I never went back to my chosen career but followed a lifetime working in tourism, learning the best reasons for travel..
After a summer that should have been a few months of freedom before I went back to my chosen career, I never went back. I loved working in youth hostels and carried on working in and for them for the next nearly 40 years.
In youth hostels I watched as tourism changed beyond expectation. I worked as a manager, worked in operations, marketing, then corporate affairs.
Working in youth hostels I was always surrounded by people travelling. I loved that because I loved travel. I loved the people I met, and the places they spoke about.
Work, pleasure, fun
I’ve been lucky. I’ve travelled for pleasure and I’ve travelled for work. I grew up in Zimbabwe. I lived in South Africa as a student. I worked on a kibbutz in Israel. I’ve lived in different places in England, and for a while the home we owned was on the Isle of Skye.
We return to north west Scotland and the Hebrides often. I’ve been to Orkney, to Wales, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Spain, and Italy. I’ve been to the USA and travelled in southern Africa.
Through all that time, travel was changing just as wider society was changing. I helped that change along, helped increase the numbers travelling, helped meet demands for more comfort, and higher quality. Helped ensure that people who were travelling further had places to stay.
As tastes shifted from touring from place to place, to staying in one place, long distance cycling and touring dropped from favour. Youth hostels in places like the Chilterns have closed and been sold. Visitors from Europe no longer slip over the North Sea for cycle tours of East Anglia.
Rather than take a trip to the Lake District as a first holiday from home, school leavers go to Spain, Greece or further, for sea, sun and sex. Youth hostels closed and the network shrank.
Fraying edges
Air travel became cheaper. Sustainability and issues of global warming frayed the edges of our pleasure. I became involved in green initiatives, to make youth hostels more environmentally friendly, hurrying us towards the issues that travel faces today.
Today we travel further and faster than we did in 1976. We expect higher standards. We expect experiences, and special places, and we want to do it with more speed and ease than was ever imagined. Nobody chose this. It’s happened with no conscious decision.
Tourism is not the problem I’m sure. Travel is not a curse or a blight, but the way society, our economises, politics and media react to it is. Travel is not aberrant but the way we were meant to be.
Travel is comradeship, and camaraderie. Chaucer’s tales are about the companionship of the pilgrimage. Travel inspires tales, and literature celebrates travel and journeys, from the Odyssey to Ulysses and Lord of The Rings.
Armchair travel
I’ve always loved reading about countries and places I’ve never seen. Part of my enjoyment of thrillers is their use of far off and unusual locations, from Shetland to Gorky Square, Iceland and Three Pines in rural Quebec.
Travel is at the root of reading, exploring a new place without leaving your armchair. That’s as true about science fiction and fantasy as it is about travel guides.
Around campfires our ancestors made friends and forged bonds. Strangers bring surprise and delight to love.
We love travel. To be human means to travel. Even after centuries of living settled lives in towns and cities, we cannot throw off nomadic ways. We travel, when we can.
We are tourists because travel is our natural state. Preventing us from travel would mean chaining and confining us in the way we were during Covid lockdowns. That some people are denied the opportunity to travel is still an injustice of tourism.
Better people
We travel to meet others, to experience different cultures and different ways of life, to understand our differences.
We travel to learn about ourselves, about geography, history, and biology, to enrich our minds, and to learn humility in a vast world. We travel for leisure, to relax and escape, to be more elemental for a time.
Most of all we travel to be transformed, to become better people. As FD Roosevelt, the US president said in 1937, “The more you circulate on your travels, the better citizen you become." That’s an idea that should be available to all.
But it’s all a contradiction nevertheless. Travel inspires us but changed the world we went to see by its very nature.
We’re trapped in a whale churning its way into the depths, suspecting that it may be a monster and we may never get out, because it is eating us and everything along the way.
We’re in love with its insides and unable to see where it is going or what it is doing. We can only hope it sicks us up soon.
Betterment
If we want to keep on travelling something has to change. What I’ve seen in a life of working in tourism convinces me of that. We have to find something new.
Plenty of people have ideas and different views of what can be done to make us all better travellers. That’s a cause for optimism. Views for betterment drive improvements.
People have plenty of ideas of how travel can be better, from tourist companies to the United Nations, all worth listening to and all able to add to our thinking on making travel better.
And history, how we changed the way we travel, also offers hope.
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/solomon-leviathan
A companion piece, and counterpoint!