Travel and its Discontents
Exploration in the Age of Self-Obsession
On our last morning in Spain, near the beach in Barcelona, a parrot stole pizza from a flock of pigeons, flew it into a tree, and began to eat. A magpie, watching the interchange, thought he could best the parrot and take the pizza for himself. The parrot was having none of it, however, and the magpie, perhaps now feeling a bit outclassed, picked a fight with some other magpies. The three of them flew off into the city in a frenzy.
Travel is not as I remember it.
The number of people who travel is growing, but the world is not. The places, therefore, the ones from history, the places which those who think about such things will know the names of, are inherently more crowded.
One such place is the Alhambra, a great Moorish complex that began to come into being in the 9th century, and is now an immense relic in the middle of modern Granada. It was citadel, palace, and administrative center for hundreds of years, a city-fortress in which two thousand people once lived, a center of the Islamic Golden Age. Even now, empty of furnishings and the bustle of royal life, it is extraordinary. Within the Alhambra’s Nasrid Palaces (Palacios Nazariés), geometrically ornate tiles and carvings adorn every surface—floors, walls and ceilings—in wood, plaster, stucco, and ceramic, one room into the next, more and more and more, interspersed with perfect gardens.
The number of visitors to the Alhambra’s biggest draw, the Nasrid Palaces, is capped at something like 8,000 per day, which is both a lot, and a little. Tickets are sold out months in advance. Even with the earliest timeslot to enter one morning, on a chilly morning in the off-season, we are amid throngs. Throngs shuffling. Throngs taking selfies with cameras on their phones. Throngs trying to pretend that they are alone, that the other throngers do not exist. But also, throngers who are not quite sure what it is that they are supposed to be doing there, either.
Yes, of course, there has always been the tourist problem. How do we simultaneously expand our horizons, appreciate how many ways there are to be human, how many different ways there are to live, while not destroying what we seek in the process? It is a true conundrum, a cultural observer effect. Just as has been noted in physics, wherein the act of observation itself changes that which is observed (see Schrödinger’s cat—or rather, don’t, unless you want to change what is true about it), there is no way to visit a place as an outsider without bringing the outside in with you, no matter how hard you try not to. And of course, many people are not trying at all.
My very first research, in which a natural experiment unfolded in front of me in Costa Rica, involved a self-described “eco-tourist lodge.” It was one of those places to which good-hearted people frequently go when they want to see wild nature, while also feeling that they are careful stewards of the world—protecting wild nature, seeing to it that the locals are included in the profits, that sort of thing. This “eco-tourist lodge” had, a few years before I arrived in the region at a nearby field station, introduced a non-native species of dart-poison frog to a forest that already had quite a fine species of dart-poison frog, thank you very much. The lodge had thought that the new species would be more appealing to (eco)tourists. But the original (and very fine) species of dart-poison frog was intimidated in the presence of the new, bigger, brasher species, and was, I would discover, going locally extinct. That, unfortunately, is sometimes how “eco-tourism” plays out.
It is also, in general terms, how tourism often plays out.
Being herded here and there, moving like so many cows or salmon to a destination, unthinking, prompts existential angst in me. What, after all, is the point.
In Granada we walked up through the Sacromonte neighborhood, which is where thousands of Roma (“gypsies”) used to live in Granada, in homes built into caves in the stone cliffs. Many Roma still live there today. At some level, we were gawking. We didn’t want to gawk. That wasn’t the hope or the point. We wanted to get a feel for what it would have been like to live, as Roma, in caves, in the sides of cliffs, above the city of Granada, next door to the Albayzín, the Moorish quarter, across a ravine from the Alhambra, its fortified palaces impressive from every angle.
In the Sacromonte, someone was selling access to his cave, for the tourists. Sidewalk cafes advertised vinos, bebidas, tapas on chalkboards. Many tourists were there in organized groups; unsure how to navigate back streets without a guide and the comfort of twenty other tourists, they had hired a leader. As we passed one such group we heard the guide say, "there is a woman here who does not like the tourists, so stay with me. With me it is okay.”
I understand that woman, whom I never saw. She doesn’t want any of us there, where she lives, in her neighborhood. She must have issues with some of her neighbors as well. Some are selling access to the caves; others are selling overpriced drinks. Tourism is how the money comes in now. That doesn’t mean that she has to like it.
