Traveling in Style : The Lost Art of Travel : Why Go Anywhere If What You Really Want Is the Comforts of Home?

Question: I am planning a trip to Hong Kong but do not like Chinese food. Are there any restaurants that serve American-type meals?

--S.K., Brooklyn

S.K. IS CLEARLY NOT A TRAVELER BUT A TOURIST, AND a tourist of the grossest kind, and yet it was in the “Travel” section of a large, not unintelligent metropolitan newspaper that S. K.’s letter appeared. If S. K.’s problem comes under the head of Travel, clearly some interesting things involving language and behavior are going on.

Those whose goal it is to insulate people from the foreign and to move them around profitably in large groups hope to persuade them that the terms tourism and travel are synonymous.

Despite cunning attempts to insinuate the identity of travel and tourism, the fact that S.K.’s question, when it appears in a travel context, is perceived to verge on the comic suggests that there is a difference, and it’s a difference some still think important. It may be worth noting that the publishers of the French Michelin Green Guides label them Tourist Guides, while over here the publishers of the Fodor Guides call them,shrewdly, Travel Guides. I don’t want to suggest that Europeans have a special lien on honest dealing, only that they are sometimes better at facing than euphemizing embarrassing realities, if not unpleasant facts. The bidet is a case in point.

Of course, tourism and travel do have a lot in common, which is why it’s not hard for the industry to confound them. Both are mechanisms of escape--from the daily, the job, the boss, even the parents. As Freud observed: “A great part of the pleasure of travel,” he says, “lies in the fulfillment of early wishes to escape the family and especially the father.” Both also permit a form of escape from one’s customary identity, for among total strangers it is tempting and not too difficult to try on a new selfhood or new disguises. Claude Levi-Strauss observed that because most travel or tourism takes you to places more ancient than home, you move not just in space but in time as well. And you move socially, too: Levi-Strauss noticed repeatedly that, arriving in some new place, he suddenly, like a character in a fairy tale, became rich. (Visitors to Mexico, India or China will know the feeling.)

Travelers and tourists are also alike to the degree that they are achieving relief from the same thing--the ugliness and racket of Western cities, from factories, parking lots, boring turnpikes and roadside squalor. Indeed, every tourist-advertising come-on constitutes an implicit satire on the terrible modern scene, testifying to the universal longing to flee into some version of pastoral. And naturally the most “advanced” environments prove in experience the most loathsome, providing maximum impulses to flight. As Nancy Mitford has observed, “North Americans very naturally want to get away from North America.”

And there’s one further place tourism and travel converge. Both, as Jonathan Culler points out, involve quests for authenticity, and it’s this that distinguishes both from exploration. Because authenticity is measured by a thing’s being identified as a pure example of the known, or even the cliche, the traveler is not so easily distinguished from the tourist, as most who conceive themselves travelers like to think. Both journey in search of something considered more authentic than what the home scene can offer. A “pure” or “real” traveler would probably go in search of nothing nameable: He would simply wander, approximating an absolute flaneur.

Culler goes on to observe that “one of the characteristics of modernity is the belief that authenticity has somehow been lost, that it exists only in the past . . . or else in other regions or countries.” Thus, says Dean MacCannell, a notable theorist of tourism, for the American tourist or traveler “the United States makes the rest of the world seem authentic. California makes the rest of the United States (‘New England’ is an example) seem authentic.” Quoting this, Culler adds, perhaps too cruelly, “Los Angeles makes the rest of California seem authentic.”

But there, in their common quest for “authenticity,” resemblances between tourism and real travel virtually run out, and we are reduced to facing their glaring differences. For one thing, tourism is unlikely to offer an equivalent to the psychological and emotional intensity of travel. To travel is to sharpen remarkably the experience of the senses: You feel, hear and see things with abnormal clarity and force. Like the quintessential traveler, D. H. Lawrence, one cold morning in Sardinia finding “wonderful” the simple feeling of standing alone on a strange road:

Wonderful to go out on a frozen road. . . . Wonderful the bluish, cold air, and things standing up in cold distance. . . . I am so glad, on this lonely naked road, I don’t know what to do with myself. As a form of intensified,heightened experience, travel differs from tourism in being not relaxing and comfortable and consoling. The word, of course, derives from travail , and travel is less like the vacationing that tourism resembles than like a quest for a new kind of strenuousness. It is a laborious adventure amid strange evil as well as strange good. One of the traveler’s ailments is homesickness, and another is loneliness. And a customary, if not always admitted, companion is fear--of strangers, of embarrassment, of violence or madness appearing in unaccustomed forms.

