School of Wonder

• Why we love and need travel

There may well be reasons not to travel. You could be robbed, lied to, ripped off. You could take a wrong turn, stray off track, get lost. Yes, all of this is possible. And when it happens, it is undoubtedly unpleasant and disturbing. But upon close inspection, it soon becomes clear that experiences like this are rare indeed, and the probability of them happening in the first place is relatively low. So, from this perspective, the courage to be open-minded is a small investment for the potential great returns that travel can deliver, getting to know oneself better and perhaps even making the world a little better by exploring it. Those who travel usually return as different people, in many cases undergoing some form of transformation or self-expansion. The male traveler has become someone they never were before; the female traveler may have become someone she never imagined she could be. Anyone who does not venture out into the world cannot know the world. Anyone who does not know the world is not in a position to judge it. And anyone who does not see the world with their own eyes remains trapped in the unworldliness of a static worldview.  

Travel elevates the trivial

Travel is not vacationing. There is a big difference between “travels” and “holidays”: holidays are always the post-arrival experience, whereas travels are always about being on the move. People who travel do not arrive – precisely because they are traveling. Both traveling and vacationing are absolutely justified, sometimes the holiday becomes a journey and vice versa. Travel is almost always a “school of wonder”, which calculated and calculation-driven people in calculating, performance-driven societies seem to have lost sight of. In a world where everything is curated, measured, and manipulated, the opportunity to engage with the unpredictable and unplanned could lead to the kind of happy experiences that are both rare and memorable. After all, travel is a declaration of readiness to discover the unforeseen and correct one's own prejudices – in this way, travel serves to rehabilitate curiosity, which may have been lost among increasingly digital/virtual contemporaries amid all that following, sharing, tweeting, scrolling, tapping, and liking. Travel sharpens perception, sensitizes a person to detail and elevates the little things that would otherwise go virtually unnoticed. Especially in times of constant stimulation, radical insults, lies, and suspicions, travel is an excellent medium for individuals to learn to trust their own judgment. In an era where reality is manipulable beyond all previous conception by propaganda bots and deepfakes using digital intelligence, people in the looming metaverse might at some point only have the chance to be sensually overwhelmed by the reality of an unconstructed world through travel.

The force and power of the authenticity of the moment

People who travel smell for themselves. See for themselves. Feel for themselves. Choose for themselves. Think for themselves. Perceive for themselves and perceive their own self. They embrace the unknown and feel the force and power of the authenticity of the moment. They do not allow others to predetermine the discovery of things or let the exploration of niches be taken out of their hands. They decide independently which path to take, and perhaps they end up on side paths and short cuts, drift into alleys and detours, stray off the beaten track, and come to an impasse in no-thru courtyards. It’s possible, but it is only in this way that they discover the hidden beauty of an unlit alley and, in any case, see more of the essentials than those who stay at home, relying only on the voices of X and gaming, YouTube, and all the vagaries of hearsay. When they travel, people acquire specific knowledge without even realizing it. Quite by accident, the traveler encounters the wonderfully ordinary real world in all its marvelous triviality. Sometimes things are baffling, but the original is always preferred to the cliché, which is why people become more open-minded through travel rather than narrower-minded. Instead of continuing to be held hostage by their own assumptions, travel offers a chance to become unbiased. Being unbiased does not mean acting naively, carelessly, or recklessly; it just means becoming aware of one’s own prejudices before judging. It means learning to spot the stereotypes that everyone carries with them for what they are. 

Expecting nothing is a difficult exercise

When traveling, nothing is subject to the pressure of efficiency and optimization. The journey is the purpose in and of itself, for example, in the case of a bus that, though scheduled, isn’t running. No, that’s wrong – it’s just that it doesn’t show up, even though the very polite ticket seller in his little booth in the village by Lake Atitlán in central Guatemala clearly said the bus to the next larger city would come in an hour. The man isn’t lying either; it’s just that he trusts in something higher than the schedule. But the fact remains that the bus does not come after an hour. Then, the ticket seller promises the bus will leave in two hours because someone just whispered it to him. After three hours, the ticket seller says the bus will come in four. After five hours, he announces that he can state with confidence that the bus will not be coming today at all. He closes his ticket booth and goes home. A bus does not come just because a ticket seller or a schedule says so; it comes when it comes. 

