Because I can Travel

One house stands isolated on a large bed of rock in the sea, connected to the mainland by a peninsula-like wall and eventually revealing its true form as a church. Today picnic packers, vacationers and lovers stand by this building loved by Matisse for a view of the sea uninterrupted by the encroaching Pyrenees. The whispering of the waves is interrupted only by the laughs of tanning vacationers on Collioure’s stony Riviera-style beach. Despite the lack of sand, summer brings thousands of sun seekers in all states of undress to wade in the clear warm bay, while at night they throng to Collioure’s many Spanish-flavored affordable seafood restaurants. Some will even sell the multi-colored plates on which they serve paella and the bright glasses that hold ladles of summer sangria. One place where the fine food challenges the elegant decor is El Capillo. Sit in their modern black metal chairs and delight in their Catalan culinary specialties including eight different ways of preparing mussels as the heavy afternoon sun fades into dusk.

As the day of sun and seafood ends, the trailing ochre rays of the setting sun splash against the blackening sea as rounded glasses fill with cognac, and the rumbling of the train trails into the distant silence as the last express leaves for the clacking castanets of neighboring Spain.

So I’m on a bus to Pokhara, Nepal, a tortuous nine hour drive from Kathmandu, and the seat in front of me is leaning backwards at a broken angle, and the three hundred pound Tibetan women with patchouli-oiled hair occupying it is therefore sitting literally in my lap, and the college student from Darjeeling is sitting next to me, talking about tea production, and trying to rub his thigh against mine, and I’m swooning with motion sickness every time we come swinging around the side of the mountain on these crazy hairpin turns telling myself we’re not going to crash, and all the while we’re passing busses warped into metal sculptures, testaments to earlier episodes of reckless driving. It doesn’t feel as if it can get any uglier.

The family with the chickens starts throwing up, one by one. My mind begins composing bilious poetry. I find myself ruminating on how often one encounters vomit when one travels. The frequency is high. And so goes travel: parts of it you love, and parts of it you survive so that you can brag about it to your friends. Only seasoned travelers know the excitement of beginning sentences with “only in Bangkok do the women really know what to do with a lit cigarette?” or “god the McDonald’s in Montmartre has great frites. And the coke!” So seriously, what of it, what makes you a traveler, and not some washed out tourist planning to spend your time in Paris communing with Jim Morrison’s long dead stoner remains, en route to Planet Hollywood?

There’s an old saying that goes: the difference between travel and tourism is that travelers go places to learn new things and tourists travel to confirm what they already know. Here at Let’s Go we find such tourism kind of appalling. Whinging package tourists in tight tie-dyed “Mexico City is for Lovers” t-shirts making new friends with locals in the native tongue “donde esta el hard rock caf?”? There is a way to travel as a tourist, and a way to travel as a traveler (and plenty of ways on how to save money while doing it).