Propaganda exists everywhere, plugging away, and travel is no exception.

If you follow the magazines, you know what I’m talking about—article after article catering to a romantic perception of some incredible perfect idyllic place just on the other side of the hill, the other side of the mountain, the other side of the ocean. Some place you haven’t been to yet.

It’s designed to make you question yourself.

I’m as susceptible to this urge as anybody. That’s because I’m also as capital-r Romantic as anybody, except maybe Samuel Coleridge or Percy Bysshe Shelley. Still I’ve had to admit a hard fact: Wandering the earth like the Ancient Mariner is not necessarily the best way to go through life. Nobody reads that poem anymore, so let me remind you of the fact that all of the Mariner’s sailors died of thirst and the Mariner himself chewed into his arm to drink his own blood.

Don’t get me wrong. Travelling the world is important to build wonderful qualities like empathy and equanimity and enthusiasm and a whole lot of other words that start with ‘e’. As you probably know, I’m writing an entire series based on the urge to pursue international adventure.

In fact, I even recently counted up the basic travel stats of my life:

Nations visited, total: 23

Time spent abroad, total: About 13 months

Foreign languages spoken: 1

That’s not too shabby by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t have as much time abroad as a Peace Corps volunteer or a trust-fund baby, but a lot more than the average member of the U.S. population. In fact, only forty percent of us even have a passport. If you find that startling, get ready for this—according to the linked page from the State Department, in 1989 less than 3% of the U.S. population had a passport. I’ve doublechecked those numbers, and it’s still incomprehensible. Didn’t Woodrow Wilson start knitting the United States into the fabric of the world back in 1914? Apparently it took more than a century for the idea that travel is beneficial to penetrate into our collective noggins.

Ainsley Walker stands as the exception, of course. She would rather not breathe than not travel.

The Dismal Science Helps Us Understand

I never studied economics (another ‘e’ word) in college, being too focused on literature and history. Ignoring it was my error. (Same with Elton John, whose music I didn’t discover until twenty years after everybody else. And another ‘e’ word.) It’s been the great discovery of my adult life that, more often than not, economics forces everything else into the backseat. As a result, it’s a revelation every time I discover a new economic idea, especially when it can be applied to other parts of life.

That includes the law of diminishing returns. Let me explain.

Prescribing antibiotics in your medical office? Fifty years later, those medicines won’t work as well, if at all. Applying chemical fertilizers to a field? Ten years later, your harvests lose their superpowers and return to baseline. Writing a term paper late into the night? The hour that starts at 11 pm will be much more productive than the hour that starts at 5 am. That’s guaranteed.

In layman’s terms, the law of diminishing returns describes the way that stuff grows less effective over time.

So too with travel. There is a finite point at which travel becomes Way Way Too Much Overload. Frequent travelers know very well that point I’m talking about. You’ve reaped all possible psychological rewards, and the benefits of being on the road begin to shrink. That moment is the highest data point on the curve—or, in economic terms, the point at which the marginal per unit output decreases. That is also the moment when, optimally, you pack up and go home. Of course, travelling doesn’t work that way.

This point of saturation is reached at various different times, depending on the individual. Let’s look at four of them.

The weekender. This person reaches that saturation point in a matter of just a few days. I once went to a tropical island paradise with a group of people that included a fiftyish woman, let’s call her Dolly, who had asked that our vacation be limited to six days. The group had ended up deciding, despite Dolly’s objections, on nine days. I watched Dolly, on day seven, suddenly and literally clam up at dinner. She just went mute. Her entire body shut down. After we paid the check, Dolly beelined directly to her rented condo and didn’t come out again until it was time to go to the airport two days later.

In retrospect, I see that she’d tried to warn us: I’m not designed to be away from home for a week. Some people call this a plantation mentality, but it’s better not to pass judgment. Lo que es, es, as the Spanish say. In English: It is what it is.

The modern HR vacation. Others reach that saturation point after a longer period of time. A two-week vacation, for example, seems to be the ideal length for most people, particularly office workers who’ve structured their own travel mentality around what’s allowed by the boss. And even then, the perfect moment may be reached midway through the vacation, on the seventh day. Then the second half of the trip serves as a total letdown, an emotional postscript. This is where the value of planning arises. To avoid peaking too soon, I like to save the most interesting activity for the end of the trip. Otherwise, it’s like getting a hangover while you’re still drinking.

