Travel is a dream. We dream of boarding the plane, of first touch with crisp fresh bedsheets, of the heat and the sea and the sand. We dream that we will live this dream. 

Later I will argue that this dream cannot survive contact with reality. It lives only so long as it is unfulfilled. And yet it cannot entirely float free of reality either:  the tread of many millions weigh heavy  on the earth; the force of their gaze affects its object. In this age, on this scale, you cannot be witness to the world without transforming it. 

But people travel for all sorts of reasons. Some just want to get fucked up. Others are seeking something. It is really the latter I want to talk about. Through the search for a total Other, they attempt to locate something essential in themselves that wasn’t accessible before - that perhaps never existed before. 

While many other travellers aren’t seeking anything (or don’t realise they are),  this  imagery of discovery in an ‘exotic’ land - concurrently imagined as an inward movement of self-discovery - has filtered into the general psyche and frames much of the way we think about travel. It is through this visual and cultural lexicon that my desire to travel took form, as did the specific route I chose. And it is in this that both the harm and the value of travel are contained

Where travel is valuable, it is precisely because of its dreamlike qualities. As dream, travel is a suspension of the real. We allow ourselves to forget ourselves, forget the particular enclosedness of our rooms, our kitchens, our commutes and our routines, even if momentarily. This lightness makes travel an irresistible proposition. The walls of the little houses we have meticulously built around us come tumbling down and we alone are left standing, exposed

Which is exciting. Without our boxes we are reminded how open-ended our identity is, that our facts and stories can be unravelled and retied with each new encounter. I am whoever I want to be in that place, on that day, agile as steam in the wind.

At the same time the opposite is true. When you’re on the move, you are passing through unending difference; the one constantly abiding feature in that is you. So, through travel we can distil something essential about ourselves. Or are perhaps made to remember what we once already knew. 

And, having shorn off routine, you can pay attention. You can celebrate the million little causes for delight or sadness that show up to you as different or unexpected. In Guatemala, for instance, locals will call you their ‘Curazon’. In Vietnam they form the symbol of a heart with their thumb and forefinger as a greeting. In Cambodia water is sweetened with lemongrass. The beautiful mundane announces itself in a way it doesn’t at home.

For this learning to take place, we must dismantle our old routines and bare ourselves to the unknown. It takes disorientation, being lost. When we are at home, the things we encounter immediately elicit the appropriate response without recourse to thought or
deliberation: I skillfully flick on the kettle, skirt round the sofa, manoeuvre a crowded street or acknowledge friends and strangers in a manner attuned to my particular culture. ‘Home’ dulls the prosaic business of the everyday by absorbing it into habit, into our bodily knowledge, so we can free up cognitive space to focus on other things. It is what Heidegger calls ‘absorbed coping’.

Likewise, our memory systems have increasingly come to rely on extrabodily stuff: notebooks, smartphones, computers, post-it notes. And since memory is constitutive of who we are, it follows that our minds are partially anchored in embodied interactions with an ecology of artifacts in our familiar environment, that they extend beyond the brain. 

This means that when we leave home, we are leaving aspects of our cognition behind. Our cognitive processes are unsure quite how to cope with the foreign environment. We are never quite sure how to interpret a gesture, a smile or a look. We do not know whether your actions constitute kindness, rudeness or just the behavioural average; whether sacred boundaries have been inadvertently trespassed; whether a laugh is shared, or directed. We have no sense of the mutterings of the past still inhabiting the present, of all the secret histories, myths and linguistic passwords compacted into the brick and soil of a place.

For Heidegger, this breakdown of my ability to cope with the world around me discloses a root existential condition of uncanniness or anxiety. While it isn’t necessary to travel to experience existential anxiety, travel can expedite it. You are yanked out of the nullity of routine and so can regard your life - all the intricate projects, decisions, dreams, regrets that normally immerse you - cooly and soberly. The upshot is that this distance enables us to critically interrogate the lives we are leading, and thereby develop a sense of what matters. Only this way can you seize hold of your projects consciously and resolutely. If you seize them at all.

Unwinding and re-binding, washing away, finding the hard stone that endures beneath the soft. If travel is remedial, this is why. Of course when you return home and get entangled in your life again, it becomes difficult once more to distinguish force of habit from force of character.

There is another sense in which travel is a form of forgetting, which itself is predicated upon another sense of ‘travel’: as transit or transport, rather than as the overall journey. It is an erasure enacted in the spaces of transit: the airport terminals, bus stations, service stations.  Denuded of all history, ambiguity and symbolic communication (which exclude some precisely by making others belong), these spaces are the process and conclusion of an active forgetting of place, time, and culture.

Nowhere more than the airport terminal do you feel the proximity of the elsewhere and the nullity of here, the headiness of possibility in this neutered world of to-ings and fro-ings. In the airport, thousands of individual itineraries converge for a moment, enclosed within their solitary universes, existing simultaneously rather than together. Nothing necessarily distinguishes an airport in Shanghai from one in Sao Paulo. The faces we encounter are all instantly forgotten as if
in a dream.

These spaces are typical examples of what the anthropologist Marc Augé calls a ‘non-place’: a space stripped of its specificity and without organic social relations. Non-places assist a solitude that is expansive and assured, which we slip into with total ease, since the rules of this space are designed to be maximally intelligible to the greatest possible number of people. We are always, and never, at home here.