More than twenty five years ago, Bret and I traveled through Turkey. It was late Summer, the season of the apricot harvest, and as we drove through the vast Anatolian plain, every town gleamed orange from a distance, apricots laid out on mats on all the roofs, drying in the sun. When we stopped for gas we were invited by the station attendant to join him for some apple tea. We accepted. In Cappadocia, as in the Sacromonte neighborhood of Granada, people have lived in caves, but for a much longer time, building elaborate structures onto and into cities that came before. In Cappadocia we were befriended one day by a local man, who showed us some of the nooks and crannies that visitors generally did not find, and we had a picnic of meats and cheeses and yes, dried apricots with his extended family, and were invited in to his home to meet the elders who were not up to a picnic, and the whole thing was not a scam and he refused to allow us to repay his gifts of time and knowledge and hospitality with anything but words of gratitude, refused it over and over and over again.
I wonder if that sort of serendipitous exchange is possible now. I think it probably is not. The world has grown too crowded, and too suspicious.
It is not just the crowds, though. It is also the globalization, which brings homogenization. We travel to see outside of our own perspective, but there is McDonald’s, just feet from the mind-blowing bridge and ravine in Ronda. When you are done having your mind blown, consider having a Big Mac. It will taste just like you remember.
If it is always possible to pull back into the familiar, there is little risk of discovery.
And if the computer in your pocket promises access to anything you might want to know, anytime you want it, you will surely lose curiosity. There will be a flattening of cultural affect.
Yes, you will surely look some things up. And yes, you will surely take some photographs. I certainly do both, and I will continue to do so.
But there is such value in not knowing, in sitting in the not knowing for a while, and allowing yourself to wonder—What if? Why? How did these people accomplish what they did? How is what I am seeing even possible?
And there is also value in not documenting—or at least, not documenting until you have had the experience that you are supposedly documenting. People who live wholly behind their cameras may have good photographs, but they are not laying down memories of their own lives.1
When we think we can know anything immediately, as easily there as here, then as now, we lose the very particularness of this time and place. But it is precisely the particularness of this time and place that allows us to feel alive.
The abyss in Ronda is so startling, it is difficult to conceive of. Unless you are right there, on top of it, it can seem imaginary. At dusk, a startling cry emanates from somewhere in it, haunting and sharp.
“It’s a peacock,” says Bret. And he is right. Pavo real, in Spanish. Royal turkey. A royal turkey, right here in Ronda. We do not learn why there is a peacock here, nor why he is so forlorn that he shrieks into the darkness each night.
In a bakery several blocks away, on a morning that is neither haunting nor dark, a woman takes particular care in wrapping up little cakes, arranging them just so on brown waxed paper, tying them neatly with colored twine such that, when carried, they are balanced just right. A few blocks away, another woman sweeps outside her shop, with a broom made of branches, a broom that appears to be both functional, and pleasurable to use. After this work, her establishment is notably more inviting.
The small pleasures of a natural whisk broom or a well wrapped package of pastries would not seem to compare to the glories of mosques and cathedrals, palaces and parks. All of the places that we went to that can be named and require tickets to enter were in fact as glorious as they seem like they might be—the Alhambra in Granada and the Alcázar in Seville, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona (the fever dream of Gaudí which is still being built) and, especially, the Mezquita in Córdoba. But that should not detract from the value of a good broom, a well prepared package.
The whole of southern Spain, at least of Andalusia, is a temporal mosaic of sky god religions. Islam and Christianity in particular have been vying for dominance for many hundreds of years, each one ascendent in its time, the others sometimes being tolerated, sometimes not.
In the year 950, Córdoba was a thriving city of 100,000 people, its streets lit at night with oil lamps, water piped in from outside of the city, its neighborhoods dotted with myriad mosques, palaces, and public baths. The city was under Muslim rule, but Christians and Jews lived there too, and people spoke not just Arabic, but Hebrew and Latin as well. At the university, men studied medicine and math, literature and the law. The Mezquita of Córdoba was already built then, a mosque of endless columns and arches in red and white stripes that is jaw-dropping today—what impression must it have made on people over one thousand years ago?
