After my trip last summer through Latin America with a friend from high school I did some writing about my experiences and thoughts over the course of our 2 month trip. It was part travelogue, part travel writing, taking more or less a novelistic approach, trying to imitate my favorite travel writer, Bill Bryson. In my never titled work I tried to correlate some major ideas and themes into the every day experiences of traveling for an extended period of time. I had always been amazed at how Bryson, hardly an adventurous or trailblazing traveler, could captivate readers with his narratives of traveling to the most ordinary of places. The stories he told and places he visited were always supported by rich exposition and thoroughly researched background information, that, combined with his quick wit and writing skills made for compelling reading regardless of the situation. But besides the stories he told, his books usually involved some sort of underlying theme that brought it to life. They became so much more than mere travelogues recounting the day by day activities that someone who had never met him, nor visited the places he was describing, could become enveloped in the pictures he painted on the page.
As I began writing more about my traveling I attempted to emulate this idea. I tried to move past the day to day descriptions (and then we ate at this place....and then we saw this building) that rarely mean much to anyone besides the author. I had some grander ideas of incorporating my unemployment into themes of traveling as a form of personal introspection and discovery, but that became extremely difficult to pull off without sounding like a whiny d-bag (I don't know what I want to be when I grow up....wah!). But beyond my own personal sob story, I continued to search for other themes, and one which became quite apparent was the way in which technology, most noticeably the information revolution of the past 20 years, has reshaped the way we travel.
The internet is global. Aside from extremely remote areas in the developing world, you can find access to the world wide web almost anywhere you go. In fact, as a traveler it's easier to do outside of the US than inside. The ubiquitous presence of home computers in the US has starved the need for public access, and though one can find multiple internet cafes in just about every town or village in the rest of the world, I'm not sure it would be so easy here in the states. Accessing the internet became a daily part of our routine on the road, whether through using the computer of our host, the one at the hostel, or finding an internet cafe, it was fairly safe to say we were online almost daily. This was done to contact friends and family, research destinations, travel routes, find lodging and keep up to date with all the happenings on Facebook.
In thermodynamics there is scientific value known as a state function, which is a property dependent only on the current state of the system and is independent of the path in which it arrived there.In searching for how the internet has influenced the world of traveling I was drawn to this description, something which could be independent of path seemed an appropriate way to describe how I preferred to traverse the globe. I realized that I like my trips to be path independent, in which I set a beginning and ending location, but otherwise am not pre-concerned with the path to which I will arrive at the end. My trip last summer was based around this mantra. We knew we were to fly into Caracas in the beginning of June, and I had a return flight out of Mexico City. In between we knew we had 10 countries to cover in 8 weeks, and we would work it out as we went along.
This is not a wholly unique way of traveling, as there are many people who have traveled, and will continue to travel, in this light. But this type of unplanned, "path independent" traveling as I like to call it, has become easier, and more accessible to the masses, thanks to the revolutionary amount of access to information we now have in the 21st century. Though we didn't plan our trip out more than one or two destinations ahead of time, we almost always had lodging arranged upon arrival, and had usually researched our destination beforehand in order to come to a decision about where to head to next. Yes, people have been able to do this for some time now, but it's only within the last few years that one can approach a trip of this manner with such certainty. I knew that no matter where we were headed, we would always be able to find access to any information we would need.
So why write about this now (aside from self-aggrandizing reasons)? As some of you know I joined the world of mobile internet access this week with a smartphone, a severe upgrade from my old flip phone with talk and text capabilities only. So now, a mere 14 months after my revelations about how technology had changed the way we cover the globe, I realize that most of what I had written is already outdated. Having the internet always just a few blocks away seems so irrelevant when you can have it at your fingertips instead. I'm exaggerating a bit as most of us don't have world wide coverage and accessibility with our mobile devices, but we're heading in that direction. The technology is truly amazing, and is only getting better. I think the thesis that I would rewrite now, is that traveling is whatever we want it to be anymore. It means I can continue to plan my trips by selecting arrival and departing cities and nothing more. It means people will be able to easier travel to lands of which they have little knowledge of the language and the culture. This could be a good thing, but perhaps a bad one as well.
I had ideas of comparing Bill Bryson's paragraphs where he extols the virtues of having quality, highly detailed maps, to me sitting at a computer, using Google maps to plan the route we would be taking. But you could almost make the same comparison of me, tied down to a computer look up a map, versus someone who has the information sent straight to their phone as they stand on the street corner, ready to head off in the direction of interest. Looking back, my musings about how fast the world was moving were already behind the times.
For now I will be glad to have access to my phone whenever I travel around the states. The ability to pull up maps, restaurant reviews, city information and so much more makes the task of traveling much easier. I don't foresee being able to use it internationally anytime in the near future, but I'm sure that day will come eventually. As I said before, it's almost more important here domestically because of the lack of public internet spots, but then again most of my trips around the US are not of the same scope and caliber as traveling internationally.
And what happened to my travel novel that was to feature said musings on the influence of technology on the way in which we travel? Well irony happened, and it was all lost when my hard drive crashed many months ago. I was not too broken up about though, as it needed quite a bit of work and I was beginning to get the feeling it wasn't going to turn out as I had hoped. But it was that experience of trying to document and narrate the life of a traveling soul that led me to begin this blog, so not all was lost.
Now I just need to be able to get away and start traveling again so I have something to write about...
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