The Trials of Travel

A blog I enjoy visiting regularly is Here Now, Gone Before Long, formerly known as "More Original Refrigerator Art", and run by One Who Goes By Many Names but, given that he signs his own comments on that blog as "Your Name Here", for the sake of clarity and brevity let's call this man of mystery "YNH". For some while – I haven't checked, but it feels like it must have been years – YNH has been posting photographs from his backfiles, and in particular those taken on an intensive, American-style tour of Europe (Paris, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Florence...) made in 2011. Now, I have to say that these are some of the best, most extraordinary "holiday snaps" I've ever seen: in the main a distinctive, quirky, well-observed set of "street" themes, documented and processed with a characteristic and consistent style and approach. Sure, he did also once document an operation on his knee joint, too, but we won't mention that gruesome interlude. Some people think it takes great courage to photograph in the street, which it does, but I think – no, let's be honest, I know – it actually takes equal courage (or at least an heroic indifference to the feelings of others) to incur the wrath of your travel companions, as you make your way to some much-anticipated touristic rendezvous, by stopping to compose yet another shot of yet another crumbling shopfront. "FFS, come on, and hurry it up, you – we're hungry!" [1]

Anyway, in a recent post YNH commented:

Most of our travel on this trip in 2011 was by sleeper/night train (Paris to Berlin, Prague to Vienna, Vienna to Florence, then back to Paris). Not doing that again.

Getting too old to schlep luggage—and that was ten years ago—, live in very confined spaces without being able to see the world we pass through outside. Not sure what is better, but this is no answer for us.

Then again, we may well not have another opportunity now. The memories, though, live on…most happily…through my pictures.

To which I replied:

Personally, I have come to dislike long-distance travel by any affordable means. A private jet would make all the difference. TBH I'm not even that keen on the hour and a bit it takes to take a train from Southampton to London, although now I haven't been able to do it for a year due to Covid lockdowns it has taken on a glow of nostalgia...

The only thing worse than European sleeper trains is the 24-hour car ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao in an aeroplane-style reclining seat. Never again. Actually, no, worse than that is being stuck at the roadside as night falls, trying to hitch a ride out of Amsterdam in 1971 -- some of those guys are probably still there.

Which sparked off my own personal mental showreel of traveller's tales. The horror, the horror! The delays, the boredom, the anxiety, the hitchhiked lifts and taxi rides from Hell, the wrong platforms, the incomprehensible PA announcements ("Wait, did she just say my name??"), the spilled luggage, the lost passports, the cockroaches and scorpions, the sleepless nights above 24-hour discos and beneath all-night rutting, shouting, and fighting hotel guests... All this and more, much more, despite the fact that, apart from one visit to the USA, I've never even journeyed outside the relative familiarity of Europe.

When you're young, of course, these things are the whole point of travel. No kid today who can afford a bit of crazy-time in exotic places wants to rock up at university without a decent fund of gap-year tales, and these days there is a whole third-world industry dedicated to meeting that very first-world need. The dangers of ending up raped, robbed, and bleeding by the dusty roadside seem impossibly remote to the young, and are, after all, probably statistically on a par with getting knocked down by a car or mugged on some drunken night back home, anyway. But those ordinary risks are not enough for some. A couple of years ago an old friend – someone I'd shared some youthful travel-time with in the 1970s, back when travel was travel – took some lengthy trips through South East Asia and India, in the aftermath of some turmoil in his life. This was not the remedy I would have chosen myself, but some people appear to find solace in rising to the challenges of discomfort and unfamiliarity; it's why men used to join the French Foreign Legion, after all. However, his reports back were entertaining, not least because of his astonishment at the sheer stupidity of some of the recreational activities laid on for young western backpackers.

The one that sticks in my mind (perhaps because it might just have appealed to my own youthful appetite for a dare) was so-called "tubing". It seems that in Laos you could ingest a quantity of magic mushrooms, chased down by any number of evil alcoholic and/or narcotic concoctions, get high as a very high kite, settle yourself into an inflated tyre inner-tube, and float off down the fast-flowing Nam Song river, destination presumably unknown. On your way downriver you would get pulled by a rope into riverside bars, where you could top up and complexify your high with various shots, smokes, whatever... Utter madness, frankly, and I suspect that it must have been the youth of Australia who were to blame for originating such lunatic displays of bravado. People died – actually died – when tubing with alarming regularity, and yet it was incredibly popular as a rite of passage until the Laotian government realised that this was far too stupid, even as a way of extracting cash from wealthy western kids in search of anecdote-worthy kicks, and decided to ban it. Or they tried to ban it, anyway; no doubt illicit tubing, or similar cheap thrills of an even more spectacularly ill-advised nature, continue to this day. Or would, had Covid not put a crimp in everybody's travel plans.

