{"id":10397,"date":"2015-05-29T10:48:06","date_gmt":"2015-05-29T17:48:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=10397"},"modified":"2015-06-03T11:16:40","modified_gmt":"2015-06-03T18:16:40","slug":"the-next-generation-of-travelers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/29\/the-next-generation-of-travelers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Next Generation of Travelers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Crossing<\/a>
Me, crossing a river in Ladakh, 1982 (ish)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I figure people like Maureen and Tony Wheeler <\/a>would think I’m soft. Those two are the founders of Lonely Planet, the ubiquitous (and now completely changed) travel guide company. I relied on one of their earliest guides — India, 1981 — to get through travels in that byzantine labyrinth of a country back in 1982-83. Maureen and Tony did the trip without a guide, documenting The Hippie Trail, a truly epic overland adventure that went from London to Istanbul, across Iran and Afghanistan, and ended in Bangkok or maybe Goa. Reading Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar gave me the wanderlust to undertake part of this route, Lonely Planet in hand. I have recently been mining my memories of those travels for stories, about the time my travel companion and I got stuck in a small town in Greece<\/a>, about the ridiculous walk we took over the Himalayas<\/a>, about sleeping in bomb shelters in Israel<\/a> during the first days of the war between Israel and Lebanon.<\/p>\n

The narrative about independent travel at the time was one that I heard from other travelers on the road, only. In our hotel in Cairo, a place where the halls were lined with so much furniture that you could redesign your room at whim, there were two English guys who had their jeep commandeered by rebels in the Sudan. In Cyprus, there were more down on your luck English, guys who were lugging cement for holiday home construction companies. Information was thin, everyone had stories but rarely any useful details. Fellow travelers traded paperback novels, drank beer, and sometimes, went to grab a meal together. We talked about where we’d been and where we were going next and if we met again — like I did with the guys in Cairo, perhaps six months later\u00a0 — it was a huge surprise.<\/p>\n

I do not remember thinking that my travel was hard, but when I mentioned that I’d been trekking in Ladakh in 1982, a younger traveling friend said, “What on earth made you think to go there, then? For that time, it’s like going to the MOON.” I had read The Man Who Would be King by Rudyard Kipling and I had this idea about traveling some very high mountain ground. The Khyber Pass was out, we knew that Soviet skirmishes with the US backed Mujahideen would make traveling there difficult, so we crossed into India from Pakistan and then went up into Ladakh, which was safe enough, and probably recommended in the 1981 Lonely Planet guide. Things sucked from time to time, I had travelers gut often, I’m sure was tired and fed up with the trials of being a very young woman traveling in the Arab world, but until I got quite ill, I don’t have any recollection of thinking, “This is too hard, I’m going home.” The guidebook was a good companion, it never steered me wrong.<\/p>\n

\"Tourists<\/a>
Tourists taking selfies via Sigfrid Lundburg (Flickr\/Creative Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This morning, I had the misfortune to read yet another profile of a highly paid professional who quit her job to travel the world<\/a>. Said highly paid professional is no longer traveling and is now married to a man who owns a software development company. She is raising a child, and practicing law again. Reductive thinking immediately kicked in. “Well Paid Professional Takes Very Long Vacation,” is how I mentally rewrite these headlines. “Of course you quit,” said my not often outspoken mate, when I showed him the article. “You made six figures. Whatever. I’d quit too.”<\/p>\n

But rather than veer into a rant about exceptionalism, this time I wondered about Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s era of travelers and what they would make of the current generation that follow the road they helped pave. And I can’t help but compare the wired, easy way they seem to travel compared to my early adventures.<\/p>\n

Even while using the Internet to tell these stories, the online publishers — this one was on the BBC — present them as bold and brave and risky, as though we don’t live in a globalized world where it’s easy to connect to your clients, your employer, if you’ve got one, back at your home base. “Area Man Discovers Internet is Global,” I think, in an Onion-esque vernacular. Travel seems so easy now, even to the most exotic of places. There are cell phone towers in the Serengeti, I connected to upload photos from my very low budget safari camp. We didn’t have ice, but we had Internet.<\/p>\n

But rather than get bogged down “When I started traveling, it was always winter and no one spoke English and you had to stand in line at the post office to get ten minutes on a bad connection just so you could tell your mom you’re not dead yet and then, pay $67.00 for the privilege” thinking, this latest round has led me to wonder: What’s next? What are the always connected, work anywhere, generation of travelers going to say about the people that follow them?<\/p>\n

Besides, of course, get off my lawn. I got that covered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I figure people like Maureen and Tony Wheeler would think I’m soft. Those two are the founders of Lonely Planet, the ubiquitous (and now completely changed) travel guide company. I relied on one of their earliest guides — India, 1981 — to get through travels in that byzantine labyrinth of a country back in 1982-83. … <\/p>\n


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