Category: Travel

Travel: More Than Ever a Fool’s Paradise

Kim du Toit:

I’m not sure I want to travel internationally again.

Me too. Been there, done that.  One of his reasons:

. . . we all know how the Filth in Britishland regard the matter of self-defense Over There.  Nothing puts a damper on the travel experience like having to explain to some judge why you didn’t want to just let the little choirboy take your property and shake your head sorrowfully at your loss.  That you applied your walking-stick to the little shit’s cranium (in lieu of having the old 1911 at hand) would no doubt land you in Serious Trouble, just as your attitude to the cops being more or less on the criminal’s side rather than on yours might also result in the cop’s uniform being ruined by the flow of blood (his).

To which he adds:

And then there’s this little nugget, from one of my most-favored places on the planet:

Most famous districts in Vienna are in the heart of the city and during summer or at Christmas season they become overcrowded, which can lead to pickpocketing, mugging and even terrorist attacks.  In these areas frequented by tourists, bus and train stations, people around you need to be carefully watched and your possessions should be kept close to you.

WTF?  Now add to that the chance that some “migrant” takes offense that your female companion doesn’t have her head covered to his satisfaction… do you see where I’m going with this?

I suggest that we aging patriots who have done our fair share of international travel add to our MAGA lists homeland travel and blowing our excess bucks here. Can one ever get sick of Route 66?

To the young, however, I say: get out there and take the risks.  See the world to appreciate the homeland. Go alone, travel light, like a man, not a suitcase, swot up as much of the local lingo as you can, and try to make it back home alive. Take pictures, keep a journal. If you make it back, you won't regret your adventures. Then you can gloat, "Been there, done that." Forever after you will enjoy the having done what you now longer would want to do.

I dilate further in Three Reasons to Stay Home at Substack.  The reasons? One's Emersonian, the second's Pascalian, and the third is of my own invention.

A Test for Marital Compatibility

Sage Substack advice. Hit the road with your bride-to-be and see if she can take a little hard travelin'.

 

Diner

 

A reader comments:

I tried something similar in the summer of '79. The girlfriend was Juanita, Sicilian by lineage and temperament, a Tae Kwon champion, and a commercial pilot. I proposed a drive to Florida from Pittsburgh. She said you drive, I'll fly and meet you there. You can guess how that relationship went.

If the target mate won't take the bait and stand the test, hand her her walking papers on the spot.

Travel and the Indifference of Places

Malcolm Pollack writing from Ha Long Bay, near Hanoi, Vietnam:

. . . mainly I’m writing just now to note how little enthusiasm I have for travel these days. I’ve been all over the place in my lengthening life (I’ll be 69 in April), and more and more it seems to me that every place is, well, just some other place, and that gallivanting around is increasingly just exhausting and distracting. The world outside seems increasingly finite in comparison to what can (and should) be explored within — and once you’ve scratched the youthful itch of restlessness the trick, I think, is just to find someplace you like well enough, and to make yourself at home.

I could not agree more.  

You may enjoy Three Reasons to Stay Home.

Of travel I've had my share, man. I've been everywhere.

On Travel

Travel introduces a salutary perturbation into one's quotidian orbit. It reduces self-satisfied complacency, putting in its place a useful unease.  Useful for what? For a renewed seriousness in pursuit of what finally matters. This is why it is good for the soul.

Travel

Mention that you are travelling abroad, and you might get the slightly hostile response, "Have you seen your own country?" Such a reaction is likely to come from one of Hillary Clinton's so-called 'deplorables.' These are typically people who, apart from military service, have never been out of their home country. They tend to be provincial, narrow, limited, ignorant, and often bigoted. But is the deracinated comopolitan any better?  There is little to choose between a rooted fool and a rootless fool. Be neither. Play the maverick across the opposition.

Here is a deplorable singing about his having been everywhere.

Three Reasons to Stay Home

These days I have money to travel, time, and opportunities.  In close communion with my 'inner Kantian,' however, I resist the blandishments and with them the vexations of spatial translation. By my present count, there are three chief reasons to keep to my Southwestern Koenigsberg, the Emersonian, the Pascalian, and my own. The first is that travel does not  deliver what it promises; the second is that it delivers us unto temptation and vexation; the third is that it knocks us out of our natural orbit, to return to which wastes time.