Slow travelers. Still other travelers prefer long journeys, four to six weeks each, maybe even a couple of months. These people tend to stay in a single city or location, enough to establish routines, meet the locals, and feel as though they’ve become part of the fabric of daily life. This is what the term slow travel refers to, and these people usually pursue classes in language, cooking, and culture. I’d include myself in this category, ever since living in South America in 2014. That particular trip lasted four months, including two months parked in a single city—Medellín, Colombia. The entire experience, while exhilarating, lasted too long for my own tastes. It taught me that I don’t need more than six weeks abroad at any given time. That may sound indulgent, yes, but keep in mind that, prior to that, my fantasy included spending a solid year traipsing around the world.

The vagabonds. Those people, the ones who consistently disappear for months or even years at a time, are in a class by themselves. They’re the wanderers, the ones who basically keep little home base, if any. They’re professional photographers, musicians, writers, ambassadors, relief workers. They’re often young, sometimes idealistic, sometimes deeply wounded by family, and occasionally just plain crazier than a shithouse rat.

While touring Bolivia last year, I met a young German couple who were in the middle of an epic eighteen-month journey around the world. Days off? Nope—they were in constant motion. Personal discovery? Maybe. Body fat? None. Were they nuts? Definitely a little. Based on what they put up on Facebook after we parted ways, they kept their own little two-person party rolling into Bali and across Southeast Asia for the next nine months. Don’t ask me how it was funded, because I don’t have a clue. By the time it had ended, they’d spent 529 days in a row travelling.

Personally, I’ve got about two weeks of constant moving in me. Any longer, and I need to plant myself somewhere for a while. Also, I really enjoy coming home after an adventure. It’s a universal urge, and it means a lot to people to use their own bathrooms, wear their own clothes, root around in their own gardens. Wasn’t that Odysseus’ goal in The Odyssey? And Steve Martin’s goal in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles? I too wrote a novel about that feeling. We all want to arrive home, eventually.

Except for the ones who are being paid for travel.

Travel Bloggers

I don’t even know where to begin with this particular creature. It’s not that I dislike them. It’s more that I distrust them.

For those who don’t know, let’s define our terms first. A travel blogger is a person, or more often a couple, who travels the world mostly for free. All their hotel stays are reimbursed by hotels. All their restaurant meals are reimbursed by restaurants. All their fantastic diving trips are reimbursed by local travel boards.

What do they do in return? Travel bloggers write blogs (duh), tweets, and posts on social media about those same locations. They gush and fawn and adore with the same variety of adjectives as the current occupant of the White House—fantastic, beautiful, amazing. (They leave out words like disaster and loser, because that doesn’t get them free stuff.) It’s not as easy a gig to get as it sounds. Travel bloggers also must have an enormous number of social media followers to be offered such comps in the first place, and that’s no small task.

There’s another term for what they do.

Pay for play.

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with this. The travel bloggers always look absolutely ecstatic. After all, they’re having luxury vacations for free. I won’t mention any by name, but you’ve probably seen their enormous perfect smiles as they take selfies every day in front of a different cocktail, a different sunset, a different pool.

Nobody’s getting hurt, you’re probably thinking, so what’s the problem?

There’s a few problems. One, I originally started working in journalism, my first real job being at The Washington Post. There, pay-for-play is such a big no-no that even Christmas presents to Post staffers must be sent to charity—and the staffer must also send a thank-you card to the gifter informing him or her of the charity donation. I know that travel blogging isn’t journalism, but it’s deep in me to avoid compromising my own point-of-view.

Two, it must be damn near impossible to put on such a front, day in, day out. I can only imagine that travel bloggers don’t actually enjoy many of their activities, constantly fiddling with their camera phones to get the perfect shot of the seawall, finding the right filter for Instagram, worrying about replying to that concierge in Prague, etc. All their daily and hourly and minutely experience must be viewed through the lens (pun intended) of what will translate well to followers on social media. And then there’s the eventual emptiness that must consume them. A travel blogger essentially becomes a glorified PR flack for tourism boards, a role that must take its toll eventually. He or she has no job security, no medical benefits.

Three, my intuition says that only a narcissistic personality needs to promote his or her own superiority to the world. Lording it over others is what narcissists are born to do. Plus, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers is something else that narcissists tend to excel at as well. When it’s all about you, then nothing is about anybody else.

Let me offer a different view of what travel should be.

Travel as a Form of Suffering

You’ll never read this advice in any travel magazine, but here’s what I’ve learned. The best form of travelling involves discomfort, particularly for those of us like myself who are afflicted with too much modern comfort.

It’s the first of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.

Life is suffering.

We shouldn’t run away from that. We should accept it.

This is the philosophy I’ve stuck by when writing the Ainsley Walker Gemstone Travel Mystery series. It would’ve been too easy to write it as a series of mere fantasy fulfillment. You know, the kind of ridiculousness that certain authors indulge in, such as, oh, I don’t know, **coughCliveCusslercough**, especially when he brings in a character named Clive Cussler to save Dirk Pitt at a crucial part of the story.

It also would’ve been too easy to duplicate the brainless attitude of a glossy travel rag. You know the type—it’s the magazine that always highlights the best civet-oil spa treatment in the Namibian bush. It’s the magazine that uses the word indulge fourteen times in as many paragraphs. (And always, always the word funky to describe a handbag. Aren’t there other types of bags? Angular? Stiff? Classical?)

I’ve gone a different path with my writing.

My protagonist, Ainsley Walker, suffers during her adventures. In fact, as the series has gone on, I’ve gotten better at torturing her. Notice that at the end of each story, while she always recovers the gemstone, she also suffers some sort of personal change or even setback. The North Korea Onyx, for example, is nearly a tragedy, a down ending that I figured might alienate a couple of readers here and there but which accurately reflects the horrific nature of North Korea. These mixed endings—rather than endings that are all happy or all sad—seem to be the most real, the most human, and the most believable.

In the end, Ainsley Walker isn’t a static character, mired in her own blinkered perspective. She’s made of taffy—stretched, pushed, and pulled by circumstances into different shapes. Sometimes, a part of her keeps its new form, even after the rest of her self returns to normal.

That is a real traveler.

In another sense, however, Ainsley isn’t even a traveler at all. She’s just a human, living a full life, experiencing the same ups and downs and lefts and rights that we all do. The only difference is, for dramatic purposes, she experiences this stuff in a very compressed amount of time, and in a radically foreign setting.

In the end, I hope she’s real to you, because I’ve worked very hard to make her seem real to me—and she’s going to continue to get stretched and pushed and pulled for many more adventures in the future.

In the meantime, it’s a big world. Let’s go see it all.

 

The great pop group Tears For Fears has been dormant for a decade now, but one of their best songs is called “Sketches of Pain”. It was never a hit, or even a single, and it was released over twenty years ago on the Raoul and the Kings of Spain album.

It’s a remarkable song for many reasons, but especially for the way that the lyrics describe how fundamentalists fail to understand art.

Some cry shame

Some cry shame

We tore them apart

We failed to imagine

 

God might claim

God might claim

The works of art

We failed to imagine

 

Great wide stretches of canvas

Signed by a godless name

Strange bright colors of madness

Only a fool would frame

 

Sketches of pain

Sketches of pain

I’ve never seen pop music touch on fundamentalism so precisely.

Let’s define a fundamentalist: He is an individual who’s feels that he’s been denied some sort of path to the future. He comes in all shapes and sizes, from Christian to Muslim to Jewish to white to black to Asian to rich to poor. He sees himself as a victim of modernity. He is above all desperate.

To cope with his lack of personal progress, the fundamentalist seizes upon the idea of glory days. He comes to believe in a mythical time when everything was somehow better, a time when lollipops grew on trees and unicorns pranced through fields and people who got married stayed married and going to religious service was deeply satisfying and not at all obligatory. A time when everybody lived hip-deep in disposable income and all the children were above average. The fundamentalist feeds himself these lies by losing himself in old texts, often interpreting them literally and verbatim.

The fundamentalist is a blunted soul. He is a flattened nailhead driven deeply into the aged wood of a mythical past. He can’t be pulled out of that imaginary world.

Most importantly, he can’t understand the act of artistic creation, because it doesn’t share this same worldview.

As Steven Pressfield wrote in The War of Art, “Fundamentalism and art are mutually exclusive.”

That said, there are some things that tradition gives us that we shouldn’t lose sight of. Two-parent homes, for instance, are undeniably the best way to build strong people and therefore maintain a strong civilization. The data (in the United States, at least) supports this. Likewise, recipes, created through centuries of experimentation, shouldn’t be abandoned. The Czechs were forced to do exactly this under Soviet rule, as Anthony Bourdain explained in a long-ago episode. And don’t get a writer like me started on the value of old books.

So the fundamentalists do have a point. Once in a while.

But in the field of art, they’re struck dumb. While the humanist artist sees the world as a constant churn, maybe even as a gently inclined slope of progress, the fundamentalist has a very different shape in mind. The fundamentalist sees a downward arrow. He is willing to go to the grave with his single inflexible belief that we humans have fallen from a higher state to a lower state.

