Forty years ago.  That’s when it started.  London, Salzburg, Belgrade, Thessaloniki, Thassos, Istanbul, and back.  That’s when I first realized.  To experience the world, all I had to do was move.  To put one foot in front of the other, to get on a bus or a train.  That’s all it took.  Mozart’s birthplace, a deserted beach in the Aegean, Hagia Sophia.  The world and its wonders wouldn’t come to me, but with a little effort and and occasional discomfort I could reach them.  Everything was so accessible.  All I had to do was move.  Forty years, six continents, sixty-five countries, and millions of miles later, I’m still moving.  Now more than ever, I’m in thrall to the simple experiences of exploring, discovering, moving around.

Like almost everyone who travels, I have sometimes traveled to see something specific: a building, monument, or place.  Angkor Wat, Petra, Luxor.   This kind of traveling – let’s call it focused, functional tourism – has occasionally been rewarding.  It has also been hideous sometimes.  I remember particularly a horrible visit to the Parthenon a few years ago. Moving around the monument with hundreds of others, I felt I was part of something destructive.  Bruce Chatwin’s famous remark “Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin” felt right that morning.  I notice as I get older that I can arrive somewhere, for example a new city, and have no desire whatsoever to visit its “sights”.  That’s partly because I don’t like crowds and organized tours, but mostly because I don’t want my experiences to be defined by someone else’s checklists.  More than ever, mass tourism is about checking boxes, recording one’s presence with a tweet or selfie, and moving on to the next place on the itinerary.  The destructive impact of this type of “hit-and-run” traveling on fragile, precious places (Venice, the Great Barrier Reef, and so on) is incalculable, to the point that some governments, such as Iceland’s, are doing something that would have been inconceivable just a few years ago – discouraging tourists.  It’s not simply a question of the visible, physical damage that can be inflicted.  There’s also the less apparent, and therefore more insidious, impact of organizing the world and its environment to suit the needs of this type of tourist.  This can be seen in parts of Africa where entirely artificial environments are created, at the expense of naturally occurring habitats, to meet the Disney-esque expectations of those on safari holidays.

Much better (at least for me) is the wandering around, the serendipity, the follow-my-nose meandering, the sitting-and-watching that has led to so many unforgettable encounters with places and people.  That’s my particular strain of wanderlust, the itch that only moving can soothe, the kind of traveling I love.