“The age of independent travel is drawing to an end,” said E. M. Forster back in 1920, when it had been increasingly clear for decades that the mass production inevitable in the late-industrial age had generated its own travel-spawn, tourism, which is to travel as plastic is to wood. If travel is mysterious, even miraculous, and often lonely and frightening, tourism is common-sensical, utilitarian, safe and social, “that gregarious passion,” the traveler Patrick Leigh Fermor calls it, “which destroys the object of its love.” Not self-directed but externally enticed, you as a tourist go not where your own curiosity beckons but where the industry has decreed you shall go.

Tourism soothes, shielding you from the shocks of novelty and menace, confirming your prior view of the world rather than shaking it up. It obliges you not just to behold conventional things but to behold them in the approved conventional way. The objects most often miniaturized and vended as souvenirs indicate the indispensable Holy Grails of tourism: the Eiffel Tower, Mount Fuji, the Statue of Liberty, all desirable not because of their beauty, magic or eccentricity but because of their familiarity.

THE GREAT PRINCIPLE OF INDUSTRIAL MEDIOCRITY and uniformity is, “Unless everybody wants it, nobody gets it.” That is the inviolable rule of mass tourism, the same rule governing such other group experiences as mass feeding and mass education. Anathema to all these is the conviction of the sacredness of individuals (like such travelers as Robert Byron or Eric Newby or Rebecca West). Impatient of their kind of oddity and their rampant wills, tourism assumes total docility in its clients. It knows that actuality will disappoint them unless interpreted on the spot by some authority. Thus the tourist is at all times attended by his guides, couriers and tour directors, lecturing at him, telling him things and assiduously insulating him from abroad its surprises, mysteries and threats. The “personalities” of these attendants, furthermore, are presumed to be a significant part of the appeal of group touring. As one tour company advertised recently, its guides “have bright, witty personalities, and love to share anecdotes and chit-chat with the family.” Another company makes the point that its guides are more than guides: They are “entertainers.”

In addition, the tourist is wholly protected from contingency, which might be taken to mean protected from life. By contrast, the traveler, as Patrick White noted, often arrives “at the wrong moment: too hot, too cold; the opera, theater, museum, is closed for the day, the season or indefinitely for repairs; or else there is a strike, or an epidemic, or tanks are taking part in a political coup.” None of that for the tourist, who is purchasing what one attractive brochure guarantees, “Absolute Peace of Mind.”

A signal characteristic of the tourist is what Walker Percy calls “busy disregard”--that is, not experiencing the foreign moment at all because of being busy with camera, lenses and film, or worried about tipping, or embarrassed over one’s monolingualism, or deploring the state of local sanitation. Tourism invites, or rather, requires, an obsession with things that are not travel--the mechanics, rather than the objects and sensations, of displacement: the waiters and concierges, the currency exchanges and the swindles, the pickpockets, the hotels and meals, the value of purchasable things, the offensiveness or charm of one’s fellows in the group. “Making new friends is one of the joys of travel,” chirps Caravan Tours. “With Caravan, you’ll find congenial companions of all ages. . . . You’ll feel right at home.”

Easy irony there, to be sure, but there are ironies everywhere in the world touristically conceived. Even Eugene Fodor, whose guidebooks have been among the most effective stimulators of international tourism, is now almost contrite about the damage he has wrought. In his guidebook “Rome, 1986,” he recognized ruefully that as a result in part of his own efforts, 11,000 tourists per day now swamp the Sistine Chapel, making a visit to it “an equal blend of pleasure and torture.” That precisely illustrates Patrick Leigh Fermor’s point about tourism killing the thing it loves and may even suggest that when tourism becomes hellish enough, it will somehow come full circle and turn into something like travel again.

