Rediscovering Travel by Seth Kugel

Author:Seth Kugel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
ISBN: 9780871408518
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2018-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

I haven’t had a calendar or a watch for the last year and a month. I don’t need a whole lot of money to travel. In Mongolia, I spent $80 in two months. I start walking and hitchhiking and whatever happens, happens. Nowadays, travelers aren’t really meeting people or opening up. Everyone’s following each other with their laptops, waking up late, missing out on the good sunrises. The night before this picture was taken, I slept on the uneven stone slab floor of the highest fortress so I could wake up early and experience the dawn glory. The wall stretches out forever, I mean like, man, it’s infinite. I kept wondering why they didn’t build it across the ocean.15

Today, how many people would have slept on the stone floor if the Airbnb app’s instant-booking option offered up a nearby bed? Or would have missed the sunrise because they stayed up too late Skyping with their girlfriend?

Avoiding the pull of technology even in 2006 was fairly easy: Like Richard, you went cold turkey. Practically no one’s phone worked abroad, and it was also fairly easy to avoid email when reading it meant taking part of a valuable day to find a cybercafé. Once smartphones caught on, it became a bit more daring to wander empty-handed, but many people did it, leaving their phones at home, or, at the very least, in the hotel room during the day. I remember thinking it was incredibly weird, back in 2013, when a friend was doing business on a BlackBerry as we sauntered around the Dominican Republic.

But the last few years have changed all that—wifi is widespread, international plans are cheap, and our devices are so important to our daily functioning that many people would prefer to travel without their underwear. Going smartphone-free might work for a hiking or fishing trip, or in a beach resort, but for most people on most trips it would make them obsolete, or like some quirky time traveler who actually asked hotel clerks for wake-up calls, inquired about the nearest pay phone, looked at the sky to determine the weather. And how would you meet up with new friends (or even your travel companions) if they can’t text you?

If that all sounds silly, and you still travel without a smartphone, you have my deepest respect. I approve. I love you. Never change.

But that’s not me, and it’s not most people. Pretty soon, we’ll have access to unlimited data everywhere in the world, and left to our, ahem, own devices, we’ll overuse them, just as we do at home. In fact, we should be using them in situations where they will improve our interactions with the places and people we visit, and avoiding them when they distract us, serve as a crutch, or make things too easy.

That’s why I often wish that right under “Airplane Mode” in your phone’s settings was something called “Travel Mode.” If Airplane Mode shuts off the elements of our phones that (we’ve been led to

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