You know I like a guided tour. They orient a traveler quickly, and good guides encourage you to explore, offering helpful info on transportation, culture, history, food, and social scene. This fantastic food tour in Puerto Vallarta is a great example of what I’m talking about (shout out to our guide, ChaCha).
But sometimes guides (and others) issue warnings that I’ve heard all my life. A recent guide in Japan warned, “Do not follow anyone into a building or down an alley,” he said. “Be wary in your part of town.” He told me his city was generally safe, but the area where I was staying “could get rough,” and people could not always be trusted.
The substance of this warning is always the same, the wording similar, in most every place I’ve visited. Delivered in a well-meaning voice, it’s still among the least-helpful advice I’ve been given.
You have likely heard similar.
Watch out how they treat Americans there.
Stay in the tourist areas.
Be careful, it can get dicey in that part of town.
Didn’t they have a war there?
Watch out. Pickpockets everywhere.
Really, when’s the last time you thought it was a good idea to follow a stranger down a dark alley? Or someone even beckoned you down one? (Actually, I did follow someone down a dark alley, into a dim basement, while traveling in Croatia. The result was a very nice bottle of rakija at well below market price.) But if you’ve traveled even a little, you know the basic safety rules. If you’re a woman, you have about 30 more (a woman of color, more still), and have lived by them most of your life, wherever you are. So, at best, warnings like these only serve to encourage a suspicion of the unknown and curb curiosity. At worst, they’re coded racism or classism, or a patriarchal protectiveness I’d rather have directed at, say, health care or equal pay.
It sucks to be in a world where we have to walk carefully at night, or keep up on state department travel alerts, or hold our car keys tucked between our fingers like claws. But this is not, in my experience, the result of regular people living their lives while I wander their museums and beaches and shops and pubs and parks. The wandering needn’t be far to be potent—a restaurant or festival in my own city that I’ve never visited is often just as delightful as one that requires airfare.
The world holds its dangers, which I know because I live in it. I am not too naive. But when you venture out into it, to see the things you may only have read or heard about, it takes on a whole different set of facts to internalize. Just recently, in this story in the Washington Post, a Nebraskan on visiting Los Angeles:
“If you’re not here, you think L.A.’s burning to the ground,” Joe McGuire said. “But you come out here, you look around and you just say, ‘My God, this is where I want to be.’”
I still think of the moment I emerged from the subway in New York City, rain pouring down as I frantically scanned my map for directions, when a stranger in a suit popped open his umbrella and held it over my head until I figured out where I was going next. The time on a train in Spain, crying in my seat because my high school Spanish had gotten me panicked and then lost, when a covey of old women surrounded me and gently, in super-slow and basic Spanish, coaxed out where I needed to go, and wrote down the instructions for how to get there. The details change, but I have a million of these. I was lost. A stranger found me, extended a hand, and so I sit here today and write.
A fascist government will restrict cultural institutions, religious practice, free thinking and, you guessed it, travel. Which, incidentally, explores all the above. So when I hear travel warnings, rather than considering them well-meaning, I hear them as encouraging the most base instincts of fearing one another, and I have to refuse it.
All this makes me think of
, in her fantastic (and beautifully titled) memoir, “The Harder I Fight the More I Love You,” where she writes about her hunger to wander before or after a show, and meet all the people she can. For her, an act of resistance.“The rule makers don’t want us to know each other in real life, they want us to know ‘of’ each other only, and fearfully at that; you’ll see it on the nightly news in every region. Meeting, in person, as many people as possible is what smashes the illusion that we have no connection with ‘us’ beyond some racist anthems and the pledge of allegiance.”
Some housekeeping: I will be sharing a detailed itinerary of my recent trip to Japan in an upcoming post—newcomers will receive it when they subscribe, and you can get a copy for sharing with others when the time comes. Thank you for being with us on this ride, and happy almost-weekend.
Giving me a big wave of wanderlust here!
This is so so so good. Hit me so hard!