Travel and the baby brain

 Blog
Mar 222012
 
Noa, baby of wonder

Taking "baby consciousness" with us (Photo by Julien Haler)

The longer the childhood, the smarter the creature. That’s one of science’s core findings about the development of the baby brain as reported by psychologist Alison Gopnik in her recent TED talk, “What Do Babies Think?“. Humans, who take years to mature, construct cities, which chickens, which take months, wind up in soup.

Gopnik calls it “baby consciousness,” a phrase so giddily Zen it makes me giggle. It’s a development-specific mindset we lose as we grow and our heads are no longer stuffed full of tapioca. People peg toddlers as daft and scatterbrained, and it’s hard not to agree with that assessment when you observe a two-year-old do things like throw dried dog poo at the wall or try to fit a sandwich in the DVD player drawer.

But Gopnik, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the co-author of The Scientist in the Crib, says the truth about baby brains is just the opposite: “Babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing, but they are very good at taking in lots of information at lots of different sources at once… When we say babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we’re really saying is they’re bad at not paying attention.”

They’re starstruck with all the things there are to see and process. They’re high on learning. They’re in that deliciously primordial state that travelers know well, when everything is fresh and even meaningless details are noticed and interpreted.

There’s something to be said for this. When we go to a new place, our frame of reference is reset to zero. We bring with us our animal instincts for survival, of course. Even toddlers are self-protective. But everything we experience becomes a teachable moment.

Kids on Fort Sumter Ferry

Wide open, soaking it in: Fort Sumter Ferry, Charleston, 2011

Our gullible states are never higher than when we’re traveling. I remember dining once with some fellow writers at The Cricketers, a country pub owned by Jamie Oliver’s family, and after the meal, the waitress had a quirky way of serving tea. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but for the story’s sake, let’s say it involved wiping every exposed surface of the teapot with a moist rag after every single pour. Well, one of my companions was a first-time visitor to England, and when the waitress left the room, she leaned over and piped up conspiratorially: “They sure do pour tea funny here in England,” she protested, and took a sip. It took some minutes for me to politely persuade her that, no, what she had just witnessed was the peculiarity of one near-freak server at one country inn and was not representative of an entire nationality. The realization of her broad-stroke misinterpretation slowly lit her face like the dawn.

When we travel, our mind state tricks us into thinking everything we see is somehow typical of the new place we’re exploring. The stereotype of tourists as gullible morons, as infants with credit cards, is by no means particular to Americans because it’s well-earned by the borderlessness of human behavior. It’s what potentially makes travelers so annoying — and easy to swindle.

Try it the next time a visitor comes to your town. Invent some myth about your home that would make a fabulist blush: that there’s an Italian Heritage parade down your Main Street every Sunday afternoon or there’s a law making it illegal to serve steak with A-1 sauce — whatever Mike Daisey-ism you dare. Because everything about the destination is new to a tourist, just as the entire world is fresh to a baby, they will most likely trust you, their host and surrogate parent.

Travel regresses us to childhood. Is it any wonder that so many of us travel in our 20s, when we’ve just left that larval childhood stage but have not yet grown into the ill-fitting uniform of full adulthood? Is it any wonder so many travelers put a high priority on intensely sensory experiences such as drinking, sex, panoramic views, and extreme sports — pursuits that please our primal natures?

Gopnik knocks her point home in a way that make me think of a backpack as the next logical accessory after diapers:

If we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think cases where we’re put into a new situation that we’ve never been in before. When we fall in love with someone new, or when we’re in a new city for the first time. What happens then is not that our consciousness contracts — it expands. So that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home…. So what’s it like to be a baby? It’s like being in love in Paris for the first time after you’ve had three double espressos.

Personally, I’m for it. Peace and wisdom flower in an open mind. We travel to grow.

Hold onto that wonder, travelers. Always see the world with your baby brains.

Jason Cochran with Mickey Mouse

Vacation as never-ending childhood: I rest my case

The State Department STEPs up outreach to travelers

 Blog
Mar 062012
 
State Department's passport mascot

Out of character? The State Department sends this passport mascot to trade shows to encourage applications

Last weekend at the New York Times Travel Show, a well-dressed young woman spotted my press credentials and introduced herself. She was from the State Department, she said, and she’d like to bring me over to Deputy Assistant Secretary Brenda Sprague.