This is, to be plain, total crap. The Christian story of The Fall has been long debunked by modern science. We humans are made of carbon chains, the same stuff as dirt. Our cerebral cortices show that abstract thought has been a relatively recent development.

As a species, we’re not plunging away from a deity because of poor decisions. We humans—at least, some of us—are building our way up to that deity for the very first time.

In her adventures, Ainsley Walker represents this impulse in all of us. The desire to grow, change, transform, and remake the world into something new and better.  The desire for Something Else. Not clinging to the past out of fear, but carrying the past with us as we build into the future.

It’s a big world. Let’s go see it all.

I never understood that maxim until I began to research The Argentina Rhodochrosite.  During my reading, I discovered one particularly weird story about the “dirty war” of the nineteen-seventies.

This story featured a woman who’d been captured by Videla’s secret government, tossed into prison, and tortured. By itself, that’s rather pedestrian, an unfortunate situation that was repeated thirty thousand times during that decade.  The banality of war, as the saying goes.

But the difference is that this woman fell in love with her torturer.

Now, that was interesting. That was the stuff of good stories. I grew more interested.

As I read on, I learned that this bizarre duo’s emotional tango went even further. Upon her release, the happy couple had married and together left Argentina. They had run off to India or Africa – can’t remember which – and eventually converted to Buddhism. Presumably they were both trying to heal some psychic scars. Eventually they had divorced, and the former torturer had become a monk, while the woman had remarried a rich man. That was all.

And that’s where the story lost me.

It defies all reason. See, the dark secret about human consciousness is that we can’t tolerate very much reality. Real life is messy, it doesn’t feature character arcs, it doesn’t have setups and payoffs, it doesn’t offer dependably comedic or tragic endings—it only has bizarre randomness that leaves us scratching our heads.

Yet what most of us want from our stories is internal coherence, a clear lesson. Because life so often teaches us nothing.

And so, for my own Argentina novel, I cut this woman’s story short. Falling in love with a torturer is about as much as our limited human imaginations will admit.

Think about the irony for a moment. To write acceptable fiction—the one discipline that’s supposed to welcome wild flights of fancy—I actually had to rein in reality, tamp it down, make it more palatable for mass consumption.

I’m not the first writer to notice this paradox, of course. After the movie Scarface opened more than thirty years ago, then-screenwriter Oliver Stone was pilloried for his excessively violent portrayal of a drug-war disemboweling. The scene involved a chainsaw, a captive, and a hotel bathtub.  It’s ludicrously violent, many said, over the top.

What they didn’t know was that Stone had drawn that scene from a real-life drug-gang murder in South Beach, and that he had actually reduced the level of violence. (If you’ve seen that movie, you’ll certainly find that hard to believe, but it’s true. The fictional version still made my stomach churn, and I hope never to see it again.  The Ainsley Walker stories are violence-free for a reason.)

Still, that’s life. It’s not beautiful, it’s not sensible, it’s not even clear. It just … is. If you want sensible endings, read more books, watch more television.

And then, when you tire of the tidiness of fiction, remember that it’s a big world. Let’s go see it all.

At one time in my life, I was homeless for nearly a half a year.

Not a sleeping-bag-under-an-overpass type of homeless, or a flecks-of-spittle-Tourette’s-syndrome type of homeless.

I was travelling.

Two years out of college, and despite a blooming career at a major newspaper, I wasn’t particularly happy.  This path seemed too safe, too obvious.  There were practical concerns too—the digital world was already beginning to massacre traditional journalism, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend the next ten years of my life watching the carnage.  Climbing the career ladder is less attractive when the is ladder is being washed away by the rising tide of democratization of information.

In this midst of this dark night of the soul … it occurred to me that I’d yet to visit the vast majority of our grand country.  And, of course, these fifty states weren’t going to present themselves to me.  The cliffside dwellings of Canyon de Chelly weren’t going to knock on my front door.  I wouldn’t wake up to find Devil’s Tower magically recreated in my backyard.  Even National Geographic photographers have to explore the back roads of Iowa to find the bridges of Madison County.

With some savings, and a dependable but ordinary four-door sedan, I recruited a friend who had a similar yearning.  We shucked everything – which wasn’t much, at that point – and spent the next five months, thirty-nine states, and fifteen thousand miles undertaking the Great American Road Trip.

You’ve seen it in a thousand movies.  A red convertible, a mutual distrust between fellow travelers that grows into a friendship.  A third traveler joins the journey, making the tension explicit.  A juke joint, a room of angry hillbillies, followed by gunshots.  Usually there’s a climax somewhere in California, usually at the ocean, at the blue limit of the unrealistic dream.  An inner conflict is resolved, the girl is won (or lost), and everything is made whole again.

