As I sit here in my hotel in Santiago (not in my room, but in kind of an anteroom behind reception, so that I can get better Wifi) I'm kind of liking this, and kind of wondering, what the hell am I doing in front of a computer rather than at a club or at the very least, tucked up with a book.
Technology sure is convenient, and earlier this evening I made a Skype call to my mom, who likes the fact that I can still call her from South America. And that book I could be reading would be on my Kindle, so that I don't have to weigh down my already back-breaking backpack with long tomes for the road.
It's all good, but something gnaws at me that vacation is not the right time to be thinking about Wifi signal strength or flickr upload times. Vacation used to be when you more or less gave up the mod cons and just lived out of that turtle on your back. And I'm only talking the 1980s--when I kept in contact via postcards and the occasional phone call--not decades ago when travel meant being thoroughly cut off from home. I carried around rolls of film, to be developed with feverish interest when I got home to see how the shots turned out.
I remember the first time I sent an email on holiday: it was from a computer in a Greek restaurant in Mexico in 1997. I thought at the time that it would probably be something we'd all be doing eventually, but I underestimated the convenience with which we'd be able to do it. This time I packed a netbook and a Kindle, and will probably get a prepaid cell phone (family likes to keep in touch). I'll probably be uploading a bunch of photos to flickr in the next few days.
So, has something of the romance of travel been lost? More importantly, is travel no longer a voyage into some kind of different world than the one we know, because we're constantly in touch with what we left behind? Yeah, maybe, but I doubt I'll give any of this up. For one thing, communication and dissemination of information aren't bad things. My friends aren't here with me, but they get to know something about what Chile is like. And I don't get as lonely.
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4 comments:
I think it is all stuff we would have done years ago if we had the capability. We didn't, and so we stored up our experiences, took a few pics and waited to get home to share stories. When I travel somewhere on my own, I often wish I could share the experience with someone else who would appreciate a particular moment. When I do that, I sometimes visualize that they are there with me. That can happen even driving along a country road in Nova Scotia not far from home. I think traveling alone can make one more lonely, so you do two types of things about it: relate your experiences back home, or have social time where ever there is opportunity. It's probably also a side effect of not having a daily agenda for the foreseeable future.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. You have both freedom of time and space for a change. The liberation can be intoxicating, I bet. I think this fits what is meant by "unwind".
First time in Europe, in 1970-71, my only communications were by letter (or postcard). It was tough not talking to family for so long (9 months), but there was a certain freedom.
In this decade, I did not start even web surfing on vacation until about 2008--these were vacations *away* from computers and the net. Even now I do the minimum, but I don't have aged parents to worry about.
Now I'm thinking about a netbook. Won't buy a Kindle--waiting for quantity of content to catch up (I've already read about 100 ebooks stretching back 15 years), and won't buy a device that does not support epub. (Still an open source geek, even in retirement.)
Kindle supports MOBI, which can be converted to from EPUB. I think there are free tools for this. All of the free books that I downloaded (from Project Gutenberg, etc. are in MOBI format). The Amazon marketing bumf also says it can handle HTML, but I haven't tried this out.
I remember the days of "tissue paper" airmail letters writing in small script as if to capture as many details as I could, or the excitement of picking up mail at an American Express office. Now the world is open, the chronicles are more live and immediate, and will provide a testament of the physical journey, and maybe the "other" journey. We can talk to or write to anyone anywhere, anytime. (Rhonda-Online empress)
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