I admit I was taken aback. Usually, when someone from the government taps you for a little chat, it’s not a good thing. But it’s precisely that mistrust of bureaucracy that the State Department appears eager to correct as soon as possible. In a surprising turn, the Obama administration’s State Department is making a true effort to reach out to travelers.

On the road, I’m always jealous of the travelers from Australia and New Zealand. When they need something from their government, it’s often a breeze. Their taxes are repaid with international support. Someone answers their calls at their diplomatic outposts. It seems like wherever they venture, they can all but pop into the nearest embassy for a beer and a back rub whenever they’re bored.  Here in New York, I’ve even attended boozy Friday afternoon wine mixers at the Australian consulate.

But U.S. consulates and embassies are never welcome a weary traveler, not even if they were born with the privilege of carrying a passport with a bald eagle stamped on the cover. Indeed, the diplomatic fortresses we build abroad, such as the bunker on London’s Grosvenor Square and the $750 million citadel in Baghdad, are resolutely intent on keeping us out. They are designed out of an imperialistic marriage between pessimism and industry, and they’re geared to making inroads for business but halting independent Americans at the machine gun-guarded door. People around the world are confronted by those impassive slabs and wonder what sort of dastardly machinations are being hatched within.

A degree of detachment makes often makes sense, of course, either for security reasons or simply because they’re routinely swarmed with visa-seekers. In Krakow, I remember having to pick my way through a mob of what appeared to be boisterous protesters, only to realize when I got to its head that they were actually jostling for a spot in the queue for a paperwork blessing by my country’s invisible bureaucrats.

At the Travel Show, the State Department representative proudly told me that they were attending the show to get the word out about STEP, or the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program. This long-overdue program is designed to supply citizens with a level of hospitable consular support that other nations take for granted. If a traveler can surmount their malaise at registering their whereabouts with the federal government, they can receive email updates about local security warnings, and if the worst happens, as during the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, American seekers will actually come knocking on doors to make sure you’re all right.

The public relations push hasn’t stopped there. Today, the State Department held a live chat about keeping safe over Spring Break. This is a topic that travel journalists are often asked to hit this time of year. (Here I am on CBS last year talking about the same subject, spending much energy to gently assure viewers that Mexico is hardly a nefarious underworld of malfeasance.) So it’s gratifying to see the government trying to anticipate our questions for a change.

Mind you, I still don’t take my government’s word as the only word that matters. I have found that Australia’s list of travel warnings is often less politicized (or at least, politicized in different ways) than our State Department’s travel warnings. But the outreach is important to me. It’s encouraging to have an administration that values international travel or at the very least acknowledges that some of us are doing it.

You might have noticed that the White House has also been much more attentive to communicating with citizens on the same level that we communicate with ourselves. It’s tweeting now, it’s pumping out annotated live streams of important speeches, and it’s beavering away on Facebook.

Uncle Sam may not be ready to invite the masses inside for free Big Macs and Cokes, and behind the scenes he’s still an imperialistic fellow who’s more interested in fostering business deals than helping backpackers, but at least he’s working harder to repaint his impenetrable bunkers in a cheerier shade.

 

 

 

Stap Vinnig Oor: Round the world during the Web’s infancy

 Blog
Feb 292012
 
Stap Vinnig Oor: Jason Cochran's World Tour

The logo for one of the original travel blogs

“One day, not very long ago, I noticed I’d never been to the Pyramids. So I quit my job, left my apartment, and made a list of places I’d always wanted to go. And here’s the proof.”

That was how I kicked off the webpage documenting the round-the-world trip I took years ago. It was 1998. People were still paying for Netscape. Few of us used the Web regularly, and all of us had dialup, but I was determined to try it: I documented my journey online as I went. I’m ashamed to admit I began by using Courier.

Everyone logs their trips online now, but no one was doing it then. I was a pioneer. It took real effort. Flashpacking didn’t exist. I had to seek out Internet cafés and without WordPress or Blogspot to rely upon, I had to hand-code everything in basic HTML, and I was forced to seek out crude FTP programs (Fetch!) to get my writing online.

I didn’t put my travels online for Web fame or to garner a following, the way so many backpackers do now. There were no affiliates or appeals for free lodging, and I was years away from collecting my first paycheck for travel writing. Then, it was simply so my family and friends could follow along and know I wasn’t lying dead in some South African ditch. It also saved money at the STD ISD in India if I could simply upload some writing and pictures for everyone to follow. (I also tacked on a first-person account of 9/11 two years later because I didn’t know where else to post it at the time. That’s republished here.)