Another characteristic of tourism isn’t mentioned much in public because it’s politically a bit embarrassing. That is that tourism is a flagrantly reactionary activity. It’s a way residents of the Free World go to patronize the poor. Except for wearing funny hats and being crisscrossed with camera straps and conglobating in a close mass, a group of tourists politically resembles a collective British milord of the 19th Century. Tourists behold the foreign destitute, scrutinize their rags and note their terrible food, observe their ramshackle dwellings and acquaint themselves with their ignorance and superstition, not with outrage or even pity but with satisfaction. This “foreignness” is, after all, what the tourists have paid for, and their contract provides that it will keep its distance.

We can call the unfortunates that tourists pay to go look at “touristees”--the South Sea islanders, the lifetime junk-dwellers of Hong Kong, the villagers of India, the young women of China who spend their lives making tiny stitches on horrible embroidered pictures to sell to tourists. Touristees are the geeks of the contemporary world, even if they don’t eat live chickens for the amusement of their betters. This looking at the luckless without any impulse to alleviate their condition is clearly one of the most powerful signals of the reactionary attitude. Whatever their initial state, touristees are inevitably demeaned by tourism into the psychological and political inferiors of the tourists who view them--with the possible exception of the touristees who dwell in Paris and other sophisticated metropolises. Once out in the countryside, even in the gondolas of Venice, the horse carriages of Spetsai or the bicycle rickshaws of Katmandu, no tourist can avoid condescending to his visible inferiors.

BUT WHEN ALL THIS HAS been said, when we have taken the standard pleasure in damning tourists, we may have to acknowledge that maybe Culler is right when he points out, “The attempt to distinguish between tourists and travelers is a part of tourism--integral to it rather than outside or beyond it.” As he says, “Part of what is involved in being a tourist is disliking tourists (both other tourists and the fact that one is a tourist).” The tourists on Swan’s Hellenic Tours, visiting the Mediterranean and Aegean on their own elegant small liner accompanied by learned archeological lecturers from Oxford and Cambridge, sneer at the other tourists being conveyed to the same sites by more plebeian transport and harangued not by distinguished authorities but by mere local guides. And those tourists in turn view with pity and contempt others gaping at the same sites from more derelict vehicles and listening to the explanation not of a guide but of a driver. And so it goes.

Again, one’s complacency in damning tourists may be diminished if one recalls one’s own youth and recognizes that virtually everyone, no matter how would-be sophisticated ultimately, starts traveling as a tourist. One must, simply, experience the great things: Santa Sophia, the Piazza San Marco, Carcassonne and Chartres and Mont-Saint-Michel, Red Square, Persepolis, Westminster Abbey, the Taj Mahal. These constitute the current Wonders of the World, and not to see them, tourist cliches as they may be, is to be forever deficient in the knowledge of what a Wonder is.

At any given moment, millions of tourists and several travelers are moving over the face of the globe, and one must ask what good, and what kind of good, results. Clearly this activity makes a lot of money for somebody, but what else? Is intelligence forwarded? Is virtue? Does any beneficial “international understanding” ensue? Dean MacCannell thinks so. He holds that one source of international social coherence is the very universal popularity of the standard touristic attractions. He argues that in the absence of any very compelling single system of ethical, political or artistic agreement, in an age of relativism where argument about essentials is the norm and “deconstructive” doubts about stable values are commonplace, tourism has at least the merit of providing one area of substantial agreement--about “what is worth seeing.”

In Paris, the Japanese, the Germans, the Argentinians and the Australians share at least one common belief, that it’s important not to miss the Louvre. I suppose the young people who converge every spring and summer on the Acropolis or at the Spanish Steps or in the center of Piccadilly Circus are too poor to be tourists and are thus, willy-nilly, travelers. But regardless, to overhear the babble of their idioms, in Hungarian, Portuguese, German, Swedish, French, Italian, American and what-have-you, is to be persuaded that some sort of international understanding, whatever that may mean, is taking place, and that what’s taking place, no matter how hard to define, is an invaluable thing.

In trying to winkle some sense out of the notion of international understanding, we may perceive that understanding can betoken quite different things. First, there is sentimental or social understanding, as when we note that someone is very understanding--that is, uncritical, sympathetic and nice.

