The Mindful Traveler: Analog Journeys in a Digital World

“The trouble about journeys nowadays is that they are easy to make but difficult to justify.” 

Travel has only become less justifiable since the adventurer and journalist Peter Fleming wrote this in his 1936 book News from Tartary when setting off from Peking to Kashmir, transported largely by camel and mule, and provisioned with a typewriter, a pea-shooter rifle and a bottle of Worcestershire sauce for emergencies. Back then, the general inaccessibility of a “Kathmandu” or “Kazakhstan”, to all but the most determined explorer or banished diplomat amplified their already exotic allure as destinations.

The great pre-war travel writers such as Fleming (James Bond creator Ian’s elder brother), Robert Byron, Somerset Maugham and Paddy Leigh-Fermor – like the Great Gamers before them – were all cool-headed, minor aristocrats, educated to drip distain upon tedious officials and unruly servants alike. Exploration was undertaken as a geographical safari, the aim of which was to drop as many obscure place names as possible and recount endless tales of derring-do to clubmates.

With the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s came an explosion of new travel writing, as the doors to vast swathes of China, Central Asia and the Soviet Union (which broke into pieces at the end of 1991) were flung open. In rushed a literary era dominated by a more vulnerable and reflective generation of traveling storytellers – characterized best perhaps by the likes of Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron and Jan Morris. Theroux was not British, and Morris (by that stage) not even a bloke. Heady times of change, indeed!

Border crossing: Thanks to one of his English language students whose father was a commander in the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan (NIFA) Mujahedeen, Stowers joined a band of fighters entering from Pakistan

In the essay “On Running After One’s Hat” from his book All Things Considered, the writer and philosopher GK Chesterton wrote: “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” Now, I have never deliberately sought out thrills. I just never had any money and roughing-it offered the most affordable way to reach a destination.

Two formative adventures in those early years helped chart the course of events my life has followed ever since. Both were made at a snail’s pace – and arduously; both in a spirit of youthful enthusiasm, totally ignorant of risk, and both involved some pretty alluring place names.

The first of these odysseys was in the summer of 1987, shortly after leaving Pakistan by way of the Khunjerab Pass to Kashgar. There followed a month of hitching rides in lumbering Jiefang trucks on prohibited roads from Lhasa to Chengdu. Days without food and nights, sleeping in caves – assaulted by dysentery, fleas and multiple, airless 5,000-metre-high passes – encouraged profound mental inquisition.

The serenity of this new life of basics was obvious and attractive. One simply had to find food and water, shelter for the night, and keep moving forwards. Surely, we would all be a lot happier paring our lives to these basic parameters, rather than continuously complicating them?

Accommodation not reviewed on Tripadvisor: In the summer of 1987, the author set off on a month-long trek from Lhasa in Tibet to Chengdu in Sichuan

All the greed and consumption of the modern world was just a substitute. People bought junk because they were, to varying degrees, unhappy, bored and insecure. News and advertising existed to confirm and increase those fears, desires and feelings of inadequacy.

Only by dropping out did the truth appear: How little one need consume to survive.

The most extreme geographical locations always seem to attract two nationalities, and two alone: the British and the French. Disparate personalities in almost every way, yet united in their own separate concepts of romantic travel.

In Tibet, for instance, the only westerner I encountered in a month-long trek was, unsurprisingly, French. And a year later – the summer of 1988 – in the shimmering far east of the Indonesian archipelago, I stumbled upon a bunch of explorers from Normandy, engaged in buying a perahu wooden spice ship off the local Bugis people. Destination: Singapore – 3,000 kilometers away. After that, back to France in time to celebrate the bicentennial of the storming of the Bastille. They needed an extra crew member to help raise the sail, and I needed to get to the Lion City for cheap. What could well have been a deal with the devil turned out to be a match made in heaven.

That extraordinary voyage taught me, through daily mounting emergencies, how to splice ropes, prepare chickens for the pot, weather storms and navigate by the stars. Arrival in Singapore was miraculous, given the sparsity of our charts and navigational equipment. Nowadays, all vessels are tracked by built-in automated information system (AIS) transponders: We did not even have an engine. It was three days before we remembered to head to Finger Pier and let immigration know we had arrived.

The photos I shot evolved into the first story I ever sold. Finally, I could think about giving up English teaching.

“Everything begins in mystery and ends in politics,” the French poet and philosopher Charles Péguy argued at the end of the 19th century. He might as well have been commenting on the state of travel at the start of the 21st. These days, we live in an age of instant gratification; conditioned to feel naked when deprived of our security blanket of digital information. Practically every corner of the world has been conquered and explored, settled, exploited, measured, mapped, built over, fought over, flown over, plowed up, cleared up, blown up, upgraded, updated and uploaded.

Geographical curiosity in the age of the internet and Google Earth seems an irrelevant passion. Aimless wandering is fast becoming an indefensible occupation, its proponents viewed with suspicion.

Now that every destination in the world – outdoors and indoors – is merely a screen-click away, each minute must be accounted for, route researched in advance, venue pre-booked, eating place peer-reviewed and experience boasted about on Instagram. Emptying your mind so as to soak up random experience and enjoy freedom of thought now borders on heresy.

I came of age in an analog world, one that welcomed the visitor as an individual, trusting in the arrival’s good intent and character, not as representative of some broader, faceless and privileged civilization – a threat. Yes, travel was often primitive and awkward but so was the flow of information. People could not yearn for or envy what they did not know they did not have.