JUNE 11, FRIDAY

SEARCHING FOR SYMPATHY

Sometimes lately I have tried to gain sympathy for my adventures, such my problems with this Amtrak trip that I am about to leave on. My body is aching, I don’t know what I am getting myself into, everything could go wrong, people around me are coming down with Covid. But I get no sympathy. People say, you are a traveler, you know what you are doing, you will come through just fine, although these assurances don’t tempt them to do the same thing themselves.

But I am realizing that the reason for traveling is the same as Don Quixote mounting his horse and heading into the unknown. It is leaving everything that is predictable, when you know just what is coming next, that draws you along. It is entering the wilderness in the heroic quest and having no idea what is coming or what will go wrong or what will threaten you. It is precisely not knowing what will happen and risking things that could go wrong that is attractive.

When I look back on other trips, trips with students that were for me more Don Quixote mythological adventures than Sancho Panza academic exercises a great number of things went wrong that I wasn’t expecting.

I think of sleeping for 8 hours on a concrete floor of an Indian railways waiting room when our tickets inexplicably didn’t arrive, of dealing with a whacked out boy on drugs embarrassing the whole group in front of a revered Buddhist leader because in Sri Lanka prescription drugs that someone in the group knew would give a tremendous high, but not how high, were handed out cheaply at a Sri Lankan pharmacy without a prescription. It was a student who wandered off to a McDonalds getting left behind when the train took off only knowing that we would be somewhere in a city of 5 million people, Ahmedabad, ten hours away. It was a girl drinking beer in Sri Lanka (highly disapproved of) tripping and cutting herself up with a beer bottle and then insisting with blood everywhere she would only be treated by an American doctor. It was an agile boy hopping over a spiked fence, but slipping on the way up and being spiked 4 inches into the groin.

There is actually enough of this in everyday life, and everyday life is an adventure, sometimes even a nightmare, with automobile accidents, rare diseases, schoolroom shootings, falling down the steps and on and on. But we accept the domestic dangers and are often leery of travel into the unknown.

Travel can be hazardous. But the reason for traveling is that you don’t know where you are going or what you need to do or what will happen. It is the uncertainly that is the draw and as with any mythic adventure the serendipitous things that happen on a trip are completely unexpected as well and the reason for traveling. But they won’t happen unless you throw yourself out there.

In contrast, the very things that people often do to have a comfortable and safe trip are the very things that will keep them from having any sort of adventure.

Cruise ships that provide every comfort with brief escorted tours at every landing are an example. We saw this recently in Paris with the guided tours through Montmartre with people huddled around a guide and facing a building that they had no interest in as they got a description of its history which they also cared nothing about. Wandering, when you don’t know where you are going is how something happens. Luxury hotels in India in the $300 range give you gardens and high ceilings and lots of flowers and obsequious Oxford English speaking educated service, but they don’t give you the India of Teen Darwaza bazaar in Ahmedabad, with its colors and smells and chaos (and pickpockets, my iPod was lifted by a sweet little girl here).

If you are looking for an adventure you have to let go and depend on your own wits in order to get around and often make mistakes. Although with GPS and google transportation advice of all kinds this is getting much easier. In an Airbnb you can get to know the owner and have a great time as I did with Efi in Greece, or a screechingly tense and awful time as I did with Lili in London. But each of them was an adventure and memorable and each of them taught me something about myself. It is the unexpected that makes travel so stimulating.