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Having travelled the world I can say without a doubt that this person misses the point of travel. It isn’t about winning a trivia night. It’s about connecting deeply on a level that a Wikipedia article just cannot offer.
We stayed in a home and it was fascinating how differently the homes are designed and function.
There is no substitute for experiencing a place.
Having travelled the world I can say without a doubt that this person misses the point of travel. It isn’t about winning a trivia night. It’s about connecting deeply on a level that a Wikipedia article just cannot offer.
Reading up on something is a great way to discover the "high order bits" but it's very hard, apart from being in person, to ever pick up the "low order bits". I recently had a friend visit Australia and notice that attitudes towards mild speeding were very different from the US, not something you ever could have found from hours of trawling on the internet. One of the hundreds of different observations he made on the trip.
Every travel opportunity for me has used these low order bits to propel huge amounts of reading to fill in the missing high order bits that mesh with it. On a recent trip to South Korea, I became obessessed with the South Korean presentation (or rather, the lacuna) of the country's history 1955-1987. I went to countless history museums around Seoul just so I could see what they wanted attendees to know about Korea between the day-by-day recap of the Korean War and the miracle of K-Pop and industrialization. It was interesting the degree of frankness each museum had but all of them made me delve much more into the scholarly writing to see what was pointedly omitted.
having just returned from a trip to asia and australia, i can confidently say that the basic premise of this article is mistaken. reeling off facts from wikipedia is not the same at all as traveling to a country. the tastes, interactions, trash on the sidewalk, mysterious odors, miasamatic airs, overheard conversations all add up to a thousand times what the two paragraph history of vietnam gives you. is this satire?…
All true, but most "travel" is staying a week or so as a tourist in some location, and it is true that what is learned from this kind of travel is generally trivial and superficial (and thus often wrong). You probably can learn more deep truths about a country and culture from reading on the internet, unless you are really making an effort to properly integrate in some way, likely for a minimum of many months. But, t…
Most reading is probably crap, too.
> what is learned from this kind of travel is generally trivial and superficial (and thus often wrong)
Someone can learn the wrong history of a dish while still being educated by it. Broadly speaking, I’m sceptical of new experiences not yielding education outside the irredeemably incurious.
If you visit Bali for a week or even a month, you likely won't notice that Bali is in a strange little island in a massive country. You'll likely fly in and out of Bali and never visit the rest of Indonesia. What is the relation between Bali and the rest of the country? No idea.
Even a question as simple as what do the locals eat is a difficult question as a tourist. Who do you ask? If you ask a few people, you might get the wrong impression, it at least one that doesn't represent the whole place.
Think about your own country. Your own neighborhood. If a tourist came up to you to ask about how things work in your area, can you give a comprehensive answer? I sure can't.
Life is far too short to learn from travel. I'm not saying don't travel but we should keep our expectations in check.
A deeper point, I think, is about being the kind of person who would read about a place. I know a few people who get excited about going on holiday, and excitedly tell you about it when they get back, but they just end up talking about the places they went drinking and the people they met, possibly with some Instagram pictures that look exactly the same as everyone else's Instagram pictures of that place. There's a lot of people in the developed world who just go travelling because it's a thing that people with money do: they're not even interested in learning about a foreign culture.
Having travelled the world I can say without a doubt that this person misses the point of travel. It isn’t about winning a trivia night. It’s about connecting deeply on a level that a Wikipedia article just cannot offer.