Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? It’s hardly the stuff that generations of Americans have dreamed of for their vacations: the museum tours and ambles through quaint villages or the streets and gardens of foreign cities, the lazing on Mediterranean or Caribbean beaches, the food adventures, the shopping for T-shirts, postcards, and knick knacks. In the pre-Lonely Planet world, travel writers often hewed to that same set of vacation priorities, with perhaps a bit of adventure—some rock climbing, say, or going off-road on safari. The really tough stuff, the bushwhacking trudge of exploration and exotica, was usually relegated to the pages of science and nature magazines and National Geographic.
“Scattered among the wicker furniture were several men in fatigues, a couple of AK-47s, a grenade launcher, and a very excited chimpanzee.” —Tom Clynes, “They Shoot Poachers, Don’t They?,” from BATW 2003
“Jon and I had spent most of our adult lives writing about the worst people and places in the world. That month, I had recently returned from northern Albania, where I’d reported a story on blood vendettas, while Jon was about to head off for war-ruined Angola.” —Scott Anderson, “As Long As We Were Together, Nothing Bad Could Happen to Us,” from BATW 2001
The writers in any of the Golden Ages of Travel—whether we’re talking about the roving of the Romantic poets or the wave of great British travel writers that spread out across the globe between the World Wars, journeying by ocean liner and, increasingly, airplane—most often went abroad in search of some version of the sublime. Even if “exotic” was what they were after, that word had a drastically different—and much broader—meaning before television, movies, glossy magazines, the internet, and the explosion of the travel industry brought the whole globe into our homes every day. Such journeys were most often educational or pure entertainment; they might be hectic, there might be inconveniences and culture clash and occasional mishaps, but the travelers were generally not looking for “hellish places,” and “rewarding misery” was almost certainly not high on their travel itineraries.
The travel sections of daily newspapers and glossy magazines are still full of accounts of idyllic vacations and typically middle- to upper-class getaways, complete with calendar images of far-away and beautiful spots. Such accounts, of course, tend to be long on practical information, and virtually always run alongside advertisements for travel agencies and charter services. Increasingly, however, disaster travel dispatches are appearing in such forums.
And the travel industry itself—at least the scruffiest fringes of it—has also apparently taken notice of the trend for hard-boiled and psychologically taxing journeys. These days, for travelers with a bit of disposable income and a particularly twisted notion of the ideal vacation, almost anything can be arranged. There are operators who will take you into the abandoned (and contaminated) city of Chernobyl, put you through the paces of a Russian boot camp, guide you through no-go areas of battle-torn Somalia and Sierra Leone, or lock you up in a former Soviet gulag above the Arctic Circle or a KGB prison in Latvia. They can even “smuggle” you, an American citizen, illegal-alien style, into the U.S. from Mexico—sheerly, one presumes, for the hellish experience of it.
But is any of this stuff really travel, or really travel writing—or is it merely a form of anguished witness, sadomasochism, rubbernecking, voyeur-ism? Perhaps undertaking such journeys is driven by a desperate desire to feel something, and to see things up close that can’t be grasped in the abstract. We’re now in what might be called a post-civilization era of travel. We’ve even gone well beyond the fad of man-in-nature/man-against-nature narratives that were all the rage seven or eight years ago. Everest? Antarctica? The North Pole? That whole Outside magazine extreme adventure genre, which was dubbed “explornography” back in 1998, in a New York Times Magazine article by John Tierney? That stuff is so twentieth century.
The newest generation of travel writers (and some are already old hands) is up to something else entirely. The subtext of this decidedly stern subgenre is usually man against human nature, or at least man confronting human nature, generally in its ugliest and most primal manifestations. Also, to make any kind of a splash or generate real attention—and granted, when you’re talking about travel essays, a largely neglected genre, that’s all relative—a writer has to be willing not only to suffer, not only to risk life and limb, but also to venture to far-flung places most of us will never feel inclined to visit, and are unlikely otherwise to think about.
It’s a compulsion that can no longer be explained as the simple desire to go where few Western people have been, or to challenge the limits of human endurance; rather it signals a willingness—and in many cases, an apparent need—to go where few Americans in their right minds would voluntarily go, and to stare hard at things the majority of us expend a great deal of psychic energy trying to ignore: forsaken cities, war zones, ruined and obliterated landscapes, sites of natural, ecological, or economic disasters and/or inconceivable poverty and squalor. If the things these writers have to show and tell us are a jolting departure from the vacation fare we’re subjected to by friends and co-workers, maybe it’s precisely that jolt that makes those things worth looking at, and into. Maybe they’re worth a visit, however discomfiting, from the comfort of our easy chairs.