I can’t count how many times I’ve been warned off travelling to certain places. South Africa is too dangerous, all of the Middle East is a warzone, Paris is ‘so overrated’, there’s nothing to do in Amsterdam beyond getting high and visiting the Anne Frank and sex museum in the same afternoon. Places I never had the opportunity of seeing, tainted and struck off from my ‘Wanderlist’. In a sense, the internet becomes almost like a mother’s voice. Omnipresent, irritating, inescapable- it dishes out advice we never want to hear but would never dream of silencing.
Image credit: blyjak/iStock
So, it’s a complicated relationship we have with technology. On one hand, it has the capacity to make or break the way we perceive a place in this world. Yet, without it, we may not have any awareness of some of it at all. It could serve to inform us on things we might be clueless about, like some of the possible challenges and dangers we may have to contend with as we delve into new adventures.
There must be tens of millions of us out there that are guilty of looking up our next holiday destination, reading Trip Advisor and Lonely Planet lists of ‘best cultural attractions’ and ‘places to eat’. Yet, there’s something inherently inauthentic about searching about how and where to get the ‘most authentic, local experience’ in advance. Surely, to be authentic, we need elements of spontaneity to stud our travels. It is this spontaneity that helps us to discover great local restaurants, undiscovered little shop boutiques or even discreet little village towns.
I can remember the excited month of planning before family holidays to France and Italy where I would sit alongside my dad, browsing through countless web pages of places we could stay. We never truly considered what part of the countryside we were in, so long as it was far from the main cities but close enough to a village, to buy our daily baguette. Once we’d found a place to stay, that’s where our research on the place ended.
Provence village (Image credit: romrodinka/iStock)
Every year, we’d find ourselves staying just outside clusters of tiny French or Italian villages in the hillsides, most of which had names we could hardly pronounce. Never did our daily itinerary include visiting grand landmarks or eating at a famous restaurant. Instead, we would simply explore the area, buy honey from the local farmer’s market, join in village fêtes and simply embrace everything that was around us. It was simple, uneventful and quite frankly, some of the best holidays of my life.
I guess it all comes down to how to strike the balance between doing enough research so that we have a decent plan to work with but leaving enough to the unknown to keep us curious. After all, why deprive ourselves of that rush we get when we stumble upon something unexpected, whatever it may be? We all know that technology can be useful but for me, it’s the uncertainty that makes travelling exciting, the prospect of discovery. Isn’t that why we do it in the first place?
