Gullible's Travels: Old Man on the Road

Two days ago I lost my trusty hand-written journal somewhere in Brussels. Truth be told, it nearly bored me to tears to write the damn thing, as I can only write at a fraction of the pace that I can type and it didn’t exactly make for a gripping read. Somehow the blog always comes off better – perhaps because I am writing for an audience and not just reciting the day to to day. I can really do without boring myself into an early grave when I read it 20 years from now. So, I am now fully committed to doing it in the strictly digital medium, though the lack of permanency of it bothers me a little; after all, would we take Moses seriously if he'd come down from Sinai with the Commandments spelled out on a couple of iPads?

For anyone new to Gullible’s Travels, the name is an obvious rip-off of the classic “Gulliver’s Travels”, but with a personal twist that hearkens back to the very beginning of my independent travels and my first day in France. On that day, I was taken for 200 Francs – about $20 – by a con artist and his collaborator “player” doing the ball and cup scam. Being taken advantage of, on the account of gullibility, is a damn shameful thing that you never quite live down. At very least, the experience lent an appropriate title to my journal, which I have mostly kept up the practice over the years due to – get this – reader demand. I have had people claim that they ditched their Lonely Planet in favour of following in my footsteps, and I’ve had positive feedback from all over the world. So lets get into the "Prelude" to this journey.

Traveling – and by this I mean budget backpacking – has changed drastically since I first arrived on the scene 10 years ago this October. Then, good backpacks were expensive and fancy Gortex™ fabrics were out of the reach of most travelers. If you did just happen to be the son of a Sultan and own a Gortex jacket, you usually were not in possession of it for long, as there truly is no honour among the nomadic peoples of the hostels.

Personal electronics were also practically non-existent, aside from an old cassette player or CD walkman; and even these had limited utility as one easily tired of listening to a half dozen CDs in the course of 6 months. Internet access was available, but only in internet cafés or, in rare instances, on a lonely archaic computer on bang-your-head-against-the-wall dialup. Telephone calls were made on public phones with pay cards.

Ultimately, one made his way or her way across the world with a pack, clothing, towel, toiletry essentials, and possibly a couple of handy guidebooks and a novel to read. Reservations for accommodation were rarely done, as web clients simply did not exist for automated bookings by credit card and most people were not willing to send it via email to some unknown party on the other side. You either called from a pay phone when you got into town or simply walked up, asked for a room and, if they were full, moved onto the next place.

Today, about one third of budget travellers, myself a recent addition to this group, carry their own compact notebook computer, and eschew the public computer option for flexibility, security, and backing up of photos and important documents such as passports, tickets and travel insurance. Approximately 90% of travellers also carry a mobile phone, the majority of these either an iPhone or some other variety of smart phone that also serves up one’s entire music collection, wifi access for booking accommodation and transportation on the fly, and provides real-time GPS guidance from the train station to the hostel door. I have no doubt that 12 to 24 months from now, the preferred device for travel will be the ultra light and compact tablet computers that Apple pioneered 6 months ago and are now being rapidly brought to market. Certainly, one do-it-all device would cut down on the mass of power adapters and connectors that one has to bring for the array of devices being packed around the world.

So, traveling has changed substantially in ten years. On the plus side, the digital revolution has made traveling nearly idiot-proof; on the down side, it rather takes away from the adventure element and there are a lot of idiots traveling.