Travel Heavy, Travel Light

The more we are removed from the authentic experience of traveling, the less we are changed.

Edith Wharton, the Gilded Age author of The Age of Innocence, carried the world with her everywhere. On her transatlantic voyages, she traveled with several steamer cases full of luggage and a few dogs. At each destination, porters carried her luggage to her fancy hotel, where waiters brought her tea and biscuits.

I travel lightly. As much as possible, I travel with a single backpack. Inside is a change of clothes, a laptop for work, an iPad for manuscripts, a book to read. If I travel for more than two days, I bring a small suitcase that fits in the overhead.

I’m currently on a working trip, consisting of one week of meetings on the East Coast, then two weeks of travel, working five-hour days as a digital nomad. My vacations are always work vacations. I brought five books, which was a bit ambitious, but it should keep me from shopping. I’m always seeing things I want to take home.

Traveling light makes it easier to see the world. But the way we travel says something about us, too. Until 1990, only about 25% of Americans had passports, while 50% of Europeans had them. Now, about 45% of Americans now have passports, because Millennials and Gen Z want to see the world. America is not enough for them.

In the fifties, driving in the family station wagon to see Aunt Betsy in Alabama might qualify as the family vacation. Now, those kids are taking their kids to the Alps or India.

As I say, you can travel light, you can travel heavily. Take, for example, cruises. There are cheap cruises (like Carnival) where you can wear jeans and get drunk every night, or Disney cruises for the kids, or eco-friendly cruises with a limited passenger count, or fancy cruises like Silver Seas where you have to wear fancy clothing—tuxes, dresses—or risk sticking out. We have not started cruising, and maybe never will. We like visiting places and spending the night.

Then there’s the travel planned by an agent, where you stay in fancy hotels and go to fancy dinners. I have never done that, but I have friends who do, and they love it. I can see how it would be much less stressful not to wonder if you are going to have to wander the streets of Venice or Rome (as we did) trying to find a place to eat.

I sometimes choose hotels and restaurants that are no good. Once, I chose a hotel right next to a whore house. I asked the cab driver what there was to do around my hotel, but he laughed his head off when he saw where he was dropping me off. He said, “Oh, you’ll find plenty to do. They’ll keep you busy. American girl like you. You’ll have lots of fun. You’re bound to have a good time.” He was laughing so hard that he could hardly drive away.

When I got to that hotel, it was noon, I fell asleep with jet lag, and I woke up in the dark and walked outside to a steady stream of cars. I looked up at a large neon sign that said: “EROS.” I was in Germany. His laughter came back to me in my haze, and I thought, “I am my own travel agent.”

So, okay, it’s not always perfect. But it’s always an adventure. That’s the real point of travel. To discover new people, new places, and remind yourself that you are not right about everything. You think you know a lot about the world until you start to see more of it. This is why I don’t want my trip planned out for me.

However, compared to my son Stephen, I live a carefully orchestrated life. When I travel, I make hotel reservations in advance. In an American city, I will jump on Hotel Tonight and make them on the spot, sure, but not in foreign countries. I plan my itinerary as I go along; I find food as I go.

Stephen lands in a city with less than $20 and gets to a hostel where he can stay for $3-$5/night. He once landed at Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, cycled across the city to a hostel, and stayed there for a couple of weeks. Later, he rode that bike (with no brakes) on the Annapurna circuit with a Polish cycling group, and then cycled to India. A few years earlier, he landed in Sydney with less than $30 and busked for weeks, sometimes in a pink tutu, making around $200 a day with his friend Spencer. At the time, they lived under a bridge. Later, they ended up living in Byron Bay and picking grapes.

When Steve is guiding a trip to Thailand, India, or Fiji, he likes his travelers to be able to stay with local families that he met during his travels and give back to the local economy. He likes people to be able to see sights that they wouldn’t normally see on a guided tour of an area, and eat food with local people. He feels that traveling in buses and staying at Hiltons robs you of the experience of getting to know what the people of a country are really like. I want to go with him to Fiji, India, and Thailand and experience these places authentically.

Younger Americans' tendency to travel is part of the reason why their xenophobia seems to be lower than, say, Stephen Miller. The generations who want to build the wall and expel immigrants are primarily the Boomers and the Silent Generation.

The more we are removed from the authentic experience of traveling, the less we are changed. Watching a country on TV is the most removed. A cruise ship is next. You touch down, but you don’t stay in the experience. Staying at a fancy hotel with a packaged experience is a step closer. Staying in a town and getting to know people there—cooking your own meals, going out to eat with the locals, traveling around however the locals travel, in Greece by bike, in Ireland a tiny stick shift—is the next step.

What Steve does, staying for a few months or a year in a new location, learning the language, and living exactly like the locals, is a level of immersion that allows him to almost know what it’s like to be from another country. Of course, he’s six three and has an American passport, so with that comes with privilege, but Steve’s experiences traveling, loading fish with the Māori, learning Vietnamese in Hanoi, and traveling in Cambodia helped him learn viscerally about the world. There are many poor people. We are privileged in the West.

When people try to cross our border, they are not just migrants—they are fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters, trying to improve the lives of their families who have been struggling around a bowl of rice that is too small to pass around.

You don’t always know until you travel that America is not exceptional. We have a cruel administration; we are a global embarrassment. The rest of the world no longer admires Americans, if they ever did. We are repeating vicious historical cycles. The barbarians crossed the Rubicon into Rome when it rotted at the core. We left behind mercy and justice for greed and cruelty; at this rate, China will overtake the US and cross our proverbial Rio Grande.

Maybe, I spent too long at the Colosseum. In the Colosseum, the games were all about cruelty, which is the 47^th’s signature move. I can still see the massive floor of the arena and imagine those crowds cheering, just as Trump’s cabinet did when a San Francisco hairdresser and a sheet metal worker were picked up outside of Ikea and shipped to a prison camp outside San Salvador. Any vulnerable American could be shipped to CECOT in an unmarked van, in an unmarked plane. That’s the endgame of dictators. If you have to ask where it ends, you haven’t been reading history.

Travel broadens our minds. It teaches us history, helps us understand culture, dreams. When I think of my own dreams, I think, I want to see the Maldives, Madagascar, Warsaw, Wadi Rum, the Chagal Windows. Travel reminds me to love.

If you must carry luggage like Edith Wharton, pare it down a bit? I’m going to try three books next time instead of six. In all my dreams, I lean into wandering and writing my best work. We don’t need to carry the world with us. But you be you. Be love. Be joy. Live in peace, live in blessing, travel to open your heart. The world is large enough.