Some of the dimensions of another kind of understanding are suggested by Roger E. Axtell’s “Do’s and Taboos Around the World: A Guide to International Behavior.” From this text the anxious businessman will learn that in most of Southeast Asia, as well as in the Middle East, presenting your business card with your left hand is an affront, every decent Moslem knowing the filthy, smelly offices you reserve that left hand for. But from Axtell’s book you will learn also that in Japan, you must present your card with both hands, bowing while doing so and in addition making sure the card is right side up with the type readable by the recipient. Everywhere abroad the businessman must be very careful with gestures. Making a circle with thumb and forefinger may mean “OK” in the United States, but in Brazil it’s grossly obscene, while in Japan it signifies “money” and in France, “zero.”

These forms of sentimental and utilitarian understanding are to be distinguished from liberal understanding, where liberal has the same, by now hackneyed, meaning it has in the phrase “liberal arts”: Motivated purely by curiosity, you pursue liberal understanding neither to be nice to people nor to put money in your pocket but to glorify your human nature and to augment your awareness of your location in time and space. You pursue liberal understanding to deepen your sensitivity to ideas and images and not least to sharpen your sense of humility as you come to realize that your country is not the standard for the rest of the world but is just as odd as all the others. As Flaubert observed, “Traveling makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

ANYONE TEASED BY THE question of how to regain the values of travel in an age of mass tourism might consider a fairly bold and simple answer. You regain them the way you might regain real education in a contemporary context of business, law and medical schools--namely, by stimulating the impulse of disinterested intellectual curiosity, the habit of inquiry for its own sake. Recovering real education, as opposed to training, would not be easy to do. It would be just as hard as recovering real travel, but the two things are so nearly allied as to constitute two faces of the same thing, and the absence of one is a clear sign of the absence of the other.

What you understand by traveling depends, clearly, on where you start and what you begin with. A Pakistani will understand something very different from traveling in, say, southern France than will a resident of New Jersey. But narrowing the focus to an American traveling in Europe--really traveling, not being insulated from actuality--one can ask, what is he or she likely to “understand”? First of all, the North American will not be abroad very long without beginning to understand that the U.S. “friendly” style is not international. It’s not even, as the naive might think, normal or natural and thus happy evidence of the absence of a possibly disingenuous personal style: It is a style, just like any other, and abroad, the American will learn, it is not just odd but offensive. Non-Americans have mastered the paradox that it is formality rather than informality that lubricates social encounters. Thus in France monsieur and madame , in Italy dottore and avvocato .

And an American’s understanding of international reality would deepen as he or she began to delve beneath matters of address and etiquette. The American abroad would begin to understand that the world outside the United States is deeply aware, as we are not, of the past. Here, the idea suggests at most a late-17th-Century stockade (restored) at Jamestown or the pretty, benign buildings of the restored Williamsburg. Abroad, on the other hand, the American will come into repeated contact with a past much deeper than that and much less gratifying in its implicit news about the beneficence of the human impulses. He will confront a plethora of ancient, medieval and Renaissance castles and fortified places organized for little but defense against gross physical violence.

The traveler, and even the tourist, will behold things quite unknown in the United States, where the Disney version of life aspires to replace the traditional one. He will behold city walls everywhere and churches and cathedrals with massive metal-studded doors and moats and portcullises and drawbridges and buildings with no windows lower than the fourth story. Observing these relics of some mighty unpleasant facts, the traveler will come to understand that violence and cruelty and sadism, and defenses against these things, have shaped European and Asian “politics” for millennia.

The traveler will perceive that most of the world outside the very singular United States lives always with vivid memories of physical coercion, torture for the fun of it and meaningless, violent death. No wonder people abroad seem to many Americans models of “pessimism,” “cynicism” or at least “irony.” For us, whose past does not extend further back than the optimistic and relatively civilized 18th Century, the foreign past is a shocking panorama of religious mass murders, drawings and quarterings, burnings at the stake, invasions, aerial bombings, piracies and such un-American events (at least since our destruction of the American Indians) as the massacre of the Armenians, the liquidation of the kulaks and the Holocaust.

In his suggestively titled book “Painted in Blood: Understanding Europeans,” Stuart Miller notes “the deep imprint of organized horror on the European soul,” which means that abroad the air is alive with tragedy and its inevitable accompaniment, irony. Even without the specifically tragic sense of human evil in action, living among the quite inert ruins of the Forum, the Great Wall, the Pyramids or Mycenae must encourage the ironic view of one’s own little concerns, and you can’t help seeing in our mind’s eye your own precious setting ruined in due course and then visited by hordes of uncomprehending tourists with their keepers, avid for a sit-down and a nice cold Coca-Cola.

