The Spirit of Travel

When lecturing, travel writer Rick Steves likes to recall his first experience in Europe at the age of 14 and how, at first, he resented traveling with his parents to Scandinavia to visit relatives. All he wanted to do during his summer vacation was play with his friends back home in the States. As the days and weeks passed by, young Steves’ teenage angst diminished and he came to love the Europe he initially loathed. He then recalls the realization he had when he saw a group of backpackers not much older than he was hopping on a train without a parent or guardian in sight. He remembers looking at his parents and thinking, “My god, I don’t need you! Those kids have all of Europe as their playground and I can too.” At that moment, Steves vowed to make annual pilgrimages Europe and has been keeping his vow ever since.

While my teenage self loved Europe straight away, I can relate perfectly to Rick Steves’ dream of a self-led European adventure. Always striving to exert my travel independence from my parents, I recall at age twelve pleading before the parental judges a case that I was convinced was devoid of logical flaws and was sure to meet their approval. Like a good lawyer, I acknowledge the weak parts of my argument and admitted that, yes, twelve years old is a young age to be traveling alone to Europe and misadventures were bound to happen. “But,” I added with presence, “we learn from our mistakes and think of how proficient a traveler I’ll be if I start making those mistakes at twelve rather than at age eighteen when most ‘normal’ people start traveling independently.” To my surprise, the logic of my case failed to sway my parents and the motion was never carried.

Feeling as though the battle had been lost but the war was still up for grabs, I switched strategy and pressed for incremental travel emancipation rather than total freedom. Citing differences of interests, I petitioned for and received more and more “free time” on our trips. In London, for example, my parents were interested in learning of the history of Westminster Abbey while I preferred learning more about the history of the iron maiden at the Torture Museum. I was granted an hour or two of independence to gawk at horrible torture devices and they were free to stare at stained glass and stone-cut tombs.

As I accumulated more and more free time while traveling with my parents, I realized that the travel “misadventures” I predicted at age twelve were more than mere rhetoric for my argument, I realized that misadventure abounds when the young and naïve travel. If this blog was a movie, right now there would be a montage playing that would start with me getting horribly lost while trying to find Abbey Road and winding up in the London suburbs. The montage would then go to a shot of me spending way too much on a crappy knock-off watch in the streets of Bangkok after being convinced of its authenticity and would cumulate with a scene of me spending hour after paranoid hour trying to find my hotel in Amsterdam after visiting a “coffee shop.”

The weekend before last, Lisa and I took quick a trip up to Amsterdam. Despite my teenage misadventure there, I was very excited about returning to the city. The Amsterdam I remembered was a progressive, exciting, and beautiful place. I kept telling Lisa how much she’d like it, how laidback the people were, and I probably added a political comment or two about how enlightened their policies are. Returning this time, however, a funny thing happened. I realized that while the city itself was exactly the way I remember it, I had changed. Suddenly the cool, progressive, and enlightened young travelers I recalled had turned into retarded slackers who were too loud, too high or drunk, and there was far too many of them.

As difficult as this is to admit, my parents were right. If my parents had by some strange twist of fate let me loose to gallivant through Europe at age twelve, the European pilgrimages I would have made most likely would not have extended beyond Amsterdam’s Red Light district. And I would have been worst off because of it. As a relatively older traveler, I have only one gripe with the youth who flock to places like Amsterdam merely to experience debauchery in a foreign country. That is that while they are traveling and experiencing adventures and misadventures alike, they are missing the point. They are traveling but going nowhere. They are the younger versions of the people who travel to Japan and immediately look for the nearest McDonalds. Now, I’m not saying eating at Mickey D’s in a foreign country is any worse than eating it at home. I am saying that traveling a long way to do the same old thing you do at home is counter to the whole spirit of traveling.

While the “spirit of traveling” has been captured by artist since ink was first laid on paper and its praises are timeworn, a music group that Lisa recently discovered has the best rendition I’ve heard in quite some time. I believe the first two verses of Future Island’s song, “Give Us the Wind,” captures the “spirit of travel” well:

