed, more colourful and gritty and stuffed with life than anything at home. Next, homesick, I would long for familiarity. Eventually I would begin to feel untethered and could accept my travel experiences as not a respite from my life, but as my life right now. I would become immersed in another land until it no longer felt foreign, often going months without hearing from home. I learned to speak French, Spanish and Italian, and bits of Turkish, Thai and Czech.

When we first spend time in a culture other than our own, we see it through the lens of home, reinforcing our own preconceptions of what we expected to see. Just as our eyes adjust to the dark, given time abroad, we begin to see details in a light we did not know was there.

This process can be humorous, painful or both, but it is always unexpected.

Once at a Calcutta hostel, a cleaning woman stole money from my wife and I while we slept. When the caretaker brought us to her place to speak with her, we saw how she lived in a lean-to and how her baby slept on a shelf above the kerosene stove. We came to tell her that we saw her flee our room and that she was witnessed dropping our empty money belts in the stairway. We came to demand our money back. Instead, we told her boss that we understood her desperate need to get some respite from her crushing poverty.

Another time, while studying Vietnamese in Saigon, our language instructor commented on a small bag of groceries we had carried in. When we playfully offered her a banana, we were surprised that she accepted. When we later saw the same banana on her boss’s desk, we learned that the Vietnamese never refuse a gift.

For me, these transformative moments came when I was completely unleashed, no longer roped in by the social dynamics that defined who I was at home. It was in this freedom that I became someone who had travelled. I was not just the old me with passports stamps and stories to tell, but someone changed by experience.

The pull of others

I never asked my friend's daughter why she and her beaux cut their trip short from 12 months to four. Was it the messages declaring, "Miss you!" from friends and family? Could the pictures of their crowd smiling on the slopes of Whistler have had an effect? I'd like to think that they did not feel like they were being followed and were able to get into their own travelling groove, that was as real to them as mine was to me, but I don't know.

It seems that as the outside world becomes more familiar to us, with pictures and video constantly streamed to our homes from all corners, the less we are able to penetrate it. When we do step out, we choose to remain digitally tethered to the familiar. We end up seeing the world as though through binoculars. It looks so close, but when we reach out to touch, it falls beyond our grasp. [Tyee]

Nick Smith is a veteran public school teacher who lives on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia. You can read his series Tyee reader-funded series "Teaching that Inspires" here.

11 Comments:

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  • Mkitty

    1 year ago

    oh yeah...

    I can totally relate to what you are saying Nick. I travelling and lived and worked in Southeast Asia when I was just 18 and 19 years old. I wrote home every few weeks or once a month, and those letters became my travel log, but I think I would have not had time to "be in the moment" if I felt pressue to constantly update my facebook status and provide pictures of every day. Although I really love reading some of my friends and acquaintences travel blogs, I too think: how do they have the time to do all this and be enjoying their adventure?

    I think it's one thing if you are a paid journalist and that is your job to take the photos and provide the daily blog updates, but for the average person, travel *is* the time to discover yourself, make mistakes, get in trouble and resolve it, discover who you are and discover the reality of the rest of the world.

  • Mkitty

    1 year ago

    oops..typos

    Sorry, typing too fast...that would be I *was* travelling...and felt *pressure*...LOL...

  • Bobb999

    1 year ago

    "People used to travel to

    "People used to travel to discover things for themselves. Facebook changed that. Everyone else gets to look in now."

    -Thankfully, not in my case. I deleted my Facebook account 2 months ago.
    I wasn't a big user anyway, & found it to be TMI (Too Much Info.) too often about some friends & relatives. My best friends don't happen to be Facebookers anyway, & email suffices.

    -Poised to do an imminent camping trip re-visiting the Stein Valley & Nahatlatch Lakes/River, I will NOT be taking along a laptop, iPhone, or even a basic cell phone.I intend to commune with nature, & look forward to being blissfully free of the accursed, intrusive, distracting info-highway! The net has its time & place (like today at home in the city), but I can't think of a more effective way to distort & spoil a wilderness adventure than to stay slave-tethered to e-networks the while. The only network I want to plug into this upcoming week is the natural world's vast one!

  • warbler

    1 year ago

    Unleashed

    Nick, yours has been one of the few articles about Facebook or social media on the Tyee that asks the right questions, in my humble opinion.

    "Were they able to use travel to broaden their worldview, or did it remain narrowed by the digital lens that followed them?"

