The trip was brief. The following afternoon we left Buenos Aires to return to Montevideo. I had hardly seen anything of the city, but I had found what I had come to find. On the plane on the way back, looking down on the sediment-heavy waters of the River Plate like a tabletop of brown, I reflected on how the national obsession with Freud had come about. The historical explanation was clear enough: a national newspaper had started a dream analysis column back in the first half of the twentieth century. That had been popular, and readers had written in to describe their dreams and get advice on their meaning. Then the universities’ psychology departments had appointed professors versed in psychoanalytical theory and in this way the whole process of proselytism had started. Soon everybody was aware of Freud and of the possibilities of psychoanalysis.
Yet that in itself is not enough to explain the extraordinary popularity of a theory and practice that is no longer widely supported in other countries: Freud survives elsewhere, but only in pieces, and as a distinctly minority interest. There must be something in the Argentinean sense of identity that compels them to seek self-understanding in this way. Is the obvious explanation the real one – that they are a nation of people from elsewhere, from Italy and other countries in a distant Europe from which they feel cast adrift? It is, after all, a remote country, far from its European cultural roots. Perhaps they need to find mother. Perhaps they need to find out where, and how, it went wrong, if indeed it has gone wrong. Perhaps their national dance has something to do with it, although even the mere asking of that question tips one over into the territory of Freudian parody.
There is a final question to ask. Does the fact that I felt I needed to make this journey in the first place tell me something about myself? It is possible that the making of any journey is revealing in that sense; we do not go to places by accident. Personally, I’d prefer not to know.
Getting Travel Dirt Under Your Fingernails
BY BRYCE COURTENAY
Born in South Africa, Bryce Courtenay was educated in Johannesburg and the UK. He arrived in Australia in 1958 and became an Australian citizen the following year. He entered advertising and over a career spanning thirty-four years was the creative director of McCann Erickson, J. Walter Thompson and George Patterson Advertising. During this period, he was invited by the Chinese government to give the first series of lectures on the subject of Advertising and Free Enterprise. He has also lectured in Asia, the UK, the USA, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, in addition to his own country. However, he is best known as Australia’s top-selling novelist, with titles such as The Power of One, which has been translated into twenty-one languages and is the subject of a major movie of the same name. His other books include Tandia, The Potato Factory, A Recipe for Dreaming, Jessica, Smoky Joe’s Café, Whitethorn, The Persimmon Tree, Fishing for Stars and The Story of Danny Dunn. His most recent book is Fortune Cookie. In 1995 Bryce was awarded the Order of Australia AM, and in 2005 he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Newcastle.
On May 29, 1953, a British Expedition sent to reach the summit of Mount Everest finally succeeded with the Union Jack planted 8848 metres up on the world’s highest mountain by New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay from Nepal. To the world at large it was a stupendous achievement by two men not far short of being regarded as physical giants. Hillary’s comment upon reaching base camp, ‘Well, we knocked the bastard off,’ is now a part of the English language and a metaphor for extreme physical achievement.
Almost 60 years after the initial conquest, approximately 3200 mountaineers, male and female, have collectively summited the highest mountain on earth some 5000 times. This is not to suggest that Everest has become a mountain for a novice to undertake; all of these people have been fine climbers. Andrew Lock, by no means a household name and from my own country, Australia, has summited all fourteen of the world’s 8000-metre peaks and has reached the top of Mount Everest on two separate occasions.
The point I make is not intended to detract from Hillary and Norgay but to illustrate that between that first remarkable undertaking 59 years ago and today, personal adventure travel has come of age. For a great many of us, our travel mindset has largely changed from seeing to doing or from observing to participating.
This participatory aspect has become increasingly necessary in the latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first with the advent of television and the various portable mass communication systems we employ. It could be claimed that they have overpowered our visual sense. We have, for better or worse, vicariously entered a virtual world where we are constantly mentally and visually transported everywhere and, depending how you look at it, gratuitously assailed or rewarded by most of the planet’s wonderful surprises.
We’ve observed the view from the highest mountains, travelled the endless deserts, crossed the seven seas while breasting the highest waves, explored the rivers, heard the thunder of great waters, traversed the boiling rapids, hacked our way through the densest jungles, seen the chaos, misery, joys and wonders of the world’s great cities, viewed the monuments, buildings grand and ancient, eaten thousands of imaginary meals set in exotic locations, all of this and much more through the eyes of the ubiquitous camera lens that prowls and snoops and records every small and large creature and detail to simulate the actual experience of going.
The result of all this is that I believe we are in danger of becoming visually overloaded. We’ve seen but not been to feel the personal thrill and sense of achievement of standing on the top of the mountain or some similar experience, alone or with a group of friends, where all our senses are employed and are rewarded.
Of course we will still flock to Europe to see the historical monuments and be inspired by great art, historical sites and the continuity of cultures we mostly learned about in history and geography lessons at school. These secular pilgrimages along with religious ones will always remain a significant part of the purpose of travel.
