February 2nd, 2004

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The Long View
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We Really Don’t Go Anywhere

As I mentioned earlier, the meme d’heure is World66, where you can generate a map of where you’ve been. This meme is more illustrative than most, and has got me thinking. I checked out about twenty or thirty sites where people show their travels. Most of the maps look like this:

You got the US, sometimes Canada and a little of western Europe. About a third of the Americans chose the states map, as opposed to the global one. This may be because they’re patriotic, but it also may reflect a lack of extra-country travel. Now I shouldn’t talk, because my map isn’t any better.

The fact is, though, that we hardly go anywhere. On class, education and IQ, webloggers would above average. We should be traveling more than the average citizen. Yet, hardly anyone has made a dent in this map. Africa and Asia remain swathes of untouched beige. Admittedly, the average weblogger age skews youngish. However, in my experience, people who don’t travel in their youth, don’t travel much as adults. So why aren’t we going to these places?

A side note: In the limited travel I’ve done, I always try to go where and when the tourists aren’t. That’s why we went to Costa Rica in the rainy season, Prague at New Years (of course, the World Juniors were a draw) and Athens on Christmas Eve (note the unobstructed view of the Acropolis). Clearly, if I really want to avoid the tourists, I ought to be going anywhere that doesn’t use the Arabic alphabet.

So why haven’t I gone to more exotic places such as Vietnam and Nepal? Fear, mostly. When I first started traveling, I didn’t think I was ready to rent a sherpa or rickshaw, to negotiate foreign airports with foreign customs agents with big, foreign machineguns. So, I started conservatively. Eventually, I graduated to mid-range places like Costa Rica and the Czech Republic. They’re hardly Zimbabwe, but they’re more challenging than, say, England. I feel far more ready to visit South Africa now than I did five years ago.

Like anything, traveling takes practice. You get better at everything–driving through foreign cities, evaluating risk, finding lodging–and your experience becomes invaluable on future trips. Also, as you get older and more world-wise, you appreciate travel more. I have a number of friends who are in their late 20s who went to exotic places when they graduated from university, at 21 or 22. While they had a good time, they spent a tremendous amount of effort just living and moving around in India or Thailand or wherever. Furthermore, they were too young and naive to really be grateful for what they were seeing and experiencing.

So, when my nine-month-old nephew gets to be 20, and wants to go somewhere, I’m going to buy him a train ticket across Canada. Not only will his parents worry less, but he’ll be able to get his feet wet (or frozen, if he goes in the off-season). Hopefully he’ll come to understand what traveling is, and how it works. Then he can apply that experience abroad, and book a rickshaw with confidence and the local dialect.

Bonus link: In perusing other weblogs that were discussing World66, I discovered this one and its excellent URL. He, she or they pointed to what sounds like an anti-mapping site, but really it’s a stylish-looking site for building ‘a comprehensive archaeological database of Thebes’.

Comments: 3 Responses so far

Heather
February 3rd, 2004
1:50 am

The only remotely interesting place I’ve been is Guatemala, so I haven’t bothered doing a map at all. It was a good trip though, and it didn’t remotely resemble a vacation - we were doing aid work. So while it was still fairly structured, I enjoyed it. I hope to travel more soon, especially to work on my french and spanish. It’s the $ that’s the problem, as always.

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Gail
February 4th, 2004
12:52 am

I posted this map on my blog a month ago and, yes, it is certainly misleading. Look at Canada, for instance. I’ve lived in BC, AB, SK, MB, but haven’t seen the country east of Ontario. Yet, look how much red it takes up. Some countries abroad I know much better in terms of their relative size, but some I’ve only passed through because they share borders with other countries I’ve spent more time in. And look at how much maps have changed even since the ’80s, with the movement of political borders along the cultural continua. I suppose it isn’t more ambitious than any other world map, eg. Mercator, Robinson, etc., in removing bias.

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Anonymous
February 9th, 2004
7:35 pm

I’m an American. I suppose if I was to pick a map, like you’ve described, I too would choose a state-level map. There’s enough wildly diverent attitudes and people in this country to more than satisfy most people, it seems. In fact, I needn’t even leave my home state to see things that are entirely foreign to me — and I live in a state with less than 750,000 population. A five hour drive west of here will take me to a world where the scenery, attitudes, and even the demographic is fairly different that here.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that one needn’t look beyond his own borders to find a great deal of interesting and unusual things.

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