    This is a great question. And its answer has implications for not just world travel, but for all sorts of social realms.

    I lived and worked abroad for a number of years, and this lifestyle choice was always a means to the more important end of exploring the world, and getting direct experience of other cultures, as "unleased" as possible. Thankfully most of my experiences had no laptop tracking my every move, no blog or FB to influence my every update to home. The only lens I had was that of a trusty Pentax K1000. And even then, because I was using real film, I used this lens sparingly and discriminatingly, unlike today's generation of reality TV traveller, who seem to always have a digi-cam rolling or snapping - I wonder if this, too, impedes their worldview.

    Many of my "transformative moments" involved fear, loathing, alienation and isolation, and in hindsight, these often end up being the most rewarding, character-building of the moments. I can say without hesitation that if I did have laptop, WiFi and a virtual connection to the comforts of home, those rewards would have been greatly diminished.

    And funny you mention your friend's daughter. I also have a friend, whose 17-yr-old daughter went to Asia last year for a 1-year high school exchange. One of the big issues for the daughter was that she have a new laptop, so she could stay in touch with family and friends. Well, when culture shock and homesickness set in for this kid (as it does for all travellers), her Internet connection / laptop became a convenient crutch. After a few months, she became a virtual prisoner to her Facebook. She stayed mostly in her room in her free time, watching North American TV online, FB'ing every 3 minutes for hours on end, online shopping, and doing just about anything to avoid those transformative cross-cultural moments. By the end of her year stay, it was evident she had seen no cultural sites, no museums, very little of anything within her own region, much less the country she was living in. She had avoided interaction with the natives at all cost. None of this would have been possible without her FB, laptop and virtual links back to home. I think her transformative moment, if there is one, will come later in life, when she realizes that she made little of a unique opportunity of a lifetime.

  • Leonasha

    1 year ago

    speaking of typos...

    2nd-last paragraph: how many beaux did this girl go to Australia with?!!

  • doggone

    1 year ago

    it ain't over yet

    Wondered why I found those phone/cameras in the ditch in odd places.
    Went for supper (which was pretty good) last night at my daughter's. She spent the past couple of weeks in central Europe Big Town and some country.
    Once the supper was cleared away the laptop comes out and there are hundreds of photos we "shared" of the trip. I had brought my Digi-cam with at least 500 pix from our visit to Eastern Europe this spring just in case she ran out of material - Luckily my wife put an end to the nonsense saying she was tired.
    Some Sci-Fi short story I read in the early '60s described "Couch Surfing" in remarkable detail. In a sense the idea is not that bad:
    You don't need a passport
    Your own toilet is close at hand
    You will never be identified as "The Ugly --------------"
    Fill in the blank
    Only problem: It is not real
    Good observation here.
    TheTyee:
    What's with the tiny font in the comments?

  • alive

    1 year ago

    same old

    re warbler's account of the 17 year old and her laptop, that is not much different from the older generations idea of staying in american style hotels and eat american food there, going on sidetrips guided by americans etc etc.

  • doggone

    1 year ago

    couch surfing

    Lately has another meaning. What I meant was sitting on your own couch watching input from around the whirl

  • RickW

    1 year ago

    Simple Answer

    Our society has come to eschew singularities. To be alone is taboo.

  • Fii

    1 year ago

    freaky facebook world

    It annoys me that all my great pics from travelling around Asia 10-14 yrs ago are in print. I guess I could scan them all... so none of them are on my facebook, but they are waaaay better photos than a lot of the stuff I see on other people's pages, haha.

    I tend to agree half the challenge/fun/learning experience of travelling is being disconnected from home and learning to go with that. When I arrived in Cheongju South Korea in 1996 I didn't have an e-mail acct yet, and no home phone. I had to wander these alleys in my new 'hood to find a public phone and call my parents... then I'd go back to my apt and sit there and listen to the dude on CNN (only English channel I got) to keep me from dissolving into tears. It was a week before I met another English speaker or spoke to anyone from Canada (other than my mum and dad from that phone booth).

    Most fascinating week of my life.

  • redheadwalking

    1 year ago

    I have also had the

    I have also had the experience of reading friends' Facebook updates about some amazing place they're visiting in another country and thought, 'Why are you wasting your time typing on your computer [or mobile device, more likely]? Don't you want to fully enjoy this amazing place?' I find it sad, and I partly blame the existence and widespread adoption of mobile devices.

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