Read the rest at Substack.

Thoughts in and of Ancient Lycia, Asia Minor

From my Turkish journal, 22 February 1996:

Phaselis is a romantic tangle of Graeco-Roman ruins in a beautiful natural setting. I hiked back into the brush, got scratched up, but was rewarded by ruins and views out to the Mediterranean, and up to snow-capped mountains.

From Phaselis to the resort town of Kemer. I am sitting at the moment facing the sea drinking beer at an 'Italian' bistro. Table set on the lawn. Vegetation like Arizona: prickly pear cactus, rosemary in bloom, a palm or two, oleander, ice plant. Overcast and  a bit cool. The cactus pads have names carved into them: Hasan, Samer, Erkan.

Living life versus thinking and reflecting on it and its 'meaning.' Surely this is a bogus distinction? For a man to  live thoughtlessly is not to live, and to live the thinker's life is to live in a certain way.  So what is the valid content of the distinction?  Thought interferes with the immediacy of experience. Thought distances, and distance is distortion. But total immediacy would be blindness.

Thought without life is empty; life without thought is blind. The true life is a thinking life infused with experience broad and deep.  So travel and suffer and get scratched up by the brambles of experience, but take good notes! Press the grapes of experience for the wine of wisdom. Stomp them for their juice.

Breathe and feel and take a good snort of the sea breeze. Play the fool; better to love and have lost than never to have loved. Take your best shot, put your ass on the line, go deep, pay your dues, sing the blues.

Above all, take risks! Calculated, deep thought risks. You learned long ago in your Thoreauvian adolescence that a man sits as many risks as he runs.  Go to the brink, but with cautious steps. Take it to the limit, but know the limit. Dissolution into the Apeiron can wait for later. Travel and act but don't neglect to meet the mat of  meditation often to quell both action and thought.

Phaselis II

A Couple of Venice Characters I Met While Working for Manpower

Bill Keezer e-mails re: my  Manpower post:

I think it would be good for all young men somewhere in their early years to have to work for Manpower. It might give them more appreciation of what they have. It also might teach them something useful. I remember my various Manpower stints with some pleasure. I worked hard at a variety of jobs, learned a number of things I might not have, and felt like I earned my money. That’s not all bad.

I agree entirely, Bill, though your "with pleasure" I would qualify.  It is not pleasant to be bossed around by inferior specimens of humanity, but that can and does happen when you are at the bottom of the labor pool.  But working Manpower grunt jobs  was well worth it, if not for the money, then for the experiences and the characters I met.

Venice_california-minOne cat, Larry Setnosky, was a failed academic, known in the seedy bars we'd hit after work as 'The Professor.'  A doctoral student in history, he never finished his Ph. D.  He lived in Venice, California, with a couple of other marginal characters, rode a motorcycle, wore a vest with no shirt underneath.  He'd write articles and then file them away. He was just too wild and crazy to submit to the academic discipline necessary to crank out a thesis and get the degree.  Booze and dope didn't help either.  I still recall his "Nary a stem nor a seed, Acapulco Gold is bad ass weed!"

 

Ernie Fletcher was one of Setnosky's housemates.  A law school dropout, he was convinced that the system was a "rigged wheel."  When I met him he was in his mid-thirties, an ex-boozer, and warmly in praise of sobriety.  He had sworn off what he called 'tune-ups" but was not averse to watching me "dissipate" as he told me once, not that I did much dissipating.  In point of dissipation I was closer to the Buddha than to the Bukowski end of the spectrum.

Fletcher was from the Pacific Northwest and had worked as a logger there.  Observing me during Manpower gigs he thought I was a good worker and not "lame" or "light in the ass" as he put it.  So he suggested we head up to Washington State and get logging jobs.  And so we drove 1200 miles up the beautiful Pacific Coast along Highway 1 from Los Angeles to Forks, Washington in my 1963 Karmann Ghia convertible.  Amazing as it is to my present cautious self, we took off the very next day after Ernie suggested the trip to me.  We probably had little more than a hundred bucks between us, but gas in those days was 25 cents a gallon.  On the way we stopped to see Kerouac's friend John Montgomery, who was also a friend of Ernie.  John Montgomery was the Henry Morley of The Dharma Bums and the Alex Fairbrother of Desolation Angels.  (For more on Montgomery see here.)  Unfortunately, when we located Montgomery's house, he wasn't at home.  I've regretted that non-meeting ever since.  Now I hand off to my Journal, volume 5, p. 32:

