It makes no sense to squeeze yourself into an alleged seat only to be hurled at frightening speed to a distant place where you don’t speak the language or know the customs. ANTHONY STEWART, Nat Geo Image Collection Women in period dress greet travelers arriving on a Pan Am flight. Nothing is more forgettable than the trip that goes exactly as planned. Travel is one of the few activities we engage in not knowing the outcome and reveling in that uncertainty. It demands a leap of faith, and of imagination, to board a plane for some faraway land, hoping, wishing, for a taste of the ineffable. ![]() I think hope lies in the very nature of travel. If a Buddhist in Kathmandu is going nuts, what hope do the rest of us stilled souls have? When we ended our call, I felt relieved, my grumpiness validated. ![]() “No matter how many candles I lit, or how much incense I burned, and in spite of living in one of the most sacred places in South Asia, I just couldn’t change my habits.” He was growing restless, he confessed, and longed “for the old 10-countries-a-year schedule.” Nothing seemed to help, he told me. For a while he did.īut during a recent Skype call, James looked haggard and dejected. You’d think he’d thrive during the lockdown, a sort-of mandatory meditation retreat. My friend James Hopkins is a Buddhist living in Kathmandu. (Related: How hard has the coronavirus hit the travel industry? These charts tell us.) “I dwelled so much on my disappointment that it almost physically hurt,” Paris-based journalist Joelle Diderich told me recently, after canceling five trips last spring. Travel Association, the industry trade organization, is launching a national recovery campaign called “ Let’s Go There.” Backed by a coalition of businesses related to tourism-hotels, convention and visitor bureaus, airlines-the initiative’s goal is to encourage Americans to turn idle wanderlust into actual itineraries. “Staycation Nation,” the cover of the current issue of Canadian Traveller magazine declares cheerfully, as if it were a choice, not a consolation. We pass the days thumbing though old travel journals and Instagram feeds. We’re merely between trips, like the unemployed salesman in between opportunities. We can tolerate brief periods of forced sedentariness. Photograph by Volkmar Wentzel, Nat Geo Image Collection “Despair,” though, is not one of them.Ī 1967 fall festival in Guadalajara, Mexico, starred traditionally costumed musicians and dancers. What if we can’t move, though? What if we’re unable to hunt or gather? What’s a traveler to do? There are many ways to answer that question. Robert Louis Stevenson put it more succinctly: “The great affair is to move.” “Moving to a neighboring band is always an option to avoid brewing conflict or just for a change in social scenery,” says Ryan. For most of the time our species has existed, “we’ve lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers moving about in small bands of 150 or fewer people,” writes Christopher Ryan in Civilized to Death. It is not natural for us to be this sedentary. The numbers paint a grim picture of our stilled lives. Only a quarter of us plan on leaving home for Thanksgiving, typically the busiest travel time. Only a third of Americans say they have traveled overnight for leisure since March, and only slightly more, 38 percent, say they are likely to do so by the end of the year, according to one report. ![]() Obliterated by a tiny virus, and the long list of countries where United States passports are not welcome. Family reunions, study-abroad years, lazy beach vacations. Canceled trips, or ones never planned lest they be canceled. Welcome to the pandemic of disappointments. ![]() I use it as a coaster and to level wobbly table legs. I’ve been putting my passport to good use lately.
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