However, the great addition to going somewhere familiar to our hearts and minds is the adventure of traversing the wildest unknown way, a way of travelling for the masses that started in earnest in the 1970s. This was when Europe and the United Kingdom no longer became the usual and often exclusive great travel destination for those of us who lived in countries where the imposition of European culture after conquest was still relatively recent. And when young Europeans and those from the British Isles first began to travel in large numbers to countries beyond the traditional nations close to them.
We began to understand that when we set out to go where the people are culturally or demonstrably different, strange, unfamiliar – even alien – to our normal expectations, then we do so on local terms. Or that when we do something physical or requiring mental stamina in unfamiliar and often frightening surroundings, our personal Everest, in both instances we become the recipient of a psychological change, small or large, but where we are rewarded with a meaningful contribution to understanding ourselves. I guess some may even refer to a trek to the Everest Base Camp, a voyage to Antarctica or an archaeological dig somewhere in the Near East as ‘life-changing’. Equally, for many ordinary folk, both young and old, volunteering to work for small N.G.O.’s, using a professional skill or simply helping on a project to benefit the less fortunate becomes a truly meaningful and rewarding way to travel to far-flung places such as Vietnam, Nepal, Africa or South America, to name but a few.
The Ndebele are a small Southern African tribe who have a saying, People are people because of other people. Translated, this simply means that we only recognise and get to know ourselves, who and what we are and may become, by the presence, experiences and observations of other people. While we may worship nature and other life forms, for most of us the ways of people assume the central place in our lives.
And so for me experiencing and observing at close quarters the beliefs, habits, lifestyle and wisdom of people other than those from more or less my own cult
ural background is the supreme reward of travel. Good travel is returning home a slightly bigger part of everyone and not quite the same person as when you set out. The ultimate reward is arriving home with a sense and understanding of who we are mutually as members of the human race. If I could nominate a supreme evil in our world it would be xenophobia. It may well be the greatest curse the human race has imposed on itself.
It is this need to know who we collectively are, our similarities and differences, anxieties and joys, habits, values, beliefs and actions that has made me a writer. My job and ongoing fascination is to attempt to explain the human condition, the good and bad we share in common, love of family, the universal need simply to put bread on the table and some kind of roof over our head, this taken together with the pain and suffering others cause us or we bring upon ourselves, the differences, fears and instincts that make us quarrel, even kill each other in the name of a particular God or strip of land or doctrine or simply for greed or acquisition.
The novelist is said to thrive on conflict, the eternal struggle between good and evil with the good guy winning out in the end. But if my personal travel experiences are any indication, I am forced to conclude that individuals of every race, creed, colour or secular sophistication, if given half a chance, are willing and even anxious to share courtesies, laughter, generosity and joy with an open-minded traveller who is curious and anxious to learn about and to understand their culture without necessarily having to embrace it.
As I write these words, in 2012, setting out to travel has at times become a somewhat tedious and difficult process and one predominantly motivated by caution and fear. The constant onslaught of bad news from the media would have it that the world is a frighteningly dangerous place. In turn, governments routinely issue stern no-go or extreme-caution warnings for major parts of the planet we share. We have collectively allowed a handful of fanatics and zealots who by no means represent the values of the various races to which they belong to effectively deny travellers access to large parts of the world. Nowhere is said to be safe. Airport security, where everyone is a potential suspect, has become a huge and growing universal preoccupation where paranoia is the officially required psychological approach.
When I was recently embarking overseas from my own local airport, the universally and now routinely common X-ray of my carry-on luggage took place, and the nail file from the gentleman’s manicure set I’d been given as a prize as a young schoolboy more than 61 years previously and had inadvertently tried to take aboard was confiscated. By the time I returned to Australia, having deliberately repeated carrying the manicure set on every flight through several countries, only the leather case and the nail buffer remained. The loss of the first grown-up possession I was ever given is obviously of no importance. But the concept that a nail file or a pair of nail clippers is a lethal weapon and constitutes a potential terrorist threat aboard a 747 jet indicates a state of universal caution, suspicion and fear that means the sheer adventure of travel, those wonderful freedom-seeking journeys into the unknown where you end up finding out as much about yourself as you do of others, may be coming to an end.
My greatest fear is that the few with agendas big and small can pull down the shutters and slam the doors to those of us who wish to explore the many joys and adventures available to young and older travellers. That my grandsons will be forced to return to the xenophobia and Euro-centric world that formed the travel conventions when I put my first furtive foot forward in the 1950s.
My most recent reason to leave Australia was to visit Israel. My government warned me that the destination was potentially dangerous and a number of friends looked askance when I told them my major purpose was to visit the walled city of Jerusalem, a location that for twenty-two centuries those of us in the Western and Near Eastern side of the world have regarded somewhat arrogantly as the true centre of civilization. It is here that three of the world’s great religions have taken turns beating each other up in the name of the same God in various disguises. At this particular moment in time, eighteen-year-old Israeli males and females in military uniform walk around wielding automatic machine guns and yet another wall to keep one of the three religious factions at bay has been built to cut off potential suicide bombers coming into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Nothing new, nothing different, the same twenty-two-century-old conflict continues with one of the three doctrines acting as top dog for the time being. Despite all this, having actually walked on the same cobblestones that have paved the path of twenty-two centuries of history was a memorable, remarkable and compelling experience I cherish.
