On travelling

Travelling is often seen with the superficial eyes of the tourist. We consider it as a temporary experience, a lapse of time enclosed in a crystal ball. But is it so? Should we widen our perspective to embrace a deeper experience?

Travelling is not only a week-long trip to Paris. In my opinion, only visiting tourist-oriented places is comparable to going to North Korea and enjoying a day in Pyongyang.

While most people don’t mind a quick and cursory trip to an European capital, going abroad can be more profound than that.

To travel is to think with an unfamiliar attitude; to act with a foreign country’s culture in mind. It can expand our boundaries.

Also, it can be a perfect way to understand how different nations can be. It’s not only a matter of national anthems, flags and whether there’s a Starbucks or not. Something which is not accepted in your country may be legal abroad: personal use of guns is not allowed in Europe, whilst the US law system lets people buy revolvers and shotguns (or even more powerful weapons) without an authorization.

Still, it can happen the opposite: For example, homosexuality is perfectly legal and accepted in most Western countries, while places like Saudi Arabia or Russia condemn it.

These are two completely different matters — one is a deadly weapon, the other is a natural tendency — but they show how traveling means living under a different mindset, even if it’s just for a week.

That’s why I consider the absence of travel as a danger for freedom. If there’s something that all totalitarian countries have in common, it’s the ban on travel. Chinese people need a visa to go abroad, and North Koreans just can’t leave their countries — unless they want to become escapees (I don’t approve of the term “defector”, it’s unworthy of their courage). North Koreans who escape are exerting their human rights, their right to travel. To live in another reality.

Dystopian books do highlight the importance of travel, and they do so by preventing their characters from fleeing. I have two examples.

The Handmaid’s Tale’s Republic of Gilead is untraversable, and people’s lives are reduced to the mere act of reproduction. Oceania, year 1984. People can’t leave their countries, and even their thoughts are controlled.