Meanings are flat and totally transparent; there is no interpretive space; the environment is nondescript.  We are therefore cleared of any special obligations towards others. We do not need to negotiate opaque social situations, and we do not need to cultivate a face to present to the world. We are liberated from our usual determinants, our social entanglements, to become an administrative quantity: passenger, customer, citizen, visa-holder, employee. All that is left is the consumerist imperatives: Be comfortable! Be beautiful! Be happy! Buy now! 

Western travellers, at least, find home in the consumerist totems of Starbucks and McDonald’s, to whom the lurid neon glow of a giant M connotes comfort, friendship. It is only those who refuse to conform to the cool anonymity of the global leisure-consumption space, who defiantly iterate their specificity against the drive to neutralise it - who are queer, homeless, punk, ‘other’ - that find themselves observed, ostracised and criminalised. 

It is also in these nowhere spaces most of us occupy with total ease that the dream of travel is able to flourish. Through adverts and marketing we are constantly buttonholed with images and signs denoting a reality just out of reach. We see a palm tree inclining on a pure white beach and a tanned woman sipping from a coconut. We see temples, raffia shacks, incense and orange robes.

When, in anticipation of our journey, we project ourselves into these destinations, we imagine ourselves totally present in that new environment. We forget that when we travel, we bring ourselves with us; that a personality riven with doubt, anxieties and desires will inevitably mar the simplicity of any moment. That when I am there – sitting on the beach drinking daiquiris – my mind will be shuttling between travel documents, work deadlines, the night before, the itchy sand in my pants – such that I am also always elsewhere. We omit the tedium – waiting for the bus, for visas – and the banality of anywhere on earth, with its traffic, office blocks, and car parks. We imagine a life half sketched: sublime, but lacking interior depth or connective tissue. 

Those sublime visions of travel can only be had at a distance. They are, in Jean Baudrillard’s terms, simulacra: symbols or sets of signifiers that denote what does not exist, a copy without an original. The sign is systematically elided with the ‘real’ it purportedly represents, until eventually it comes to displace it. The simulacrum is a promise not intended to be fulfilled, its power predicated upon its unreality, its purpose just the feeling it is intended to evoke, a feeling only sustained in anticipation. 

The imagery of beaches and temples is a slippery evocation of escape and otherness unmoored from any physical reality. Any real destination is simply too specific, and hence imperfect, to live up to it; and our experience of it is crowded out by anxieties, memories, and regrets. But when we are in transit we have no demands for our surroundings. Through them we move calm and capable, buttressed by the heady anticipation of dreams to come – without yet having to navigate the anxiety of bringing them to fruition. The errant wanderer can feel at home here, in a way they cannot once their destination is reached. 

The displacement of reality by unreality reaches beyond the journey and into the destination itself. The material environment is bent and warped to reproduce the false image immanent in the mass visitors’ collective imagination. This happens thanks to the fearsome economic disparity between visitor and visited, seer and seen. 

There is a parallel with what Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayoyo called ‘pornomiseria’ in their 1977 mockumentary The Vampires of Poverty. Ospina and Mayoyo sought to critique the “mercantilist impulse” of filmmakers to treat poverty as a spectacle, easy to sell as a cathartic “counterpoint to viewers’ opulence”. Modern travellers do similar - but not with poverty exactly. Rather they fetishise authenticity. 

We seek in the exotic a foil to the anomie of modern postindustrial life and a remedy to those withering values believed to encumber us in the west: self-concern, spiritual neglect, material consumption, competition. We have a need for it to be totally distinct from the familiar. This fetishised conception of authenticity therefore permits no room for individualism or enterprise. The vision of society it engenders cannot bear change, dynamism or heterogeneity. Not migration, multiculturalism, urbanisation, globalisation. It must be totally other.

To satisfy travellers’ fetishised vision of the authentic exotic, locals must turn to the production of Otherness as pure spectacle. National dress is paraded, photos sold, traditional crafts flashed, sacred ceremonies staged for a foreign audience. A commercial product is made of an identity, just as it is bled out of everyday life with condos, beach resorts, and tours. And by commodifying otherness, for westerners brought up on the commodity form, it becomes not so ‘other’ after all. 

Some popular travel destinations increasingly meet this demand by assuming the character of a theatre production. When you arrive at the Tegalalang rice fields in Bali, historically famed for its green and beautiful terraced paddies, you will find swings, wicker constructions and hollywood sign-esque large letters declaring ‘I LOVE BALI’ encroaching on a seemingly dormant arable space. It is clear tourists here want a backdrop to insta posts and this infrastructure has grown spider-like around the borders of the shot to service this need. These giant Hollywood-style letters were common, acting as prompts to photos and announcing a location. This is indicative of the systematic inversion of real and imaginary that distinguishes the hyperreal. The actual destination resembles more a ‘backstage’, while its online existence – through social media or streetview – increasingly assumes the character of the real thing. 

We chase authenticity the way kids chase their own shadows. We try to outrun the harrowing effects of tourism, will make the absurd complaint that presence of tourists has changed a place, cost it its charm, and that opting for ‘the road less travelled’ will always be internal to the spirit of the traveller. In reality, for anyone chasing a crystalline vision of Otherness, the enterprise is inherently self-defeating, since the fact of your being there (and the infrastructure necessary to enable this fact) tells the lie to the authenticity of the encounter. We are a presence seen as much as seeing, and inevitably changing the nature of the object of our interest by being interested in it. Thus it is the peculiar character of Otherness to vanish once it is approached. The real location of the travelling destination is in the universe of simulations, the ‘carnival of mirrors’ in which we stand, dazed, gawking at reflections of a reality either extinct or totally imagined.