Saturday Midday 10 February 1973

Keroauc AlleyLast Monday left L. A. about 12:00 PM.  Saw [brother] Philip in Santa Barbara, made Santa Cruz that night, stayed in motel after checking out [folk/rock venue] "The Catalyst" and local flophouse.  While passing Saratoga, CA  decided to look up John Montgomery, friend of Ernie's who knew Kerouac and the Beats.  We couldn't get in touch with him.  So on to Frisco, entered the city, became involved in intricate traffic tangles, visited [Lawrence Ferlinghetti's] City Lights Bookstore and Caffe Trieste where I had a cup of espresso.  By the way, in Big Sur visited Ernie's friend Gary Koeppel. [He was bemused to hear from Ernie that I was a Kerouac aficionado. In those days, Kerouac was pretty much in eclipse.  The first of the Kerouac biographies, Ann Charters' was not yet out and Kerouac's 'rehabilitation' was still in the future.] 

Spent Tuesday night in Dave Burn's trailer in Arcata, CA.  [Dave was the drummer of a couple of bands I was in back in L. A. 1968-1971]  Gave him the two tabs of acid I had in my attache case.  Wednesday morning fixed the headlight (highbeam) which was malfunctioning and for which I received a citation the night before.  Then went to the nearest CHP office and had the citation cleared.  Breakfast at Ramada Inn and then on to Eugene, Oregon.  Dug Taylor's, The New World Coffee House,and Ernie and Larry's old haunt, Maxie's.  Arrived at Ernie's brother-in-law's house at 11:30 PM.  Thursday spent in Eugene.  I bought Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests.  Friday morning left early for Forks, Washington, arriving around 6:00 PM.  Presently lodged in Woodland Hotel.  Drinks last night with Ernie and legendary logger,  Jim Huntsman.  Arranged to start working Monday morning.  So far, so good.

Journeys and Preparations

We plan our journeys long and short.  We lay our plans for trips abroad well in advance.  And those who leave their homeland and emigrate to another country take special care.  Why then are we so careless about the journey on which all must embark and none return?

"Because it is a journey into sheer nonexistence.  One needn't be concerned about a future self that won't exist!"

Are you sure about that? Perhaps you are right; but how do you know?  Isn't this a question meriting some consideration?

The Young and the Reckless: The Cautionary Deaths of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan

To live well, one must take risks. To live long they must be calculated in a calculus informed by knowledge of self and knowledge of world. Let the romantic in one be tempered by the realist to avoid the fates of Christopher  McCandless, Timothy Treadwell, and Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan:

Asked why they had quit their office jobs and set off on a biking journey around the world, the young American couple offered a simple explanation: They had grown tired of the meetings and teleconferences, of the time sheets and password changes.

“There’s magic out there, in this great big beautiful world,” wrote Jay Austin who, along with his partner, Lauren Geoghegan, gave his two weeks’ notice last year before shipping his bicycle to Africa.

They were often proved right.

[. . .]

Then came Day 369, when the couple was biking in formation with a group of other tourists on a panoramic stretch of road in southwestern Tajikistan. It was there, on July 29, that a carload of men who are believed to have recorded a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State spotted them.

Bruce Bawer in Death by Entitlement offers astute commentary (bolding added)

Their naivete is nothing less than breathtaking. “You watch the news and you read the papers and you're led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” wrote Austin during their trek. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted….I don't buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.” This rosy view of humanity suffuses Austin's blog: “Malawians and Zambians are fantastically friendly people.” And: “All throughout western Europe, when folks asked us where we were headed and we'd say Albania, their faces would drop and they'd start muttering 'Oh, no, no, no.' Albania, they'd tell us, is dangerous. The people of Albania will steal your spleen….The Albanians we come across are perhaps the warmest, friendliest, smiliest…people we've met on the continent.”