But the golden age of Córdoba, ruled over by the Arabic Umayyads, would not last forever. Fighting among rival groups of Muslims led to its decline, and the city fell to Christians in the year 1236. And the Christians, rather than building a separate cathedral and letting the mosque be, or tearing down the mosque and building a cathedral in its place, decided to build their house of worship inside of and up out of the mosque, leaving most of the mosque intact. That is what exists today. The Mezquita is a mosque – cathedral. Or perhaps it is a cathedral – mosque. It is called both things. For nobody seems to know which it is more of now—mosque, or cathedral.
All of those places—the Alhambra and the Alcázar, the cathedrals and mosques—were magical and mystical, historical and necessary. But we saw them coming. They have already been well described. It is the things we cannot predict, those things that we do not see coming and which have not already been analyzed endlessly, that are the true experiential gems.
In addition to its historic Mezquita, Córdoba has a Roman bridge that spans the Guadalquivir river. Just downstream of the bridge is a giant, ancient wooden water wheel, in and around which lives a colony of feral cats. Many of them appear to be Siamese. The water wheel is mounted on high stone walls, on which pigeons roost, clinging to shallow impressions on the vertical surfaces. Cats sit above the birds, looking down, considering.
In Grazalema, a white hill town within the vast olive, cork, and cave filled Sierra del Grazalema Natural Park, we were stopped by a man named Juan. He was celebrating his 75th birthday when he saw Bret taking a photograph in a grocery store and guessed, for reasons that he never did explain, that we must be Scottish. Upon learning that we were American, he jokingly made the sign of the devil at us, before inviting us to join him for some tapas and a drink.
And in both Córdoba and Seville the trees were full of oranges, beautifully ripe oranges. But they were ripe bitter oranges, not good for grazing right off the tree (yes, we tried)— better that they be made into bitter orange marmalade, then eaten with thin slices of Manchego. One night in Seville we happened upon orange thieves stealing all of the oranges, pulling them off trees and filling bucket after bucket, stashing the fruit filled buckets in the backs of vans. The orange thieves, it turns out, were not thieves at all, but employed by the city, municipal workers paid to harvest the oranges and—I hope—turn them over to people who would in fact make bitter orange marmalade out of them, which in turn would be sold, the profits turned back into public works projects. Or at least that is my dream.
The only whisper of violence or threat of any kind that we saw, in nearly three weeks of mostly urban exploration, was in Granada, a physical confrontation between two men. They were Glovo delivery guys—Glovo being the local equivalent of DoorDash—and also North African Muslim men by the looks of them, being held apart by other North African Muslim men, until those holding back the combatants could do so no longer, and the alley in which the altercation started, where we happened to be walking at the time, no longer contained the anger. The two men spilled out on to the busy street, on to each other, a punch thrown, a phone hurled onto the pavement, and then they were separated again, pulled back by their respective people, tugging at them. On the street, where we had hustled to make sure that we were not collateral damage, all activity stopped, watching. Police soon arrived. Half an hour later, the police were still there.
Other than that, we literally never felt at risk in Spain, not even a hint, and it was…odd. Police were around, but hardly ubiquitous, and people were raucous at times, in places, but nearly always it just felt like there were a whole lot of people living their own individual lives, often in close quarters with others, and everyone was pretty much getting along. Doing the civilization thing.
Doing the civilization thing. It’s what we all need to be doing. It has become rather rare in American cities. We might take a few hints from older cultures than ours, people who have lived among difference and disagreement for far longer than we have, and have learned to make it work. We might give “doing the civilization thing” a solid try.
There is good research to back up this claim, on how living behind our cameras changes memory. Here’s a start: Henkel 2014. Point-and-shoot memories: The influence of taking photos on memory for a museum tour. Psychological science 25(2): 396-402.
We visit cities largely to see our connection to the past, not the present. Venice is very modern, outside of the old city. But nobody goes to see the new stuff. Same for Rome. The colosseum is surrounded by modern structures that no one cares about.
In America we are less inclined to build the new in and around the old. We bulldoze the old. It's in our way. As we bulldoze the buildings, we also bulldoze our sense of who we are and how we got here.
That does much to explain our collective sense of dissociation.
Thank you so much Heather. I’m so grateful for you and your writing.