# Far is Not Far Anymore



## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

*End of the Road
The real threat to travel is that our sense of wonder will vanish along with all the exotic destinations. *
By Marcel Theroux 
10 April 2006
Newsweek International

Far is not so far anymore. When I took my first long trip to India in 1986, I didn't speak to my parents for five months because the phone lines were so bad. I collected my mail at the Poste Restante counter each time I arrived in a new town, and wrote home on crinkly airmail paper to save postage. 

At 37, I am not yet old--but these details already belong to a very old-fashioned world. E-mail and Internet cafés have made the letter home seem as quaint as sealing wax. And if a young traveler went five months without calling nowadays you would assume the worst. 

Stealthily, the world is converging, thanks to cheap flights and computers, cable television, mobile-phone networks and the spread of commercial franchises that have put Irish pubs and pizzerias in cities as far apart as Baku and Tegucigalpa. And yet, the purpose of travel remains the same--to encounter the unfamiliar, to get Elsewhere. It's a place of enchantment and transformation which can be arduous to reach, but which promises to enrich your understanding of the world, and reflect your own life back at you. Prospero's island in Shakespeare's play "The Tempest" is the epitome of Elsewhere. No one went there to get a suntan, and there's tension between the locals and the outsiders, but almost everyone went home a little altered. 

Throughout history the existence of Elsewhere has been a given. Traditionally, it was very close, rarely more than a day's walk away. But the same global culture that now draws us together also threatens to tame Elsewhere with uniformity. After all, Prospero's island wouldn't seem quite so magical if there were a Club Med on it. 

I traveled by biplane through a wilderness of snow in 2002 to visit the Even, a group of reindeer-herding near-nomads in northern Siberia, only to find myself in a wooden hut watching a Hollywood submarine movie with them. I wanted to eat ritual hallucinogens and talk about shamanism; they wanted to drink whisky and discuss Mr. Bean. 

Our appetite for more and more exotic destinations is partly driven by this sense that Elsewhere is disappearing, like a once common animal, retreating further into the woods as its numbers dwindle. It's almost a relief when you come across indisputable national traits: lachrymose Russians quoting Pushkin, Argentines dancing the tango. Yet you half expect those characteristics to peel off like fake adobe on a Mexican restaurant in a shopping mall. 

The danger is that as travel be-comes easier, and places change to accommodate the homogenized appetites of global tourism, we will lose the sense of wonder that travel has always inspired. And if we lose sight of Elsewhere, then we are no longer provoked by its unfamiliarity, challenged to open our eyes and look at our own lives afresh. "Here," laments the poet Philip Larkin, "no elsewhere underwrites my existence." 

Nothing lifts your heart like the first sight of home after time spent Elsewhere--those initial moments when the known is strange again. Our native planet never seemed so spectacular as when we first saw it from the moon. 

Yet the answer is not to take to space tourism, but to recognize that the close and familiar can have as much power to surprise us as the temples of Angkor Wat, or the snowy Andes, or any other Elsewhere you choose. I recently returned home after a weekend spent walking with three friends. We covered 60 kilometers in three days--it would have taken 45 minutes in a car. But at our slow pace, the hills and churchyards and soft rain of north Devon gave me a greater sense of Elsewhere than I ever got from my first and somewhat disappointing glimpse of the Taj Mahal.


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