Austin's blog also provides a window on his (and presumably her) hippie-dippy worldview and ultra-PC politics. Elephants, writes Austin, “may very well be a smarter, wiser, more thoughtful being[s] than homo sapiens sapiens.” When white South Africans tell them “that the nation and its redistributionist government are making poor, ignorant choices,” Austin sneers at their “Eurocentric values” and their failure to realize that “[n]otions like private property” are culturally relative. This is apparently a comment on the South African government's current expropriation of white farmers' land without compensation. (To be sure, when a friendly Afrikaans man advises Austin and Geoghegan to move their tent because they've pitched it too close to a black settlement and may antagonize the locals, they're quick to let him lead them to a safer spot.)

[. . .]

The Times article about Austin and Geoghegan drew hundreds of reader comments. 

[. . .]

Perusing all the reader comments, I found exactly two that mentioned Islam critically. Here's one: “Tajikistan is 96.7% Islamic. It is a dangerous place for American tourists….This is not Islamophobia. It is common sense.” Here's the other: “As a Western woman I have no desire to visit a majority Muslim country because of the religious and cultural bias regarding their treatment of women.” Both of these comments attracted outraged replies. (“Many parts of the US are not so kind to women either, particularly those states that have managed to close just about all their Planned Parenthood clinics.”) Several readers railed against “religion” generally, as if terrorism by Quakers and Episcopalians were a worldwide problem.

Indeed, this being the New York Times, moral equivalency was rampant (“Yes, they [the ISIS murderers]were brutal….But what about our treatment of prisoners in Guantamino Bay?”), as was a readiness to blame Islamic terrorism on America (“There are consequences to our nation's decision to murder Muslim civilians by the hundreds of thousands”) or, specifically, on Donald Trump. One reader comment, a “Times Pick,” read, in part, as follows: “A great story and an admirable couple. But those who condemn their killers as evil probably fail to recognize that ISIS fighters see themselves as being on the side of good. For them, these young Americans were an embodiment of the Great Satan….Instead of bandying around moral absolutes, perhaps we should recognize that good and evil are relative categories, dependent on your culture and your values.”

[. . .]

Times readers called the couple heroes. No, the heroes are not these poor fools who stumbled into an ISIS-controlled area; the heroes are the soldiers from the U.S. and elsewhere – most of them a decade or so younger, and centuries savvier, than Austin and Geoghegan – who, while the two 29-year-olds were on a year-long cycling holiday, were risking their lives to beat back ISIS. What, then, is the moral of this couple's story? In the last analysis, it's a story about two young people who, like many other privileged members of their generation of Americans, went to a supposedly top-notch university only to come away poorly educated but heavily propagandized – imbued with a fashionable postmodern contempt for Western civilization and a readiness to idealize and sentimentalize “the other” (especially when the latter is decidedly uncivilized). This, ultimately, was their tragedy: taking for granted American freedom, prosperity, and security, they dismissed these extraordinary blessings as boring, banal, and (in Austin's word) “beige,” and set off, with the starry-eyed and suicidal naivete of children who never entirely grew up, on a child's fairy-tale adventure into the most perilous parts of the planet. Far from being inspirational, theirs is a profoundly cautionary – and distinctly timely – tale that every American, parents especially, should take to heart.

SCOTUS Rules 5-4 to Uphold ‘Muslim’ Travel Ban

Yet another victory for President Trump and for common sense. And yet another embarrassment for the Never-Trumpers who refused to support Trump and who, by their refusal, indirectly supported Hillary who would never have supported any such travel ban.

And of course, if the Never-Trumpers had their way, the composition of the Court would not have been favorable to conservative rulings.

(Once more: a Never-Trumper is a conservative of some sort or other who opposes Trump. Bill Kristol for example. Remember him? Every Never-Trumper is an Anti-Trumper, but not conversely. Is this just an arbitrary stipulation on my part? No. This is the way the terms are used by those in the know who value clarity of thought and the distinctions that support it.)

Predictably, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent that is rather less than intelligent:

“This repackaging does little to cleanse [the policy] of the appearance of discrimination that the president’s words have created,” she said. “Based on the evidence in the record, a reasonable observer would conclude that the proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.”

On the contrary, a reasonable observer would conclude that Sotomayor should not be sitting on the Supreme Court. I'll give her this, though: she has a beautiful name.

Imagine the composition of the Court after eight years of Hillarity. 

Seeing as how we are in the vicinity of Islamist issues, I now refer you to William Kilpatrick's latest,  Islamization in the Schools.