June 4, 2007--Monday On Mallorca: Real Travel

In a recent issue of Departures magazine, my friend Leslie Woodhead wrote an article that I took to be something of a personal challenge—about “keeping it real,” the title, while traveling because here I am again, perhaps for my 20th visit to Mallorca in seven or eight years; and even to me, at my defensive best, this doesn’t sound much like adventurous travel when others are trekking in Nepal, visiting Stone Age tribes in the Amazon, or wandering along the Silk Road across the Stans of Central Asia.

And yet, Leslie, who is an intrepid traveler and documentary filmmaker, reports something we have all noticed that has made even the route to the peak of Everest a version of a littered highway—that as the remotest reaches of the planet are now fairly accessible: the South Pole, the source of the Nile, “lost tribes” in New Guinea. Jet travel, expanding populations, pressure to “develop” rural areas, mass migrations to cities, electricity, roads, cell phones, the Internet, the globalized economy all have contributed to shrinking and homogenizing the planet.

To help us understand this change, this loss, Leslie writes:

Sociologist Dean MacCannell has identified tourism as the defining emblem of modern life, in which people, driven by restlessness and mobility, yearn for something authentic. Observers of the adventure-travel boom talk about “staged authenticity,” “pseudoevents,” and the impossible pursuit of “more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers, a lifetime of adventure in two weeks,” as historian and cultural pioneer Daniel J. Boorstin put it. The result, he wrote, is that travel “has become diluted, contrived, prefabricated.”

Faced with all of this, is there any hope for the adventurous, to return the juice to travel, is there is anything authentic left to do, to experience? Perhaps. Leslie goes on to say:

How can the determined adventurer preserve a sense of that elusive authenticity? Committed wayfarers I’ve talked to say there are a few essential ground rules. “When the traveler’s risks are insurable,” Boorstin noted in the classic sociological tome The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, “he has become a tourist.” Abandoning the safety net of the package trip and the organized tour is crucial.

So what about poor me, sitting again at Café Consigna on Mallorca, sucking on my third cortado of the morning, looking out at the harbor where $5.0 million yachts ride at anchor side-by-side with the town’s remaining but dwindling fishing fleet?

It may be that depends on what the meaning of “real” is when it comes to travel. Perhaps to even how you define “adventurous” and “dangerous” and “uninsurable.”

To be clear, I think Leslie, and I know I are talking not about the travel of discovery or conquest—what Columbus and Magellan and Hudson and the Conquistadores undertook—or work-related travel or simple vacation leisure-travel where you check into a resort for ten days of R&R. He is alerting us to the fact that with so much packaged, so much staged by “natives” pretending still to be “primitive,” so much set up to appear to be dangerous and intrepid while just out of sight you are ringed and protected in the Bush by guides with high-powered rifles, there is hardly a way anymore to be challenged, as in the past, by truly other peoples, their “folkways,” culture, belief systems, and the threat that some might cut off and shrink your head while other members of the tribe boil you in a huge pot to tenderize you for their dinner.

My rejoinder to Leslie is that if by real travel he means travel for adventure’s sake, then I am with him. But if he is also including in his rueful critique travel for learning’s sake; travel to gain insight about the larger world; travel to be personally and spiritually challenged—to have one’s assumptions assaulted; and perhaps most important to me perched in the middle of the Mediterranean, travel that is more inner than external, if he is not including this kind of travel, then here he and I part company. Because travel of this kind can also be arduous, intrepid, and authentic. Perhaps it is an even more essential form of travel than that which takes you out to stare into the real faces of the Mursi, cattle-herding nomads who live in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley, subjects some years ago of a remarkable series of Leslie Woodhead documentaries.

So what’s available to me besides those delicious cortados?

After the first one I remind myself that in the West, as early as the 8th century, the first travelers were religious pilgrims. Thousands would make their arduous way along, say, the Camino de Santiago, from southwestern France, across the Pyrenees, and then along the Camino below the northern coast of Spain, walking unprotected through heat and storm more than 1,000 kilometers to Santiago de Campostella to visit, worship, and do penance at the shrine of Saint James who, after his martyrdom, descended from the sky in a burst of stars and found repose at this thus holy site. Others early real travelers made their somewhat less intrepid way to Canterbury to visit the tomb of the slain Christian martyr Thomas a Becket. In the latter case it did not hurt to have the Wife of Bath along or Chaucer’s Friar, still that trek, though through physical space was for the authentic traveler of the time an inner, a spiritual journey.

And then after my second cortado, I recall that many years after those pilgrim-travelers, during the Romantic Period, when our modern ideas about travel were incubated, journeys from say England to the continent were not just to take the Grand Tour of the sights in Paris and Rome, for many it was just that with some transgressive fun thrown into the mix, but was also for many the chance to experience “awe” in the Church of Nature—from the peaks in the then wild Alps to find God in the mountains and glaciers. To, as they put it, “transcend” the material, the limited world of the senses, striving to reach something larger, more spiritually uplifting and challenging. Ultimately this was another version of inner travel even while transported by the very real Matterhorn.

And finally, after my third coffee, perhaps with a rush of caffeinated pseudo-perception, I remind myself that the repetitive nature of returning here again and again, tracking along the same trails and camis, moving at a pilgrim’s pace, if we are fortunate and work very hard at it, to reach a virtual meditative state—especially slowing ourselves down in body and spirit, to sharpen awareness--we find what William Blake indicated was possible, to see and grasp “the world in a grain of sand.”

Our last February’s search for the local wild asparagus was just such a journey. While making that journey, after days of futility and frustration, when we finally found a few stalks that had pushed their miraculous way through the newly tarred road, we understood as much from that display of the vegetative power of Nature as if we had spent a week hacking our way through thickest parts of Amazonian Ecuador. And we learned about how the women of the town, while passing along their secrets intergenerationally for centuries, until even today as cars and trucks ripped by at high speed on the main road less than a 100 yards away, how they retained their secret gathering places, not encroaching on any others in unspoken compact

And we finally learned not to intrude, finding satisfaction and a form of belonging by sharing their world, situating ourselves as resident-outsiders in the long, flat plane that lies between the town and port of Andratx. For us these special asparagus are to be found only and appropriately in the town’s market, just on Wednesdays as they have been there also for centuries, continuing until today in spite of all the bodegas and supermercats, a place where we, all of us are expected to meet and then go our separate but connected ways.

This feels real enough for me. But maybe, again, it’s just the cortados speaking.