Technology and I have progressed somewhat, to say the least, but for all these years I have left my online diary online, quietly stashed in a corner of the Internet as a sort of museum of myself and of travel blogging.

I invite you to peer into the past to see how I did my online Web journal. There is some stuff that could really get me in trouble here, but just remember how young I was. Read about hippo attacks, angry mobs in Jordan, and false positives for syphilis. Learn about the traumatic event that made me call my RTW journey Stap Vinnig Oor.

Here’s the link, for as long as it lasts. Go:

Stap Vinnig Oor: Jason Cochran’s World Tour

It’s as much a journey into the Web’s past as it is a trip around our planet.

Jason Cochran at the Monsoon Palace in Udaipur, India

Me at the Monsoon Palace in Udaipur, India

Sometimes travel delays your life’s true calling

 Blog
Oct 222011
 
Cycle couple at Badlands National Park

Travel can be empty without connection: Badlands, South Dakota, 2011

I hate to say it, but someone should. Sometimes travel isn’t enough.

I know I have made travel, and the discussion of how anyone can do it, one of the central themes of the last 15 years of my life. And the world of magazines, blogs, and Twitter encourage me daily to maintain that. My identity dictates my focus.

But I also can see when travel, and the addictive pursuit of it, overtakes lives. The lessons one learns by traveling can be life-changing: the similarities between all people, the vast inequalities between societies, the deep psychic simplicity of rituals.

However, there comes a point when many people don’t give their own lives an opportunity to incorporate these profound discoveries of wisdom.

I can always spot the traveler who has been too long on the road. They linger for too many hours in the hostel common room. They surf too long on Facebook. Their eyes may gradually glaze over when confronted with a long list of potential new experiences to tackle tomorrow. They go slowly.

In short, they often show the same symptoms as someone who hasn’t been on the road long enough. For both groups, their inner voices are actually back home. The conscience knows what ambition does not, and if there is one thing that nearly every society has taught me, it’s that the natural state of most human lives is not conquest but ritual. And without the ritual of a daily life for comparison, the things one learns through travel would have far less meaning beyond mere curiosity.

I myself first felt this feeling of travel malaise when I was nearing the end of a nearly two-year backpacking trip. I was in Wellington, New Zealand, a city I have since returned to and come to adore. It was a Friday night, and everyone else in the hostel — nearly all of them had been on the road for only a few months — was going out on the town. But I found myself resisting. I wanted to stay in and read a book instead.

I heard myself say, “But what if I meet someone I actually like? I can’t have them. I’m leaving town soon.”

It was the first time I felt that the exposure to something new was not going to be enough. It was a rupture in my travel worldview.

I know now that it was a sign that after all of my meaningful discoveries, my heart was telling me that it was time to give meaning to the meaning.

Many travelers get that feeling, but many of them override it by seeking another destination with more discoveries. That works for a while because learning is never a waste. But they find the voice keeps gnawing, and as it does, it nibbles away at their resolve to remain in perpetual motion. Sometimes they start going back to the places they loved the first time around, not realizing that impulse could be a surrogate for building a ritual life of their own. Some of them head back out with a girlfriend or boyfriend, which may be why the world is crawling with traveling couples.

I had my Wellington realization more than a decade ago. Of course it didn’t stop my travels. But it altered how I approached them. I still go to new places, but increasingly, I find myself gravitating to places filled with people I care about, or to spots that I know to be my personal lodestones. Having seen nearly 100 countries, I now find myself reinvesting my explorations by learning and loving a few chosen places more deeply. More importantly, I invest in my true life back home.

Because of my recent apartment building fire, I have found myself needing to pass time outside of my home. My first impulse, being a career traveler, was to head to Thailand or Edinburgh or to spend some time writing in Tulbagh, South Africa, where one of my friends from past travels runs the sublime Cape Dutch Quarters retreat.

Although travel has always been like a companion in my life, I couldn’t pull the tigger this time. I have a book I want to write and other projects I want to see grow. This time, rather than unplug and absorb, I felt the psychic need to feed my learnings back into my ritual life. I will return to the road sometime. But right now, I feel like it’s not my purpose to discover, but to create.

