Travel Is Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

Travel is touted as enlightening, but is it?

Middle-class girl saw the world, and it wasn’t good enough? Where are my pearls? I must clutch them! Ok, I am aware of how jarring I sound. So, to avoid being egged or spat at, please bear with me... 

Previously, I was always surrounded by people better-travelled than I. I’d return to school and university post-holidays, braced to hear about friends’ umpteenth trip to New York or Namibia, or worse, hear my lifelong adversary: the question “Do you ski?” I had barely left Western Europe, and the most exotic people I had ever encountered were the people of Blackpool, and, come to think of it, they probably still are. However, fuelled by envy to see what the fuss was about, in 2024 I travelled South-East Asia, nipped to Africa, and romped further through Europe during my year abroad. Maybe I did come back better-rounded, with many life lessons learnt. How anything is loo roll if you’re creative enough was one. Even the lows provided me with anecdotal currency: Having been spiked in Bangkok, and with my dreary year in France mirroring Napoleon’s exile from it, I’ve enjoyed spinning those yarns like veterans telling tales of lost limbs.  

However, my past, less-travelled self, was still somewhat disappointed, and I want to share why... 

First, being from Yorkshire, I saw no real reason to leave it and even less reason to pay to do so. Nothing surpassed what lies in God’s Own Country. You’re looking for raw majesty and the greatest examples of human achievement? Have you not seen the house on the M62? Some trek miles for the spirituality of Angkor Wat or Santiago de Compostela, but any trip via that wonder of the world is pilgrimage enough for me.  

Furthermore, fun and I were always incompatible, and unfortunately, the type of ‘fun’ you spent your childhood longing to outgrow is the same ‘fun’ you’re expected to have with fellow hostelers in adulthood. Adding to the list, I find animals utterly boring, I’m unimpressed by views, and I find performing dancers and singers excruciatingly embarrassing in all forms, particularly A cappella. Nothing, therefore, filled me with greater dread than when minibus excursions were paused so that we could be sung at, or so we could gawp at some rare type of tree or goat on what was inevitably the driest piece of land I’d ever seen.  

What’s more, most other travellers are unbelievably irritating. They are neurotic about food hygiene, they wear ghastly vest tops and shorts of obscure lengths, and they buy hideous magnets to put on their fridges (no doubt filled with neurotically hygienic food). Their obsession with taking pictures is also infuriating. I strongly believe that Google has an ample supply of non-blurry photos of any landmark without my ugly mug ruining them. But to look at others, it would appear that their private photoshoot had been crudely interrupted by a holiday. I’m sure I do things just as irritating, but ultimately, it’s difficult to travel without thinking that you’re the only worldly cosmopolitan left in a world consumed by technology, health and safety, and vanity.  

Finally, no travel is that intrepid anymore — aye, there’s the rub. In the nineteenth century, Livingstone managed to lose contact with the outside world for six years in Tanzania. If you got lost in Tanzania today, you’d be located by a GPS-savvy local guide and whisked to the nearest refreshment stand before you could say “hakuna matata.” Technology, internationalism, commercialism and, well, the British, took over and created an increasingly homogenised world. Although this opened the world, it narrowed the possibilities for adventure. That ‘lost’ feeling was swapped for eSIMs, Trainline, and 7/11s with the same comforting but cowardly feel as mummy’s apron strings.  

So, yes, travelling is wonderfully enriching, but it does have its disappointments: true adventure was lost to modernity, nobody is as sophisticated and cosmopolitan as me, “if it’s not from Yorkshire, it’s shite”, and, most unfortunately, I can’t pick up this paper as I’m currently in Switzerland...