The Power of Travel Information

With Monty's Tank, Imperial War Museum, London

Time, Money and that Other Thing...

Traveling requires three resources: time, money and information. People often focus on the first two, while failing to pay adequate attention to the third. If I was good at math, which I’m not, I would come up with an equation that represents the relationship between time, money and information—I’m sure it would make a good graphic...snore. Instead I will just say that unless you HAVE access to unlimited time and money, you need to GET access to unlimited information. Where to find this information will be the focus of my next blog. Today I want to try and describe that equation with some examples from my own stupidity…I mean, experience.

Scrooge McDuck and Spare Change for the Street Vendor

You need time to travel. You might have a bank vault that could shame Scrooge McDuck’s, but if you can’t take a day off then you’ll never be able to go anywhere. You also need money. You may have all the time in world, but if you don’t have a few coppers to pay a developing world street vendor for some hygienically questionable food, you’ll starve to death. I don’t deny this. But, people seem to think about how much the plane ticket/gas in the car is going to run them, and how long they’re going to be gone, without loading up on enough information on where they are going and what there is to see and do when they get there. You may be saying, “What? Of course people know what there is to do at their travel destination. Why else would they be going there?” Good question. The answer is easy: people are lazy!

Brain Vacation

Westminster Abbey, London

When we go on vacation we tend to want to shut off our brains. You don’t take two weeks away from work to do doctoral dissertation research at a museum. You go to look at the freakin’ exhibits! Yet, what is the point of taking time off, buying the plane ticket, paying for hotel rooms, etc. if your knowledge of London consists of 1) Tower of London, 2) Big Ben, 3) Westminster Abbey, 4) uh…. If you catch those first three, you might consider the trip a success. But just imagine if you had known that a short tube ride away from these sights, you could have watched a radical socialist and a Muslim missionary engage in rhetorical combat at Hyde Park’s “Speaker’s Corner.” Or, that the Sherlock Holmes pub, where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jimi Hendrix used to eat Yorkshire Pudding—though not simultaneously—is just off of Trafalgar Square. It might not break your heart to get home and realize that you’ve missed something like that, but, then again, it may have made your travel experience all the richer had you known it was there. If you arm yourself with as much information about your destination as possible beforehand, you’ll find that—whether or not you get to see it all—you’ll come home feeling travel satisfied, instead of eating the bitter herbs of regret. Let me illustrate my point with a short story from my own wanderings.

Sweet Falafel and Bitter Goulash

In summer 2000 my wife and I joined a small group on a tour of Israel. The leader of our group had studied and traveled in the country and knew what its travel highlights were. But, he also asked each member of the group to read up on a specific sight we would be visiting, and then brief us on it when we arrived. Sure, most tourist sights nowadays have kiosks and glossy pamphlets, but it really made the places come alive when someone from the group would chime in with some less-commonly known information about the pile of rocks we were staring at.

Flash forward to summer 2001. My wife, our friend and I are on a trip in Eastern Europe. In reaction to our well-orchestrated Israel excursion the year before, we decide to go on a nice and easy, almost hippie (minus the Buddha toking and inadequate deodorant) backpacking trek. Our friend had lived in Hungary for two years and knew plenty about it, but none of us had been to the other countries—Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey—we planned to visit. We had bought some travel books, but had not studied them sufficiently before arriving.

Let’s compare the two experiences.

The trip to Israel was a veritable information overload. I heard more about the places we visited than I wanted to, and we crammed more sight-seeing into those two weeks than should've been humanly possible. In contrast, the trip to Eastern Europe ended up being a glimpse of a few sights, interspersed with lots of wandering, milling around train stations, riding in filthy taxis, getting lost, etc. When I think back on those journeys, I have no regrets about the Israel trip—we got our money’s worth and more. On the other hand, the Eastern Europe trip…leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t regret going one bit, but I regret not reading up enough first on ALL the sights we could’ve seen while we were there.

I will be the first to agree that getting lost, spending time on public transportation and wandering are actually all valid and important parts of travel. However, they should probably not be your primary activities. After all, if you go to Paris and don’t see the Eiffel Tower, why bother?

Beat that Horse!

Stained Glass, Bath Abbey

If this entry has sounded like a moron flogging a dead horse that could be revived by a small dose of common sense—great! You have already won half the battle. But, if you still think a cursory knowledge of your destination, plus a vague plan to “see what you can see” is sufficient, then I hope you have a lot of time…and money.