![]() In the first 20 years of the millennium, international tourism arrivals more than doubled, from 700 million in 2000 to almost 1.5 billion in 2019. Recalling those travels now, it is tempting to view them as having straddled travel’s golden age. A consuming fixation, unthinkable for the vast span of human history, that even today, after months of immobility, I struggle to imagine living without. ![]() It wouldn’t be unfair to think of it as an addiction. In hindsight, the best word to describe my compulsion to move isn’t wanderlust but dromomania, because the second word better hints at its obsessive dimensions. I began travelling independently with that trip in 2000, and in the period since I’ve travelled a lot, certainly more than is usual. At the time of writing, there are only memories, and the work of reorienting ourselves to a more inert and less hospitable world. The old way it was practised, at vast scale, and across increasingly porous borders, has begun to look like it might be a terminal casualty. For while it may be glib to bemoan a lack of adventure in a period of global bereavement and anxiety, the drastic contraction of international movement is likely to be one of COVID-19’s most momentous cultural and economic ramifications. ![]() I guess it was inevitable, as the pandemic dragged on, that many of us would be plunged into nostalgia for the journeys we took in the past. ![]() Sitting at a desk in London 20 years on, those rudderless months in Australia and Southeast Asia belong to an expired world. It was the escape hatch I’d been searching for. Home, increasingly, had begun to feel like a malaise away seemed like an instant antidote. By the time I stashed away this box, I think I already knew that I had found an obsession, and a counteragent, potentially, for the fidgety discontent I’d carried through school. Emptied onto a bed, it looks like anyone else’s trash. There are a few banknotes and coins street maps of obscure Vietnamese and Cambodian towns a dozen flyers for backpackers’ bars. It’s taken me 20 years to revisit the contents. Then I crammed it into this shoebox and shoved it in the attic. When I arrived home – 30 pounds lighter, with a penchant for wearing baggy trousers emblazoned with a Chinese dragon, and no doubt insufferable – I transferred the trove of knick-knacks I’d accumulated in my rucksack into a plastic carrier bag from a Bangkok 7-Eleven. Other than the starting point, Cairns, and the return flight from Bangkok, I had little idea of where we were going, or what we could expect to find when we got there. I’m not sure what propelled me and the two friends I travelled with, beyond some vague cultural determinism this was just what a lot of British teens did in the hiatus between school and university. It was the sort of journey that was a rite of passage for kids of a certain milieu at the turn of the 20th century, when Gap Year culture was the rage. The photo is one of a thousand odds and ends inside a box – specifically, a Reebok shoebox – that long ago became a reliquary for the stash of mementoes I brought home from my first independent trip abroad. Whatever the case, I was having a good day. The rapturous look on my face suggests that I was either unbothered or that I hadn’t noticed. The image is shot at an angle from below, and the purplish sky overhead prefigures a gathering storm. The pair of us are crouched on a boulder on a beach in western Thailand, in the ungainly repose of people who have just hurried into position after setting a camera timer. It depicts me, aged 19, with a collegial arm slung over the shoulders of Ed, an old friend from school. The first thing I linger over, when I upturn the box onto my bedsheet, is an overexposed photograph of two skinny boys.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |