Suzanne Harrington: Has travel forever lost its sense of adventure?

Is this progress, or the death of adventure?

Idling through the bookshelf in someone’s bathroom — as you do — my eyes fall upon a sacred text, dog-eared and decrepit. A 1981 Lonely Planet, its pages Rizla-thin, its typeface tiny. 

India: A Travel Survival Kit, by a travel maverick called Geoff Crowther, who would have compiled it in the 70s when the intrepid shoestring backpacker could take a bus overland from London to Delhi for a fiver, trundling through Iran and Afghanistan with a block of hash down their pants and no clue where they might end up. This was how Boomers backpacked.

All through dinner I long to lock myself back in the bathroom with this mystical portal crammed with hive-mind folklore, and time travel back to analogue backpacking.

Tiny paragraphs and blurry black and white photos on what to see, where to sleep and eat, how to deal with police and giardia and holy cows, decades before the logistics of backpacking was radically reshaped by TripAdvisor, Google, Booking.com, Revolut, Airbnb, Grab, and Uber. (This is not about Instagram — that’s a whole other topic).

Journeying into the unknown is no longer a thing — Google Maps means you can never get lost. No more haunted wanderings through the labyrinthine back alleys of midnight Varanasi, brain offline after an opium cookie from the local chai shop, wondering if you will ever find your flea-pit guest-house again. These days, your phone will not just smartly lead you to your accommodation, but will have found it, booked it, and paid for it, having reviewed it for you first. Nothing is left to chance.

Never will you accidentally end up in an ex prison camp in rural Vietnam, complete with rusty barbed wire, masquerading as backpacker accommodation. No more turning up in distant lands without a bed for the night, and hoping for the best. Is this progress, or the death of adventure? What would Dervla Murphy say?

How did anyone travel before phones, my daughter asks incredulously, on WhatsApp from a remote corner of Indonesia. She’s giving me a virtual tour of her Airbnb; the monkeys outside her window screech digitally inside my kitchen 12,500km away.

We waited around a lot, I tell her. We had the Lonely Planet, we made it up as we went along, we’d leave handwritten messages on backpacker noticeboards, like trails of paper breadcrumbs. Nothing was preorganised or researched. 

I tell her how I once met my sister in Saigon by sitting outside a backpacker bar and hoping she’d walk past. (She did, eventually). I explain travellers cheques, and only being able to take 36 photos. Writing postcards, using post restantes, and being genuinely uncontactable for months on end.

She finds these ideas incomprehensible, inefficient and slightly horrifying. She’s right, of course. Far better use of travel time to arrive somewhere knowing where you’re going and what you’re doing. Phones have made travel frictionless, so that you need never again sleep on a railway station floor unless you’re disorganised, rather than because you had no way of finding out when the last train departed. 

We should be grateful — Gen Z don’t want to rough it, and we Gen Xers are too old now for railway station floors. But still, a little voice whispers. Isn’t getting lost part of travel? Part of the fun?