I have had the good fortune to travel widely in my life. In terms of destinations I have experienced the familiar and the utterly strange, sophisticated and primitive, joyous and frightening. Among the lonely but hugely exciting places have been the tropical jungles and mountains in South America and Central Africa and the extravagant wildlife and primal ice and snow of the Sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, the latter, despite the lack of human habitation, one of the truly great travel adventures. I have loved living in and exploring the teeming cities and countries of South East Asia and the Indian sub-continent. I’ve seen and been to many of the world’s great locations and yes, of course, gawked with everyone else at the enduring treasures to be found in Europe and Russia. I’ve sometimes suffered a little hardship and inconvenience, and on one occasion in Peru, altitude sickness where I was convinced I was going to die. Corny as it may sound, I’ve been charged by a Cape buffalo and have stepped on a well-concealed sleeping crocodile while trekking along the Tsavo River on foot in Kenya. I have been on a camel safari in Somalia. Of course, there have been mishaps and near disasters, mistakes and misunderstandings, but I’ve for the most part enjoyed several truly grand body- and mind-expanding adventures, just one of many being allowed to run a section of the Great Wall of China.
Taking all this together, it would be impossible to choose the one travel experience that most profoundly moved, delighted, taught and in small or larger ways challenged and changed me.
At the risk of sounding over-sentimental or Pollyannaish, in almost every travel destination I’ve undertaken it has been the caring, kind, generous, giving individuals I’ve met along the way – and not any particular people at any particular location, or doctrine, superstitions, dogma or God or Gods worshipped – who have brought both new insights, fresh thinking and stimulus to my life. It remained the same this time in the old city of Jerusalem, where Jewish, Arab and Christian individuals, despite their conflicting interests, co-exist with what appeared to me to be a minimum of sectarian fuss and where my wife and I were treated with great kindness and consideration.
Finally, I’ve purchased a new pair of nail clippers and placed it beside the nail buffer in the small, much-scuffed and -travelled leather case. It occurred to me at the time that I couldn’t remember ever once in 61 years putting the buffer to use. In the travel sense, getting your fingernails dirty is what it’s all about. Furthermore, I am comforted by the notion that one of the truisms of travelling is that as one door closes, another window opens. I read recently that eight private citizens have each separately paid for and been to and returned safely from the International Space Station. Now that is surely the final great travel frontier that sadly I will miss. Damn! Damn! Damn! Can you imagine looking back at our small quarrelsome blue planet, a tiny dot in the vast universe? Now that would be an awesome out-of-this-world experience.
A Small World After All
BY CHARLES FINCH
Charles Finch is the author of a series of historical mysteries set in Victorian England, the most recent of which, A Burial at Sea, was described by the New York Times as ‘so fascinating it’s a shame it has to end’. His first literary novel, The Last Enchantments, will be published in 2013 by St Martin’s Press. He has written essays and criticism for the New York Times, USA Today and many other publications. Finch lived abroad for several years before returning home to New York in 2011.
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sp; With every week that passes there are another few square inches of the atlas that I can cut clean away: Time is always shortening, and in all likelihood I will never see the places they map with my own eyes. Sometimes I’ll catch a name and think, goodbye, Cuenca, or Ashgabat, or Indianapolis. I genuinely wish I could come and learn about your beloved municipal celebrities and terrible art museums and novel ways of cooking chicken, but instead I’ll probably go to London another half-dozen times.
Of course it’s that way for everybody; each of us knows only a few pockets of the world intimately, a few dozen casually, the rest not at all. Such is the sadness even of the traveler – perhaps especially of the traveler.
And yet. In the summer of 2010, with a group of fellow Americans, I spent a month living along the waterfront of Cape Town, South Africa, and during that time it seemed as if the world had reduced itself approximately to the size of the city. The occasion was the World Cup.
During our first few days in Cape Town, we spent our time primarily with the staff of the U.S. Embassy, where we had a friend. (Sample quote, from a young, pretty Ole Miss grad: ‘Mexicans are dorks.’) In fact the Americans and Brits all seemed to cling together, haunting the same few bars and plazas, a lack of enterprise that is hard to understand in retrospect. Perhaps it was the simple astonishment of being in Cape Town, with the great flat mass of Table Mountain curving the city in toward us, the clouds above it moving unhurriedly during the blue days, then quickly during the bright, hard, moonlit nights. The weather was sultry. Everything was cheap.
Things changed on our fourth day, when we went to a liquor store to pick up beer. What I remember most vividly about the shop is that its chief decorative adornment was a small, autographed picture near the cash register of Republican Senator Bill Frist, in which he looked as if he badly needed to use the bathroom.
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