The Value of Travel

[swan_tower]

I originally posted this as a reply to John Scalzi here, but it occurred to me that it was something that might be of interest to my local audience — especially since I’m posting all these photos from trips I’ve taken.

In discussing his own feelings about travel, Scalzi said:

The fact of the matter is I’m not hugely motivated by travel. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy it when I do it, nor that there are not places I would like to visit, but the fact of the matter is that for me, given the choice between visiting places and visiting people, I tend to want to visit people — a fact that means that my destinations are less about the locale than the company. I’d rather go to Spokane than Venice, in other words, if Spokane has people I like in it, and all Venice has is a bunch of buildings which are cool but which I will be able to see better in pictures.

To which I said:

I like seeing people, sure — but the second half of the comment is boggling to me, because it’s so radically different from my own view, in two respects.

First of all, seeing is only part of the experience. Looking at a picture is flat, whereas being there is a full-body surround-sound sensory experience. There’s sound, smell, the feeling of space or lack thereof, the process of walking through. Highgate Cemetery was more than its headstones; it was the blustery autumn day with the wind rushing through the trees raining leaves down on us and the tip of my nose going cold. Point Lobos is more than the cypresses; it’s the smell of the cypresses and the feel of the dirt under my feet and the distant barking of the sea lions. Furthermore, pictures will never show me even everything from the visual channel: they may show me the nave of the church, but usually not the ceiling, nor the floor with its worn grave slabs. They will show me the garden, but not the autumn leaf caught in the spider web between two trees. I would have to look at hundreds of pictures from Malbork Castle to capture what I saw there. (Heck, I took hundreds of pictures there!)

Second, the most memorable part to me is usually the bit I wouldn’t have thought to go looking for if I weren’t there. The first time I went to Japan, my sister and I went to see the famous temple of Ginkakuji, which I loved — but I loved even better the tiny shrine off to the left outside Ginkakuji, whose name I still don’t know. Or when I was in Winchester, and she and I walked to St. Cross outside of town; we went for the porter’s dole (old medieval tradition: even now — or at least in 1998 — if you walk up to the gate and ask for the dole, they will give you bread and water), but stayed for the courtyard with the enormous tree and the most amazingly plush grass I have ever flung myself full-length in. I can look at pictures of famous buildings in Venice, but I’m unlikely to see pictures of the stuff I wouldn’t think to look for.

I write all of this in the full awareness that I have been extremely fortunate in my travel opportunities. My father’s work has often taken him abroad, so he has a giant pile of frequent flyer miles, and both in childhood and now I’ve been able to afford trips to other countries: British Virgin Islands, Costa Rica, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Israel, Japan, India, Poland, Greece, Italy, Turkey, France, the Bahamas. It’s created a positive feedback loop: these trips have led me to really enjoy travel and the different experiences I have when I go places, so as a result I arrange more trips when I can. As a replacement, pictures don’t even begin to cut it.

Not part of my comment to Scalzi, but I will add two further observations:

1) Clearly I do see value in pictures, though, or I wouldn’t take so damn many of them.

2) What it says about my sociability that I am liable to travel to places rather than to people is left as an exercise for the reader.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[starlady]

Judging Scalzi kind of hard right now, ngl. Although I am also a person who is liable to travel to places rather than to people.

[swan_tower]

Yeah . . . it's hard not to read that as devaluing the importance of experiencing other places, people, ways of life. If you read his post, he talks about wanting to spend six months in a place rather than six days, and I can understand not wanting to be a "tourist" as such. But even a brief experience, and one mediated by sightseeing, is still valuable.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I agree. I love the physical experience of a new place. Nothing can replace that, though I research assiduously because I don't get to travel much.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

In a weird way, I think a novel is the most likely to be able to replace travel -- simply because a novel is more liable to indulge in the kind of sensory and emotional description that a nonfiction discussion won't touch. (This is presuming, of course, that the novelist has experience of the place and is conveying it well, which will not always be true. And of course you're getting their experience, not your own. But still.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

It is also worth pointing out that different places contain different people. Left to myself, I'll spend half my time abroad just people-watching: which is something else you can't do in a photograph.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm actually not much of a people-watcher, but yes: the place and the people are intertwined. This can be anything from "looking at pictures of a Hindu temple is not the same as being at that temple while people around you are praying" to "when we went to Dún Dúchathair it was deserted, except for the pair of hikers we passed as we were leaving."

[desperance.livejournal.com]

What I love most is when the local people's ways of thinking and being and interrelating are as alien to me as their architecture. Which is why the further I go, the happier I am to be there. And also why America keeps confusing the hell out of me, because superficially it looks and sounds and operates quite the same, but underneath... Yeah. These are not the ways of my people.

[ckd]

I travel for both reasons. Some travel is primarily for people; I've attended many conventions in the airport-hotel-nearby restaurant-airport mode, and will likely continue to do so. (Less so in some cities; I'm specifically planning extra London/Dublin time around Loncon/Shamrokon just so I can spend time in both cities because it's been far too long since I've visited either of them.)

Sometimes the trip is "people show me their places"; my two most recent trips to the Twin Cities, for example, didn't involve any conventions (unless you count MN Ren Fest) but were so that I could see specific things that had extra meaning to people I care about (Ren Fest, the Minneapolis Institute of Art) and also get extra time with a friend who can't travel much.

[kurayami-hime.livejournal.com]

That grass. That grass.

以上

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I'm finding that now, when I go to England, it's to see people not places. I do get to see some new places, in the course of visiting friends (like seeing Glastonbury when we went to see mevennen). It's a different way of thinking of the country.