Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Much is made of the difference between tourism and travel. Tourists are said to move about in clusters and to reassure themselves with unflattering comparisons between wherever they are visiting and their homeland. Travelers venture forth because they want to experience a place, not just see it. When Flemming Nicolaisen, a Greenlandic Inuit friend, visited me in New York on his first foreign trip, he seemed uninterested in the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum, Broadway shows. He preferred taking my dog for long walks all over town. “When you came to Greenland,” he said, “did you want to see the war memorial? Or the museum in Nuuk?” I had to admit that I mostly wanted to be surrounded by the prismatic landscape of ice. He pointed out that the entire population of Greenland would have fit in one of the Twin Towers (then still standing) and said he just wanted to feel what it was like to be in a place with so many people. He was a traveler, and my agenda for him had been touristic.

Authenticity is a traveler’s grail. It can be sought, but not planned. When I was twenty-eight, I drove across Botswana with my friend Talcott Camp on the country’s one major road; we’d periodically have to stop for a crossing herd of cows. Once, we saw a herd far, far ahead, but no evidence of a cowherd. As we got nearer, we realized that they were elephants. We had already seen elephants in enormous reserves, in their “natural habitat.” But the legal demarcation of national parks where paying tourists came to observe wildlife introduced a whiff of artifice to our encounters. Chancing on these creatures outside official boundaries was infinitely more transfixing. One was blocking the road, so we had to stop the car. We sat there for nearly an hour. The sun was low and washed the pachyderms in pink light. I’ve seen elephants in a dozen African and Asian countries, but nowhere else have I experienced such a feeling of revelation.

Two years later, I traveled to the Baltics with my father. In Lithuania, we visited a tiny museum devoted to Vilnius’s vanished Jewish population. We were alone in its four rooms except for a couple of babushkas, half-asleep on plastic chairs, who we assumed were either guards or cleaners. Nazi propaganda had blamed the Soviet annexation of Lithuania on Jews, 90 percent of whom had been slaughtered with the enthusiastic collaboration of local authorities. Lithuanians who tried to help their Jewish neighbors were killed as well. Relatively few Lithuanian Jews ended up in labor camps, but one of the display panels at the museum described the conditions in such a camp and referred to a song the emaciated workers had sung to cheer themselves. My father, a great enthusiast for music, commented on it, and I wondered aloud what the tune had been. From the corner, a thin, reedy voice piped up. It had not occurred to us that the woman in the corner could understand English, nor that she might be Jewish; but now she sang that song of the camp, and we understood that she was not only this room’s guard but also its subject. When she fell silent, we tried to talk to her, but she withdrew back into apparent unilingualism and seemed unable to understand what we were asking her. She was one of those who had had nowhere to go, yet had survived.

It is easy to be primitive without being authentic, but nearly impossible to be authentic if you are afraid of the rustic. John Ruskin, the great Victorian essayist, complained that the efficiencies of train travel eliminated the joys of voyaging. “It is merely being ‘sent’ to a place,” he wrote, “and very little different from becoming a parcel.” It took me some time to acquire a taste for discomfort. At first, I liked having had adventures better than I liked having them, but bit by bit, I realized that either you have a good time or you have a story to tell, and I ended up being open to either result. As a child, I experienced fairly luxurious travel; as I grew older, I learned to travel with fewer material expectations and discovered that luxury is a mutable concept. When I went to Guatemala City to write about gang life, I found myself one day in the poor neighborhood of La Limonada. An old man with a herd of goats approached us. “You thirsty?” asked the teenage felon who was showing me around. When I said I was, the goatherd milked one of the goats directly into a large paper cup, then handed it to me. I have never enjoyed a beverage more.