Some travelers confuse this shift as a message that they have grown out of the need to travel. That’s not the case. The rewards of travel are not a function of age. After all, we have all been out there with old timers with more zest for exploration than the alcoholic Gap Year kid in the bunk above you. They can be, however, a function of where you are in your life.

I used to look at those Gap Year kids, those listless Australians gulping non-stop rum shots to impress girls and loitering for months in a single hostel without much resolve to pick themselves up and resume their lives. When I began traveling, I envied their open-ended itineraries. But after I felt my emotional rupture in Wellington, I saw some of them as avoiding the inevitable and necessary emotional connection to themselves. A new phrase came to my head:

“If you don’t put down roots, you can never grow.”

For many of us, this is why we travel. We travel to enrich the soil of our lives back home. But the lure of learning, paired with the emotional intensity of meeting fantastic people and having to condense the arc of a relationship into a few days, can be so seductive, so addictive, that we forget.

 

 

The 3 o’clock travel photo project

 Blog, Photos
Jan 172011
 

Before I was a travel writer, I was a full-time traveler. I spent nearly two years out on the road, backpacking around the world. And for many months of that journey, I conducted with an unusual experiment.

Every day at 3 o’clock on the dot, no matter where I was or what I was doing, I took a photograph. It didn’t matter if I was doing something mundane such as traveling on a bus or resting in my hostel dorm room: I would grab whatever I was doing as the clock struck three. Why should all my travel photos be exclusive to hyper-composed shots dominated by antiquities and assiduously smiling subjects?

With my 3 o’clock pictures, I would show travel as it really was, and it would be as true as any diary — truer, even, because it the collection wouldn’t be edited for the good bits. Therefore, I forbade myself the right to take time to compose shots well, because, I reasoned headily, that would be a betrayal of truth. The only compositional rule of the project dictated that I had to take a picture with my left wrist in the shot to indicate the time.

I kept the project up for months on end. I only stopped to break my own rule. When I stopped in Cape Town and rented an apartment, I found that too often, I was always doing the same thing at 3:00, and that was usually either hanging out in my flat or sitting in the Internet cafe. Suddenly, the 3:00 project was memorializing my shame. Besides, I was on a shoestring backpacker’s budget and I was using a film camera to take my pictures, and it was getting expensive. I decided that the potential of eighty consecutive images of my hand in my apartment or in front of a word processing program wasn’t the best use of my see-the-world funds, so I stopped taking my daily shot.

It was still a good idea, though.

I’ve gone through some of the pictures from my 3 o’clock project. Doing it brought me to the brink of tears. Just as I predicted, they paint a vivid portrait of the blend of excitement and mundane movement that full-time travelers experience, and they conjure up details of my experiences that I thought had gone away. They remind me of the boring hours and travelers’ tasks as well as the sublime pleasure of having no vocational demands. They also capture some surprises.

I did something I will never do again: I took the bus from London to Paris. I was trying to save my money, so I didn’t want to pay for Channel Tunnel. But in taking the eternal trip from London Victoria to the ferry to Paris, I lost a whole day of experiences. I got this picture, the first 3:00 shot I took.

London to Paris, 3:00

A typical shot of a hostel room. This one is Barcelona. A backpacker develops an intense relationship with their backpack. It is companion, provider, and home-from-home all in one. It is also tormentor, burden, and perennially inadequate. Travelers spend a lot of their time as caretakers for their stuff. Given the symbiotic/parasitic connection travelers have with their baggage, it’s a shame we don’t take pictures of it. We record our trips by turning our momentary attentions to the sights we see, but that’s a lie because our stuff is as much a part of our journeys — if not more. We should all take more pictures of our luggage.

I called my backpack “The Boys,” because it split into a backpack and a daypack, and it warms my heart to see The Boys looking so fresh and shiny at the start of a two-year journey.

Barcelona, 3:00

A typical bus ride. This one is between Beni Mellal, a town in central Morocco, and Fes, I do believe.

Morocco, 3:00

When I arrived in Florence, all the hostels were full. There was a waiting list in the lobby of one of them. I went over to one of the other backpackers and asked if he’d like to go somewhere else and split a cheap room. We went across town and found beds at a convent (true) and by the afternoon, we were out exploring. This is Peter Szollosi from Adelaide, Australia. The next year, I visited him in South Australia, and several years after that, Peter later stayed with me for a few weeks in New York City. And it was during that stay that he met an American girl, Julie Schuck, at a party.