At the other extreme, I suppose the nearest I've ever come to the private jet experience referred to in my blog comment above was touring down through France one summer in the 1980s in a brand-new Audi 100 Avant CD estate, borrowed by one of my travelling companions from her mother. I'd never driven in a luxury car before – or rather, been driven, as I had yet to take a driving test – and the whole experience was rather like rolling through France on a soft, leather-upholstered sofa, complete with air-conditioning, top-end stereo, the works. Roadside police would sometimes salute as we cruised past, and whenever we pulled into some rural hotel for the night, the staff would hurry out to grab our bags from the capacious luggage compartment – presumably in anticipation of a substantial tip from these wealthy foreign tourists – only to recoil at the scruffy rucksacks and carrier-bags of unwashed clothes and half-eaten food they found stuffed inside. You have to wonder whether they suspected we'd stolen the car.

Ordinary commercial air-travel, of course, is an unspeakable foretaste of Hell. I can't imagine anyone anticipates it with any pleasure (unless, of course, they are en route to the Foreign Legion, seeking solace by rising to the challenges of discomfort and unfamiliarity). It wasn't always like that, however. I remember when my father was involved in the installation of some conveyors in the SIMCA car factory at Poissy, France in the late 1950s. To fly from London to Paris on a BEA Viscount airliner was an enormous privilege, and business passengers were treated like VIPs. He was only 40 then, and would return home from these trips bearing gifts and, as it seemed to me aged five, swathed in a Sinatra-like aura of masculine sophistication: I imagine these flights were highlights in a life not overburdened with experiences of luxury or privilege. And I bet they didn't have to hustle onto the plane with sharp elbows, just to make sure of getting a bag into the overhead locker before the inconsiderate dickheads on the other side of the aisle managed to stuff it with their bulky coats and excess duty-frees. Or await the inevitable announcement of the "brief delay" – waiting for take-off clearance, or a refuelling truck, or a replacement pilot for the one just led away in handcuffs – that ends up lasting an interminable hour or two. Grr...

So, whoever the idiot was who first said "it's not the destination, it's the journey", they had probably never used the equivalent of a budget airline, or – as I did once, in the days when I could still think of it as fun – stood much of the way from Athens to Paris in the corridor of an overcrowded train, a stopping service amusingly named the Orient Express, which peasant women clutching live chickens would join for a couple of stops, like the local bus service. Even more amusingly, the uniformed guards (of whom there seemed rather more than necessary) would squeeze up and down the train, selling desperate tourists tickets for guaranteed seats (not me, I'd more or less run out of money) once the train reached Belgrade. At which point, all the Greek personnel got off, to be replaced by rather fewer Yugoslavs, who denied all knowledge of any such arrangement. I'm not sure, now, how long that journey took – three days and two nights, I think – but rarely has a destination been so welcome, or a journey so unenlightening. Except, I suppose, into the ways of underpaid men in uniform. Admittedly, I did also see some spectacular fireworks as we finally emerged from the claustrophobia of the Simplon Tunnel, although on reflection I'll never be sure on which side of my exhausted eyelids that was really happening.

Mass travel and tourism are clearly Bad Things, environmentally-speaking, and charges of hypocrisy or elitism may embarrass a few, like me, into travelling less, but will not dent the scale of the industry. Regrettably, it's unlikely that even the experience of Covid will disconnect the idea of "holiday" from "faraway destinations" in most people's minds. Quite the contrary: the wheelie-bag [2] hordes will flood onto whatever absurdly cheap flights are on offer as soon as the boarding gates re-open. "We've earned it!", they will claim. The idea that the world is essentially a leisure resource has taken root, and "two weeks of sunshine abroad" has become an entitlement, virtually a right, that every first-world citizen expects to indulge freely; more freely even than the right to vote.

That expectation has been embedded deep in our minds by the holiday and air industries, of course. I don't watch much TV, but whenever I happen to wander into our capacious media suite I seem to see adverts featuring young people in swimwear on a palm-fringed beach that is definitely not in Dorset, or some model pretending to be a typical cabin-crew member on some budget airline. Even the weather reports on Sky News are sponsored by Qatar Airways ("Hate your filthy climate? It's time to get up, up, and away!"). In the end, the only realistic solution must be to require airlines – indeed, all forms of transport powered by fossil fuels – to charge the full, realistic cost of travelling from A to B, including some sort of "green travel tax". And, yes, that will probably return air-flight to the luxury category my father experienced, and perhaps the endless lines of hitchhikers will reappear outside major cities once more, all waiting for the next driverless electric car to appear on the sliproad, and – if "hitchhiker mode" has been turned on – for the algorithm to decide which hopeful to pick up.

1. Tip: Don't let the mad photographer carry the tickets, then the rest of you can just walk away. Alternative tip: Photographer, make sure you have the tickets, then they can't abandon you.

2. It was many years before we realised that "trundler" was a coinage only understood within our family to mean "wheeled luggage"; nobody else had a clue what we were talking about.