We set out to find something to hold

When seeking truth the answer is the road

When seeking wisdom the journey is you home

Fight through the wind, fight through the rain, fight through the cold

We left ourselves behind on dancing wires

The love ones we’ve left back home will be our choir

Let the doubters be the stick, the thorn, the brier

Fight through the wind, fight through the rain, dance in the fire

The Necessary Pain of Travel

In 1869 the American Publishing Company started printing and sending out copies of Mark Twain’s newest book, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress, which chronicled Twain’s travel adventures through Europe and the Holy Land aboard the USS Quaker City. Contained within the humorous tome of nearly 700 pages is a line that continues to inspire men and women to pack their bags and hit the road. “Travel,” he wrote, “is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness...” Eleven years later, Twain published another book that featured an essay entitled, “The Awful German Language,” which comically criticizes a language spoken by tens of millions of people for its nonsensical structure and then proceeds to make recommendations on how best the language can be improved. While there is little doubt that Twain’s essay on the difficulty of learning a new language was written in a tongue-in-cheek manner, the dichotomy of his musings nevertheless brings to light a pain that is endured by many expatriates and seasoned travelers. That pain comes in the physical act of expanding the scope of one’s worldview by traveling and exposing oneself to cultural difference. Perhaps if I frame what I am trying to say in more personal terms, I will be able to convey my point more clearly.

Lisa and I have now lived in Europe for three months and four days. Since our arrival we’ve seen many splendid things. We see the stunning bouquet of Paris’s lights blossom whenever the rain slicks the cobblestone streets and the gentle red glow of each streetlamp is reflected in such a way that you feel like you’re living in an Impressionist painting. We’ve seen Medieval castles and wine vineyards in the Loire Valley and Chateaus situated in perfect pastoral landscapes in the northern French countryside. We’ve seen narrow canals spanned by 15^th century footbridges resting in the shadows of towering belfries in Bruges and we’ve seen the flat-stoned beaches of Nice where the green piedmont of the Alps gives way to blue majesty of the Mediterranean. In the last three months Lisa and I have seen many beautiful things that we will never forget. But perhaps more impactful to our lives is the pain we’ve endure in order to see those beautiful sights.

Believe it or not there is pain in travel and much more pain in living abroad. There is physical pain, the kind one’s back experiences from the unnatural act of being over 30 years old and sleeping on a futon mattress, and there is psychological pain. The psychological pain outweighs the physical pain every time because it can afflict one’s ego as well as one’s cognitive mind. Being a stranger in a strange land means this type of pain will spring up in the most unlikely places. Places such as a French bank. Merely entering into a bank here for the first time challenges a foreigner’s faculties and can assault their ego with the elaborate sequence of buttons, intercoms, and doors one must navigate in order to reach the teller. If you think of all the booby-traps the Goonies had to disarm before reaching the pirate ship you’ll get a more or less accurate understanding of the difficulty level of entering a French bank. Just as in the movie, the last challenge is the hardest. You’re confronted with a set of glass doors separated by a small room only big enough for one person. You press the intercom button for the teller to unlock the first door and when you hear the buzz you enter the small room and hear the door lock behind you. Seeing another intercom button next to the second door you press it and wait once again for the buzz to unlock the door. The buzz never comes. Giving dagger-eyes to the teller who is assisting a customer but could easily buzz you in, you commence to press the intercom button relentlessly assuming that they are ignoring you. While you are cursing the French and straining your brain to figure out how and why you’re locked into this glass coffin in the middle of the bank, the crushing blow to the ego comes. Fed up, you aggressively push on the second door only to realize that it was unlocked the whole time and the intercom was not actually signaling the teller at all.

While many of you out there might be tempted to reduced the pain of these types of mishaps to mere “pains in the ass” and leave it at that, I contend that I was compensated for the pain my ego and mind suffered the day I stood for a long three minutes inside the glass security box at the bank. I contend that my pain was compensated with knowledge. For that day I learned not to automatically assume the worst of people. I assumed that it was the teller’s sick sense of humor that locked me in that box when really it was my own ignorance…although, I should go on record here and say that I think that the security sequences to reach a teller at a French bank are absolutely insane. But how metaphoric is that glass box for a life without travel? You observe people from afar and make assumptions about their morality without ever meeting them face to face. That is the “prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness” that Twain wrote was killed by travel.

Killing one’s own prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness with travel is painful. It’s painful to the mind, the ego, and, at times, one’s back. Sometimes the traveler laments the pain with a little tongue-in-cheek humor the way Twain did with “The Awful German Language” or the way a lot of expats I know talk about the French. But while cultural differences and even entire languages are sometimes the butt of a traveler’s joke, a tinge of both love and pain can always be detected when they utter it. And when a traveler returns home to native soil and looks back on all the pain they endured while abroad, they know that the pain was the necessary pain of growth.