The traveler does not expect his personal reconnaissance to result always in optimistic news. That is, you don’t have to like a place to understand it, or, to put it another way, life is not a vacation.

In the United States, if you want to sense the ironic relation between past and present, you read “The Wasteland” or “Ulysses.” Abroad, you raise your eyes from your book and look around.

But speaking of “the past,” the experience I’ve been talking about may seem already archaic--not just that it’s been displaced by a cheerful, superficial tourism but that tourism has been overtaken by something new. We can call it post-tourism . That term would designate a stage in the history of traveling characterized by boredom, annoyance, disgust, disillusion and finally anger. These new travelers seem to doubt that the world available for scrutiny is a place where any stable understanding, interpretation or even enjoyment is likely.

NOW, SOMEHOW, THE bloom is off travel, and a term such as understanding acquires overtones of quaintness. Or so one might infer from a number of recent travel books, fit to be subtitled, like John Krich’s account of his Asian travels in 1984, “Around the World in a Bad Mood.”

Krich shares Levi-Strauss’ conviction that modern industrialism has so ruined the world that no place can be any longer a refuge from pollution, corruption and Western-style commercialism. Thus “trying to escape--at least in ways that travel brochures promise--is like trying to escape death. We know that we can’t really do it, but that all the meaning we’ll ever find will be in the effort.”

Similarly, one British travel journalist, Digby Anderson, has recently recommended a new kind of “negative” touristic writing designed to discourage tourists from going to certain places by the unaccustomed act of telling the truth. The object of such negative travel writing, he says, is “to make readers think twice before going, to protect them from the temptations of . . . (travel) agents, to undermine rather than inflate their self-confidence, indeed to reduce those going to that minimum which will really enjoy it.”

He proposes some sample sentences from such writings, like: “All the French Mediterranean is horrid in August. Don’t go,” and “Taormina may have been pleasant once; it isn’t now.” The same writer has suggested that travel consumers should be informed seriously that travel is like liberal learning, difficult if worth having. Travel writers, he insists, “need to remind us that pleasure demands effort and is improved by knowledge and taste.” He goes on: “It is unusual . . . to deny this about literature, music or painting. Why should it be any less true of travel and holiday?”

With Paul Theroux, it’s hard not to notice how often he enjoys the awfulness he’s experiencing, with what pleasure he confirms his worst suspicions about the badness of airlines, trains, hotels, guides and famous places. Observing Belfast, Theroux said, “It was so awful I wanted to stay.” If “it really was one of the nastiest cities in the world, surely then it was worth spending some time in, for horror interest?”

For these new post-touristic observers, Anatole Broyard observed, awfulness is “the contemporary equivalent of the exotic”--which used to be the magnet for their traveling predecessors. The essay in which Broyard delivered these accurate perceptions is nicely titled “Having Minimalist Time, Wish You Were Here.”

If universal litter and filth are one cause of post-touristic dismay, another is the homogenization of the modern world, the spread of uniform airport and hotel and frozen “international” food and standard “travel agency” into even the most unlikely places.

The tourist is at all times attended by his guides, couriers and tour directors, lecturing at him, telling him things and assiduously insulating him from abroad its surprisesmysteries and threats.

Although now almost impossible to believe, air travel was once pleasant. On a flight in the 1930s, Paul Bowles recalls, “I had a cabin with my own bed in it, and under sheet and blankets I slept during most of the flight.” But 40 years later the progress of the tourist industry had brought many more people than travel smarties to a full post-touristic attitude. “I realized with a shock,” Bowles says now, “that not only did the world have many more people in it than it had a short time before, but also that the hotels were less good, travel less comfortable and places in general much less beautiful. . . . I realized to what an extent the world had worsened.”

His conclusion, mistaken as some may think it, will strike others as the only honest one for a person of knowledge, sensibility and taste: “I no longer wanted to travel.”

Excerpted from “Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays,” by Paul Fussell. Copyright 1988 by Paul Fussell. Reprinted by permission of Summit Books/Simon & Schuster.