I am lucky enough to have had a lot of opportunities to travel, and it has caused me to often think about the nature of “the traveler.”  Our discussions on place have brought this idea back to me once again.  I don’t have any good answers, so if that is what you are looking for, you have come to the wrong place (place!).  I thought, though, that I would take this opportunity to voice and perhaps unpack a little some of the pervading questions I have about travel.

I want to start by saying that I love traveling.  I deeply appreciate the opportunity it affords individuals to learn about other people-groups and cultures and to see oneself as part of a much larger whole.  However, I also often feel guilty about travel.  I think it is impossible to visit a new place without engaging in colonization in some small way. Obviously, I don’t feel guilty enough about this to stop exploring, but I do try to be mindful of it as much as possible.  I know that I have a tendency to want to project my own knowledge and understanding onto the culture that I am seeing around me, and I have a feeling that others do the same.

One thing I often catch myself doing is accentuating or exaggerating the similarities.  I take my own, American worldview and project it onto a new place.  “Everywhere has a McDonald’s, which means we are all the same!”  I think what I am really trying to do is find a common ground or a point of similarity, but what I end up doing often is ignoring the unique aspects of a place or culture by trying to force it to fit into what I already understand.  I end up “colonizing” a place by denying its complex history and the relationship it has to its inhabitants.

Or I swing too far in the other direction and idealize a place for being so different.  Yesterday as we walked, I saw into a row of back yards and saw laundry hanging from a line.  At the moment it felt very idyllic; a picture of a simpler life.  But I realized that I am romanticizing someone else’s real life.  Their laundry isn’t on display so that I can think, “Oh how quaint! How picturesque!”  Their laundry is on the line because after a long day of work, they had to come home and do laundry (I recognize that this too is a projection, that I am still attempting to write the laundry owner’s narrative).  So while addressing the fact that everything is not exactly as I already know it, I try to perform the balancing act of not “otherizing” everything by making it either idyllic or mysterious.

Finally, I colonize through my attitude towards other tourists.  I want an authentic experience.  Which, I think, is actually impossible for me to have because I am inherently inauthentic as a visitor.  But I desire to see “real life,” which means that there can’t be any other tourists around.  “Go away, Americans! This is my ‘real Irish pub’ and you are ruining it!”  In my attempts at a unique or authentic experience, I end up laying claim to a place that I have absolutely no claim to.  I am the American tourist.  I am the person I glare at when she or he enters my “secret” spot (usually that I found in a guide book).  So while I often think that tourists are grossly tourist-y and that I want to get off the beaten path, I try to remember that I am an outsider, a visitor, too.  While I may want to go off the beaten path, the people who actually live and work on that path may not want be stomping through it.

So, yeah.  Make of that what you will.  I don’t think there’s a right answer.  Travel is important. And getting off the beaten path sometimes is important too.  But it’s also crucial that I remember that real people with real lives inhabit the places that I visit.  The picture above shows just one small bit of a complex and beautiful landscape, and I try to remember that, even when it’s not foggy, as a visitor this is all I will ever see or understand of a place that I am visiting only temporarily.