They are now married, live in New York City, and Peter is one of my most treasured friends. When I was going through the photos from this project, it was a shock to see Peter just hours after we met. I didn’t remember taking this. He just happened to be in the day’s shot. But if we hadn’t met on this day, his life would be much different. And so would mine, which is why this one brought me to tears.

Peter is now an extremely talented and successful director of photography and editor, and I’ve had the great pleasure of working with him in my professional life, too. When I think about the accident of our meeting, and all that came to be because of it, this picture becomes incredibly poignant to me. It was a birth of more than either of us could have predicted.

So is every moment, if we allow it.

Florence, 3:00

On my trip, I napped everywhere. Who wants to do all your sleeping in a hostel when there is a world of wonders to nap by? Besides, you’re always having to get up early when you travel. To this day, this is one of my most memorable naps: in Syntagma Square, the central square in Athens. I slept for a while right out there on the grass like the vagrant I suppose I was. I still recall this fondly, as we tend to recall our first transgressions.

Future naps would include in an ancient cliffside home in Petra, Jordan, and on grass in front of the Taj Mahal, because it was easier than braving the streets of Agra during the festival of Holi. I considered making up “Nap the World” tee-shirts. But I was too lazy.

The FedEx was from (believe it or not), The Jerry Springer Show. A friend worked for it, and she sent me a tee-shirt and Jerry’s jazz CD. True.

Athens, 3:00

A typical street in Cairo. Backpackers spend a lot of their times wandering — or at least I do. This is how I will always think of Cairo: post-colonial, pleasingly ramshackle, a little brown with desert dust.

Cairo, 3:00

In Jordan, I hired a long-distance taxi to take me between Aqaba and Wadi Mousa. Carpeting on the dashboard: It’s the little details.

Jordan, 3:00

This is the kind of thing backpackers do: Buy deck-class tickets on ferries that take two days. I slept on the deck for the journey between Haifa, Israel, and Rodos, Greece, with a stop in Limassol, Cypress. On this trip, I learned that I what I thought was my usual seasickness was actually nausea from ships’ diesel fumes — an important discovery that opened up a lot of sea travel to me.

While an interloper from the fancy indoor class takes in the view, sitting with me are my temporary companions. She’s from Norway, and he’s from Holland. His name was Sander, I believe. Both lovely. You are never alone when you’re a backpacker. Your heart is always being lit up by strangers, and then broken again when you part ways on your separate paths after a few days.

Ferry from Haifa, 3:00

Walking through Goreme, Turkey, in Cappadocia. Notice the “fairy chimney” rock formations. I stayed at a hostel burrowed into some of them. As you do there.

Goreme, 3:00

This is my birthday, I think. I’m in Sultanhamet, Istanbul.

Istanbul, 3:00

In Edinburgh now, during Festival. I spent a whole lot of time reading and writing in my journal. I wrote whole books’ worth of observations. The book is Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt, which is appropriate reading partly because I was traveling like its characters and partly because it’s one of the only Greene books that doesn’t make you want to slit your wrists because of endless exposition of his Catholic miseries. This was my favorite pub, which I think was called the Green Tree. It was replaced by a condo a few years later. And so it goes.

Edinburgh, 3:00

I spent several weeks living at the High Street Hostel off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. I made good friends with a very funny, very smart, very ambitious guy named Barry Ferns. As you can see as I captured our daily meal ritual in the hostel’s kitchens, he’s also very healthy. Barry Ferns, if you subscribe to Google Alerts, make yourself known to me again! I really liked you.

High Street Hostel, 3:00

Captured on the London Underground. Seeing this, those grotty old wooden Tube carriages, the ones with the grooved wooden floors, flooded back into my memory. This must have been the Northern Line. Wasn’t that one of the last ones to be modernized? I thought I missed those old cars, but looking at this, I remember just how grim they actually were.

London, 3:00

This is the last 3:00 picture I took, after it became clear that this project was exposing a failure in my activities during what was supposed to be my Isherwood-in-Berlin period. It was at a braai (barbecue) and pool party held at a house in Cape Town. Jayson Clark, who brought me to the party, was a friend I made when I arrived there. We’re still in touch, too, I love him to bits, and he is a wildly successful proprietor of a B&B empire, the Cape Dutch Quarters, in the winelands town of Tulbagh. Stay with him the next time you’re in Cape Town.