It didn’t quite work out that tidily.  Still, I wouldn’t trade that half-year for anything.  We encountered wild javalinas in a Texas desert, interviewed a roadside preacher in Mississippi, ran out of cash in Amish country (they don’t take plastic, shockingly), and even executde an unbelievable skin-of-the-teeth escape from federal authorities on the Canadian border.  (One piece of advice: Never attempt an international border crossing with a highly self-destructive friend-of-a-friend who secretly hides a firearm in your jumper cable box.)

I would liken the entire experience to running on a moving walkway.  Once you reach the end, your equilibrium has changed, and you feel like life is meant to be lived at that pace, in that way, and the slowness of the concrete under your feet feels oddly irritating.  That’s why I kept going, alone, for another month after my fellow traveler bailed. 

The reason: It made me happy.

The Buddhists call this satori, or peak experience.  If you’ve had this, you know how vitalit is to leave our comfort zones, at least if we want to find happiness.

And now a recent article in Psychology Today supports this. 

It’s a good read.  Among other observations, the author points out that risk-taking, uncertainty, and discomfort are essential ingredients in the search for happiness. 

Consumer culture, you’ve been put on warning.  You can’t pull the wool over our eyes for too much longer.  For one, we aren’t making as much money as we used to.  Two, our needs aren’t solely material.  We have emotional and spiritual desires too.

And sometimes, as you’ve watched Ainsley Walker discover, the only way to fill these needs is through travelling.

It’s a big world.  Let’s go see it all. 

He’s an astounding writer.  He used to be a good cook.  And he’s been making good television for almost a decade now.

But Anthony Bourdain has an inner struggle.  A cleavage in his soul.

One half of him, the part born and raised in New York City, the place where people’s emotional shields are as high, hard, and glossy as the glass curtain-walls of their skyscrapers, hasn’t changed.

That’s the wisecracking part.  You saw this exhibited best in the Sardinia episode, years ago, the skinny dude in the black Ramones t-shirt, crouched on a rock, unleashing his sarcasm-plated tongue on the local caper farmers — until they reamed him for using utensils.  The former junkie putting his own needs above others.

Dostoevsky called this a state of “laceration”.  It doesn’t translate so well into English, but I think he meant people who have been pierced, and are aching with pain.  In Bourdain’s case, of course, he “pierced” himself, over and over again, with a heroin needle.  And he’s still aching.

But the other half of his soul has been blooming.  You may remember the Brazilian episode, in Sao Paulo, in which — confronted with a really nice woman and her stew — he finally let down his guard, shed the New York tough-guy shell.  It emerges in other episodes too, when his empathy quietly emerges, especially during segments with troubled people.  Those are my favorite moments.

As a fiction writer, I’ve been advised to plate my characters with armor, and then throw them into a pool.  It’s a fascinating metaphor.  The main character is forced to strip herself of her psychic armor—because if she doesn’t, she’ll drown, and the mission won’t get achieved.

Bourdain has been “stripping” in public for years—not of clothing, but of his own psychic armor.  And he’s still got years of television (and lots of psychic armor) to go.  It’ll be exciting to see if him continuing to change, and to explore the world, at CNN.

In the meantime, it’s a big world.  Go see it all.

If there’s an easy way to feel reborn, it’s through new food.

Swab a hunk of unfamiliar bread in oil, buy a weird knobby vegetable at a farmer’s market, sample an alluringly odd piece of meat on an hors d’oeuvre plate, sip an unusual cocktail with ingredients you’ve never heard of (what exactly is velvet falernum? or genever?) …  all of these things we can do in our neighborhoods, close to home.

And despite their proximity, all of these things break us out of our ordinary routine and make us feel more exciting, a little unusual, a little more alive.

If you have the means, eating while travelling carries even more resonance.  We may forget quadratic equations, but we don’t easily forget the impressions made upon our sense memories.  We’re programmed to remember the tang of our first bite of Stilton cheese in Bath, the bitterness of our first sip of an amaro in Miilan.

It’s the caveman imperative: That bush has yummy berries.  Return to it, keep eating from it, and you won’t die.

This also explains why people come home from their travels gushing about just how goshdarn amazing everything is in, say, North Dakota, or some other pleasant but—to be honest—noncompelling place.

But eating isn’t always easy when travelling.  Sometimes it isn’t even safe.   But that’s why we travel, isn’t it?  To jerk ourselves out of our webbed safety net?

In the meantime, it’s a big world.  Go see it all.