And when – shaped as it is by the demand for punctuality – the will is hindered by fate like this, the power of an inexplicable self-transformation can reveal itself. And one teaches oneself to take things as they come. Rather than being with the person that is late, the fault lies instead with the person who expects everything to happen on time. What entitles people to believe that everything happens according to plan, let alone their own plan? Expecting nothing is a difficult exercise for contemporaries who have no time to spare and have learned to overload their lives with expectations, only to have even less time when those same expectations are met. So does this mean that in the demanding existence of societies defined by a division of labor, people should learn not to rely on things? Yes, of course, relying on things has to be possible, but the question is: on what exactly? If the bus whose arrival was announced either does not come at all or turns up two days later, the traveler gains two extra days and nights of unexpected time and — after an early morning climb to the crater rim of the San Pedro volcano — perhaps the most beautiful sunrise ever seen in their life. None of which would have been experienced without the missing bus. Ultimately, the lesson is: if the bus does not come, the traveler learns humility. In this way, travel could trigger a reversal of values and insights: the true luxury of life lies not in wasting money, but in wasting time that one did not think one had in the first place. Anyone who travels to a city, region, or country conquers a place by letting it conquer them. Letting a place conquer them? Yes, throwing oneself into a place as openly as possible – to learn to read, hear, and understand it. Being conquered means allowing a place to seduce without prior knowledge, until one can guide oneself through it because one has managed to decipher its grammar: the verticals and horizontals, angles and turns, the arrangement of alleys, streets, houses, squares, and parks, and the punctuation of the spaces in between, where traditions are expressed. The deciphering gaze does not evaluate. It does not judge. It observes. It strives to find, not to exploit. People do not advance thanks to success and functionality, but by the recognition of mistakes, errors, and missteps. They learn by asking and, in doing so, encounter others. Among the things that traveling the world teaches is that everyone is themself wherever they are, but also always a stranger. And perhaps those who have had first-hand experience of what it feels like to be a stranger in a foreign land will become more sensitive to hostility toward foreigners in their own country. 

The paradox of travel

Undoubtedly, in spite of all its merits, traveling can also become a burden and a strain. With all the mass travel, tourism has turned into overtourism; reports of local citizens fighting back against the influx of visitors are becoming increasingly common, in Barcelona, Palma, Venice, Dubrovnik. Ever intensified and expanding, mass tourism has created a ridiculous dilemma: the destruction of the very thing it is based on. The true paradox of travel is that discovering the world can simultaneously mean destroying the world. More precisely: destroying nature or destroying social structures. Every traveler, who at the same time is also a tourist, is caught in the jaws of a dilemma. They are contributing to a phenomenon that they exempt themselves from. They are part of a problem, the only realistic solution to which would be to not travel anymore. However, if a ban on flying were to be enacted, as is increasingly demanded these days, or mobility and travel restricted in general in the belief that it would protect habitats for the socio-ecological benefit of the locals, this, too, could turn to their disadvantage in the long run. Ecological and morally-minded sustainability along the lines of renunciation and deprivation could well end up having severe economic and subsequently social repercussions for regions that – in their search for survival strategies – have already surrendered themselves to international tourism and would be hard pressed to compete in the world’s markets otherwise. More and more countries and islands have submitted to the promises of ever better organized mass tourism and have found the only remaining economic basis for existence in the short-term visitor – every traveler invests in the areas they visit with money that would just not be there without tourism. 

New Tourism Ethic

And now, demanding higher social and ecological standards for a new tourism ethic does not do away with travel; it changes it. Decarbonization and carbon-neutral propulsion technologies have been worked on systematically for years, and some day, not too far from now – the optimists out there have the year 2035 in their sights – airplanes could indeed be powered by hydrogen-based fuel cell technology, and ships run on hybrid engines with battery power. Beyond that, magnetic levitation trains and hyperloops could eventually come out on top – they would then be more environmentally friendly than airplanes, cheaper than trains, and in total, deliver greater per capita energy-efficiency than any other mode of transportation. Ultimately, too, all travelers could steer clear of mass tourism infrastructure in the cities and countries they visit, support local value chains, promote sustainable offers through “guided demand” – enhancing protection of local structures within a market economy in the process. In future, would it be inconceivable for visitors to provide targeted support for those local families or communities in particular that are committed to a Fairtrade mindset? Could state certification through an internationally binding ecolabel not be the decisive incentive for people to only book places to stay and hotels in the country they are traveling to where regenerative water cycles have demonstrably been put in place, renewable energies generated, regional product portfolios offered, and where housekeeping and cleaning staff are well compensated? The more that the image of cities and regions depends on the wider environmental and social compatibility of their businesses, the less harmful travel would become for the environment and climate. And if individual travel was priced more highly going forward, individuals would more likely ration their travel activities: traveling twice instead of four times a year, which firstly does not exclude those with lesser financial means, secondly ensures travel is still possible for everyone, and thirdly curbs the masses.

A tiny bit more world peace

But why travel at all if it’s bad for the climate and the environment? Why go to faraway places if it leads to the gentrification of cities and a situation where locals can no longer afford the rent because they’ve been displaced by Airbnb hosts? Why travel when the culinary presence of the globalized world – from pasta and hummus to burgers and sushi – is brought directly to one’s home comfort zone anyway? Because at home, every last square meter of living space is subject to regulations, specifications and ordinances. Because people in functional societies based on the division of labor grow up in prefabricated worlds, living in predetermined habitats monitored by regulatory bodies, within the tightly regulated coordinate systems of carefully calculated lifestyles that are subject to standardized processes. Where imagination and curiosity wither away and urban stress increases. Travel offers the precious opportunity to contribute to greater civilization by showing respect for others – out of a sense of gratitude for every small act of understanding participated in, out of an appreciation for each tiny moment of human connection people are permitted to share in. And from the conviction that every handshake between strangers, done with understanding and trust, means a tiny bit more world peace.