As for who that guy in the pool is, I have no recollection. I think he was puzzled about why I was taking his picture. I wasn’t, as you now know. That would simply be weird. No, I was taking a picture of my watch at 3:00 because I made a vow to do so. Not strange at all.

Cape Town, 3:00

Preserve even the most mundane moments. Go out into your neighborhood tomorrow and take pictures of things you’d never ordinarily think to capture, because it will change — usually imperceptibly and unrecorded. Ten years from now, 20 years from now, you’ll find your casual, unstaged, desultory pictures are probably the most interesting because of the unappreciated and fluid things they capture.

Jeff Schroeder’s ‘Around the World for Free’: World class

 Blog
Sep 042010
 

Hold me down! I’m big-time digging Jeff Schroeder’s Around the World for Free on CBS.com. Some of it has been slightly canned, like the plugs for American Airlines (a sponsor), but the majority of it is killer stuff. Anyone who backpacks will recognize what he’s going through right now as he tries to make it around the world without spending any money, instead relying on the generosity of the people who are following the trip online, like an open-palmed version of the Travel Channel’s dearly departed 5 Takes. Although the series’ conceit seems like a stunt, it takes a special traveler not to make an actual stunt out of it.

Jeff on 'Big Brother'

As a not-so-closet fan of Big Brother, I watched Schroeder last summer, and I grew to appreciate his demeanor, his almost childlike joy for seemingly trivial stuff, and the respect he has for other people.  Reality television players can be unabashedly self-serving, but Jeff wasn’t. He was the frat boy who cared. I watched the Big Brother live feeds, which expose players every minute of the day, and his character held up — when he had momentary lapses, he instantly recognized his failings and made up for them.

This summer, as he does this trip, I have grown to appreciate him even more. He’s bushy-tailed and peppy, and what he lacks in eloquence (most stuff is either “amazing” or “awesome”) he makes up for in enthusiasm and empathy. He’s unfailingly polite, hungry to learn, and is good at anticipating his audience’s questions. Two weeks ago, Schroeder served for a day with a People for Care and Learning, a humanitarian group that delivers water purification devices to floating villages in one of the poorest provinces in Cambodia.

In this segment, from a week ago, he’s stranded in Pakse, Laos. He’s not allowed to spend money, but he needs $18 for a bus fare. Begging for cash in a poor place like Laos would be highly unsavory. I seem to remember another show from about 10 years ago that was built on just such a premise — strand the players, see how they get home — and it turned me off. But that’s not how Schroeder is handling things. He’d rather go thirsty than be a burden on the locals.

This clip brings me a flood of powerful travel memories: the heat of a Southeast Asian village’s streets, the benign language barrier, that unique feeling of wandering aimlessness paired with the traveler’s faith that everything will turn out just fine. And what backpacker hasn’t found himself struggling to find a Wi-Fi signal, peering in the windows of the fancy hotels?

“I don’t want to mooch off anybody. That’s not why I signed up,” Schroeder says.

He doesn’t have a production team to put words like that in his mouth.

He made it out. Today, he’s in Bangkok battling some tummy trouble, and he appears to have been reunited with the prodigiously talented videographer and editor named Zsolt Luka (I wouldn’t give Luka’s daily edit-and-recharge demands to a monkey on a rock) who accompanies him much of the time and whom I have to assume is equally responsible for the spirit of this endeavor.

Schroeder is making this odyssey not about himself, but about the people he meets, and that’s clearly by design and not by accident. So many other mass-media travel diary projects are about the ego of the traveler, but against the odds and the currents of the genre, Schroeder always puts the spotlight on the people he meets. He’s both amazing and awesome. You can follow Schroeder’s adventure (videos, photos, tweets), throw him tips, or offer him help on his next leg by going to CBSAroundtheWorld.com. There are also videos on YouTube.

Major praise to CBS for accomplishing this series with so much sensitivity. And since it’s the sponsor, I guess I should tip my hat to American Airlines, too.

The fatal flaws in flashpacking

 Blog
Aug 292010
 

I tried, but I just can’t get behind the so-called “flashpacking” trend. I have real problems with it.

