World Tourism Day: Leaping into the unknown
Olivia Porter | September 27, 2011
Travel holds enormous potential to create positive, constructive change. By ‘change’ I mean change in the way Australians think about things like where their coffee comes from, or how fair trade empowers disadvantaged communities including Indigenous cultures.
For a 24 year old, I’ve seen a lot. Some would assert that I have an addiction to travel. From the hallucinogenic salt flats of the Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia, to the hot springs, tearing fissures and slow, grinding glaciers of Iceland, I‘ve indulged in numerous journeys around the world, admiring and celebrating vibrant cultures, colonial cities, impressive landscapes and ancient civilisations.
While I’ve met plenty of people on my travels who could (and happily would) tick off all of the countries they’ve visited, list all of the trials and tribulations and predictable breakthroughs they’ve had, rave about all the artwork and trinkets and objects they’ve bought, and swoon over the precious simple authenticity of ‘the locals’, I find nothing particularly revolutionary or educational about it all.
Then there are those travellers who have gone through transformations abroad and started, little by little, to see their world and the world overall from different angles. They’ve started to follow the news much more carefully and to search out different perspectives about deserted villages and the impetuses of refugees who seek asylum in other countries so they can rebuild their lives.There are plenty of Australians abroad who have been prying into their own assumptions and accepted ways of understanding the world, taking apart their own cultural perspectives and coming away with a much more complicated, empathetic understanding of the connections between themselves and the places they’ve visited.
I think this process, of empathising with people from vastly different cultural, social and economic perspectives, is at the heart of traveling abroad. This is what often distinguishes travel abroad from domestic travel — travel abroad requires so many more leaps into the unfamiliar.
There are the smaller unknowns; how rice or sugar cane is harvested, or the herbs people use for medicines, but there are also the major unknowns; the unknown languages, cultures and histories. Traveling abroad is the process of excavating these unknowns, of bringing them up to the surface of one’s mind, in the hope of creating a new bridge of empathy and compassion.
So it’s not the percentages and statistics that matter, nor the act of getting one’s passport stamped, but the way of seeing and questioning that makes travel abroad different, and has so many people vehemently defending the act of crossing borders. It’s the push into the unaccustomed, and the coming back humbled, contemplative, vulnerable, and yes, in ways both conscious and vaguely felt, changed.World Tourism Day 2011 is being held under the theme Tourism — Linking Cultures. With millions of people travelling the world each year, never before have so many people been to so many places, nor been so exposed to other cultures.
For some, travel is a dream that comes true once a year for the annual vacation. For others, they yearn for the great big adventure where they sell everything to spend a year or two exploring the world. Or perhaps travel is a sweet plan for retirement on a boat, or the purchase of a caravan.
I recommend that everyone take the time to travel. If anything, it allows you challenge yourself in new and unique ways, strengthening the connection between individuals and communities, and their diverse cultures, and leading to tolerance, respect and mutual understanding.
For more information about World Tourism Day 2011, visit http://wtd.unwto.org/
Olivia Porter is a Master of Publishing student at the University of Sydney (USYD). She holds a Bachelor of Arts (English Literature and Behavioural Science) from the Australian Catholic University and a Graduate Diploma in Psychology from USYD.
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