Why we travel ... even more so in a rapidly shrinking world

As I read this Paul Theroux essay (is there a better contemporary travel writer around?) so many thoughts flashed through my mind.  I can still recall my excited feelings when I stepped into a "jumbo jet" for the first time in 1987, which was when I left India to come to the US to attend grad school in Los Angeles.  It was a Singapore Airlines flight, and when I stepped in, it felt like I had entered into a huge hotel lobby.  And there was a staircase, for the business class, of course!  Unbelievable it was.

I reached my seat, which was quite in the rear of the plane, only a couple of rows ahead of the "smoking section."  Yes, the brilliant minds of those days who saw no problem with people lighting up in such a constrained space.  It was on the same flight that I tasted the real thing--Coca Cola--after a few years.  During my younger days, the Indian government, in all its infinite wisdom, pushed out a whole bunch of multinational corporations, including Coke.  And all we folks then had were the awfully sappy Thums Up and "77 Cola." 

Quite a few flights later, I am always ready for the next one.  Reading about places, and looking at photos and videos, has become so easy with the web having everything I would ever want to know, and more.  However, this all the more fuels the desire to go check those places out, and experience the places.  Yes, it is the experience--not any old idea of new and exotic.  In a world where we can get pretty much music and food and arts from any corner of the world, it isn't a whole lot of newness that I am after as much for simply the experience of it all in the "original" environs.

Plus, there is a sense of more vibrancy than before.  A village in India in the 1970s might not have looked all that different from how it looked in the 1960s and 1950s.  But, a decade now brings about a lifetime of changes in many places around the world. I liked this aspect of Theroux's essay in particular:

the world has been made more restless, more volatile, more impatient through the Internet, and it has robbed people of contemplative solitude and introduced a new solitude, a sort of loneliness induced by a buzz of information. But these very alterations in culture, far from diminishing curiosity, have made much of the world less predictable, more dramatic and accessible, full of paradoxes that have to be seen to be believed.

Indeed.  More so for travelers like me, who are more interested in observing and understanding peoples and their societies, they have to be seen to be believed in the fullest.

All the more excited am I am by the upcoming trip to Ecuador.  Wish me well, dear reader!