In the beginning, when flashpacking was first named as a trend, it sounded like something the trust funders were doing: Go abroad with your laptop, your HD video camera, your iPods and iPhones, and use them to stay connected and maybe to document your trip for the people back home. It’s said that flashpackering was born of cheap budget flights, as somewhat affluent workers could now choose to sojourn wherever they wanted, and bring their goodies with them for comfort, and wear nice clothes and eat really good food. In short, they want to take their consumerism with them.

My classist assumptions aside, at the very least, I insist on traveling with the bare minimum of possessions, and the mere thought of a laptop in my pack makes my lower back ache. I also couldn’t stand having to block “recharge time” into days that I’d rather keep spontaneous.

Now things have changed, and I recognize that being a flashpacker no longer says much about your income level back home. People of all classes — except the extremely low ones, who are unlikely to be backpacking anyway — can now afford some kind of device, and many hostels offer the free Wi-Fi necessary to connect them. Four years ago, too, having a laptop in your satchel might mark you as a crime target at a hostel, but now, a significant proportion of travelers have one. So flashpacking may not say as much to your fellow travelers about your status as it did just a short while ago.

But if you flashpack, it probably says a lot about what kind of countries you prefer to visit.

That’s because it’s very difficult for a sensitive traveler to take expensive electronics out of their packs in a countries where extreme poverty is the norm. Some of my favorite sights from my travels went undocumented by me because I wasn’t willing to take out my camera when I saw them. That fascinating procession of holy men in India, that animal sacrifice in Bangladesh, the flies crawling on the open eyes of laughing children in Luxor — the list is long, and lives mostly in my journals. I kept my few electronics hidden, and not because I was trying to avoid being robbed.

From www.how-to-travel-the-world.com

No, there are vast swaths of the planet where I don’t take out my expensive equipment because it feels like an insult to the people who are there. When five-year-olds go shoeless and beg for food in the streets, I do not want to flaunt my American wealth by using a frivolous luxury item such as a camera or an iPhone. Even the cheapest, flimsiest, D-grade models are worth more than many people make in a year. I refuse, and I refuse to snatch their image and turn it into a personal commodity that forever marks the value of my trip. Sometimes, journalism and imperialism are one and the same.

There’s also something liberating about not caring if your backpack is stolen when it’s strapped to the roof of an overnight bus in India or tossed onto a luggage canoe in the Okavango Delta. Carrying gadgets around is like toting a nest full of baby birds that demand daily feeding; it’s like that assignment in middle school when you had to take care of an egg as if it was an infant. Your journey is simply more liberating without them.

It seems to me that if you flashpack, you’re probably hitting the road well traveled: Europe, parts of urban Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and so forth. It would be pretty much unthinkable for me, as a person with an overabundance of empathy, to use my appliances in many other places on this Earth — meaning most of this planet. I’m glad they’re traveling at all, but this mode only works in a subset of the world’s destinations.

Of course there are ways to do it humbly, and there are ways to use your culture’s clutter without rubbing it in the faces of the people who are hosting you. But  flashpacking, in my perspective, limits the number of places you can effectively see — at least if you want to use that stuff you brought. I’d bet a lot of flashpackers are markedly more discreet about their swag when they’re in the Third World, and that says something to me.

About eight years ago, I got in a passively aggressive verbal sparring match with a developer who told me, the travel writer, that I’d better get on board with the Palm and other devices, because hand-held travel guides were “the future” of travel writing. He himself was throwing himself wholeheartedly behind them.

I told him he was wrong. They might take off among business travelers, because they are generally wealthy and insulated from poverty. They might even do pretty well in American, Canadian and Western European cities. But there was no chance that a sensitive traveler was going to whip out a smartphone on a street corner in Mexico City or Mumbai or Nairobi or countless other major cities on this planet, and to think so hinted at a complete blindness to the realities of the enduring worldwide inequities of class.

The open use of devices, I told him, would always be something restricted to the wealthy Western world. There is a significant portion of this planet where people can’t find clean water every day, or wood to burn, or medicine to keep themselves alive. To assume we’re all going to digital is the grossest form of ethnocentrism. We aren’t, because we can’t.

That’s flashpacking. It’s a prerogative of the rich, and often marks an indulgence in naval-gazing, and anytime I tote the burdens of my culture and my class into a place where I intend to better understand the locals, I miss out on the richness of a full experience.

What she really wants is the iPhone 4 (Prince Albert, South Africa)