Late last year, a Spanish researcher named Sergio Gonzalo contacted me with some questions for a multidisciplinary study on travel. “I am trying to approximate how different sciences or disciplines have approached travel as an activity and as a phenomenon,” he wrote. “For that reason, some specialists from different disciplines (such as Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology or Philosophy) are helping me by answering some questions. But I also want people from “the travel world” to participate. I read your Vagabonding some years ago and loved it, and I would be very pleased to include your points of view in my study.”
Sergio’s questions, as well as my answers, follow.
What is travel, as an activity, for you, personally?
Travel, for me, is any act of leaving home and being in a new place – be it across town or around the world. We have a travel industry that caters to vacationers, but travel need not be a holiday – it can apply to any endeavor to a new place, be it a hike in a forest near your home, a refugee crossing borders in search of a better life, a devotee on a religious pilgrimage, or a young person traveling the world on the cheap in search of fun and life lessons.
Which are, in your opinion, the main benefits a person can access by traveling?
The main benefit of travel is newness – of being forced to deal with new places and people and challenges away from home. It is, in its own way, a very pure kind of education, where one has to learn new things, not because they are being assigned by a teacher, but because these new things are an intrinsic part of negotiating and making sense of a new environment.
Which attitudes and behaviors make easy to obtain the main benefits one can extract from the activity of traveling?
Openness is the main attitude that can leave one attuned to the possibilities of travel. Openness to all new experiences, good or bad, expected or unexpected. All too often we approach travel in the manner of consumers, with specific experiential expectations, when it is better approached in the manner of a pilgrim, who is open to embracing – and learning from – all new experiences. Part of this attitude of openness is patience and gratitude when it comes to these new experiences.
Which techniques, methods or procedures are useful to optimize what can be obtained from travel?
I’m a big fan of walking in new places. Walking helps you attune you to new surroundings, and it helps you balance the expectations you had as a “tourist” with the subtler, quotidian realities of the place that surrounds you. Walking is a great way of paying attention to a new place – and especially paying attention in a way that allows you to break out from tourist expectations and see a place in all of its complexity.
Apart from what the traveler can do, how can travel itself help the traveler to learn or to acquire capacities and skills?
Travel, at its best, is about adapting and adjusting to being in a new place – from encountering new landscapes and cultures, to dealing with new foods and languages and manner codes. Away from home, the traveler learns not just how to deal with these new things – but he also learns that he has a great capacity for adaptation and adjustment, one that he might never have encountered back home.
To which extent you think travel is an educational tool which allows the traveler’s learning and enrichment and that is complementary to traditional and conventional education?
The lessons that one learns during travel can be had in tandem with, or independent of, a more conventional education. For example, learning a new language has a certain structure in a classroom, but using that language in a new culture and new environment is a more dynamic and useful (and fun) application of those lessons. And while classroom lessons are often broken down into specialties, travel offers a constant, interdisciplinary kind of learning – one where the traveler might be embracing language learning, architecture, biology, business negotiation, art history, horticulture, cartography, and city-planning, all in one dynamic day.
Why do you think travel is better than other activities to learn and to gain the many skills you mention in your book?
Travel is applied rather than theoretical. It’s one thing to conjugate a verb in a classroom; it’s another to conjugate a verb to order delicious food or flirt with an attractive person on the street. It’s one thing to study geology in a classroom; it’s another thing to climb a mountain and study its geology in a distant land. It’s one thing to study economic theory in a classroom; it is another thing to immerse oneself in the economy of an unfamiliar land.
Which kind of place / destination / country you think is better to both learn and gain skills when traveling?
I think the less familiar the place, the more potential it has to offer learning opportunities. One often hears of “culture shock” that afflicts the new traveler or expatriate, but often it is by working through culture shock that one makes breakthroughs in gaining new understandings, perspectives, and skills. Oftentimes this learning happens not at the situational level, but at the structural-cultural level – when, for example, an American traveler raised to prize individualism comes to understand that East Asian cultures do not prize individualism, and have many core cultural beliefs that reflect different values.
What can be done to elevate the consideration travel has in society in general?
I think encouraging travel at all levels – be it tourism, or migration, or recreation, or study abroad, and long-term vagabonding – can help societies embrace a more nuanced understanding of its value. Often it feels like the academic lenses through which people view the world don’t allow for nuances and imperfections, whereas travel deals in nuances and imperfections, and helps us to deal with them.
What could be done to convince young people about the huge benefits and advantages travel may have in their lives?
I often speak to young people on this topic, and I think the main way to make them appreciate the benefits of travel is simply to convince them to get out and do it. Often, I tell young people that a great reason to travel is that it is a lot of fun. This sometimes makes the adults nervous, since they think “fun” is frivolous compared to the educational potential of travel – but I think this attitude doesn’t give enough credit to young people. Even as young people go into the world seeking fun and personal fulfillment, they will be seeing new things, learning new things, and solving problems and creating understandings in new situations. Regardless of what inspires young people to get out and travel, the travel itself will teach them things they would never have learned at home.
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