You Haven’t Visited A Country Unless You’ve Visited It In Absolute Squalor
When you’re traveling the world, you want to experience the true essence of the places you’re visiting. You want to be immersed in exotic culture, lost in new sensations, and enveloped in toxic bug bites. What most casual guide book travelers don’t understand, though, is that in order to gain that level of appreciation for any location, you have to experience it in as decrepit conditions as humanly possible.
Every time I pull up Instagram, I see posts of someone riding a hot air balloon in Myanmar, or going on a safari in Tanzania, or staying in a mid-range boutique hotel in Istanbul that looked good online but is kind of dated and doesn’t have a mini fridge. And I can’t help but thinking that these people may as well be on movie set replicas of these wonderful places they’re supposedly visiting. Where is the dirt and filth? Where is the hunger and fear for one’s safety? Where is the character??
It’s simple. You haven’t really been somewhere until you’ve experienced it in the poorest, most depressed, closest to absolute collapse state imaginable. You could visit Beijing and tour the Forbidden City. Or you could go a factory on the edge of the city and educate yourself on proper shoe assembly. You could go to Portugal and stick to Lisbon and Sintra. Or you could spend time with the 14 indentured servants formerly tasked with moisturizing Ronaldo’s calves. You could go to London and take a picture of Big Ben. Or you could venture under Westminster Bridge, meet a homeless man named Eugene who’s searching for food scraps dropped by the meandering tourists above, and take picture of that instead.
Trade flats for favelas. Townhouses for townships. All-inclusive for rent-controlled. If you see tracks, get to the other side of them ASAP. Anyone can book a hotel on Agoda. It takes a real traveler to sleep on the floor, to break bread with ordinary folks, to become a migrant worker in rural India for 6 years.
Think about it this way, if you see a model on the cover of a magazine, do you really know her? Sure you see her carefully manicured face, glowing skin, and custom tailored clothes. But do you see her hastily hidden crows feet? Do you feel her years of emotional neglect? Do you smell the raw scallops she’s having trouble digesting? Tourists can “cover model travel” all they want. I’d rather flip the magazine to the section that details her chronic yeast infection and get to know the real her.
How you see the world is up to you. You could get a shiny, surface-level appreciation for the planet, or you could see the planet dig crumpled dollar bills out of multiple pockets at 3:17 AM to buy morning after pills for another planet it met 8 hours ago. I’ll let you decide which one is more real.
