On Glorifying Travel

As a society, we glorify travel. We take photos to capture the experiences and places so new to us, we share the beauty with friends and family, and we tell stories in community about our adventures.

As we partake in this deification of travel, we often conveniently leave out the not so beautiful details – the trials and tribulations and discomforts that got us to those new adventures. Sometimes in our recounting, we even leave out the good details too, skipping over the small features that make the landscape of the experience even more breathtaking.

WARNING: The following blog post will contain these left out details.

What I’ve shared thus far has been generally reflective of the sentiments my adventures have elicited in me. Because of this, I’ve left out a lot of details – the good and the bad – which may be captivating or alarming to some, hilarious to others (probably depending on whether you’re related to me). Below, are *some* of those details:

Over the last week, I was lucky enough to travel to Singapore to visit some friends who recently moved there for work. I was ecstatic to be able to explore a new place and see my friends, a little piece of home in a world that has been uniformly foreign for the last month.

The trip itself was full of details that were really different than what I had expected of Singapore or grown accustomed to in India.

The first beautiful detail of my trip to Singapore was the shower at my friends’ apartment. Yes, the shower.

One of the cultural adjustments I’ve had to make with life in India is bathing. Bathing is done by filling up a large bucket with water, then using a smaller hand-held bucket to dump the water over you – a “manual shower” if you will. This has been made all the more wonderful by the fact the water heater is broken. I didn’t take a shower for the first three days because I honestly wasn’t quite sure how. After some googling, I made my first attempt at the manual shower process, which I proudly thought I had done very well (at least until I found about half the conditioner I used was still in my hair an hour later). After a couple trial-and-errors, I had the system down, albeit still slightly awkwardly.

But alas, the shower in Singapore was utterly familiar and comfortable. I knew just how to get all the conditioner out of my hair and reveled in the automaticity. Over my 5 days in Singapore, I took 4 showers, blissfully unthinking and relaxed. My friends and I even joked repeatedly about the hard conditions of life in India, exemplified by my cold “manual shower.”

It wasn’t until after I returned to India that I realized the beauty of my bucket showers. The nature of it being a “manual shower” means there’s a certain amount of intention that goes into every action. With every scoop and pour, I’m aware of exactly how much water I’m using and not senselessly running a tap continuously for 15 minutes. While the shower in Singapore felt wonderful because it was familiar, my bucket and my water-scooper are a constant reminder of precious resource I’m using – made all the sweeter by the fact I’m in India to look at water and sanitation systems. The intentionality that the “manual shower” invokes is now something I’m grateful for (especially as the water heater was fixed a couple days ago).

Another big contrast to life in Singapore was in my immediate surroundings.

Singapore and Bangalore are both huge cities, but urban expansion and sprawling in the developing world is largely unplanned. This leads to things like heavy traffic congestion, overcrowding, perpetual construction of apartment buildings, waste management problems, and difficult access between different parts of the city. Bangalore is not an exception to these trends. These trends are to some what you might call the ‘dirty details’ of living in a developing nation.

Singapore, on the other hand, is an extremely posh, well-planned city. With well-maintained highways, regulated traffic, tall corporate buildings, quaint river-side walkways with bars and restaurants, and a mall at every other street corner, Singapore City could be considered a step up from NYC. And the cherry on top of this improved Big Apple – Singapore has stricter (and scarier) laws, so there is way less crime.

From being in relative chaos daily to being surrounded by militant order, my brain had difficulty comprehending these two extremes. I was expecting Singapore to be a nice, well maintained city surrounded by lush jungle, but in reality the jungles of Singapore aren’t even visible from the top of the tallest building. I was expecting Bangalore to be a hard place to live, but in reality I was finding the day to day easy and loving it.

These contrasting details spoke to a more innate part of my character: I like the dirty details. I like a life that has twists and turns and ups and downs. The dirty details make life more rich and authentic and deeply knowable to me because they are an honest reflection of life. Our paths as humans are not straight or grid-patterned. They crisscross, dip, dive, take whirling spirals down, and switch-backs up. The dirty details are something I want in my life. In Singapore, it felt like these dirty details had been purposefully erased in order to uphold a more pristine version of the world.

That specifically is why coming back to Bangalore felt a lot more like coming home than I was expecting it to, I think. Singapore made me a little homesick, but Bangalore (and talking to my parents for a couple hours) remedied it.

Last but not least, something that confronted me time and time again over the last week was the value of relationships.  

In my mind, I had been conceptualizing this trip to Singapore as a quasi ‘solo travel’ trip. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of ‘solo travel,’ it’s exactly like it sounds. You travel somewhere, by yourself. Because the friends I visited in Singapore work full time, I knew that Thursday, Friday, and Monday, I would largely be on my own and I was excited!

Solo traveling is a subset of travel that receives its own deification. Some enthusiasts say it takes you to a deeper sense of self-knowing or that your travel experience is made richer by doing it alone because there are no other voices to filter your experience – it’s just your own, raw, internal monologue of processing. My excitement stemmed from these sentiments.

While I enjoyed all the things I did by myself in Singapore (went to the zoo, historical sites, and even did a bike tour of an island just 10-minutes off the coast), I found it profoundly unsatisfying. When I’d get up and no one was home, it was hard to find motivation to leave the apartment some days because I knew it would be just me off on this adventure – the perpetual internal monologue never being shared. For me, experiencing the realities of these places is harder doing it on my own. Just as I think the dirty details make life richer, so do the people with whom we experience them.

I don’t want my life or traveling to be about performing a monologue. I want it to be a rich dialogue. I want to see the world anew through others’ personal filters. I want the individual rawness to be refined into expressions of communal meaning and wonder.

Overall, it seems to me that romanticizing solo travel or travel in general is an escapist way of not honoring the fullness and depth to our experiences. We worship the idea of travel via Instagram accounts or after traveling, we redact the fullest versions of our stories because it makes travel seem romantic and easy and fun. In this process, we remove ourselves a step away from the reality of travel.

Don’t worship travel. Don’t glorify. Don’t deify it.

Instead, know travel: honestly and intimately. Embrace the details of your experience – the good and the bad, the comforts and discomforts – so that you create a truer picture of our world.  The shallow recounting of “crystal blue waters, ethnic food, and a different culture” don’t approach reality authentically. Instead, help your friends to know travel, too.

As we travel, we have a unique opportunity to gain perspectives on the puzzle pieces that make up the picture of our planet. The reality and the beauty of a puzzle is incomplete without the minute details on each piece. The colors may be bright and bold with clear lines in some places, while other parts may depict darker or blurry undertones. As individuals, we each experiences travel through our own eyes, which means we may see and paint our pictures with different palettes and styles.

These details and differences at a global and individual level collectively honor travel as a diverse, intimately knowable action. To me, travel is made all the more beautiful and authentic through the knowing and through diving into those details that make up our experience.

I’ll definitely keep trying to know travel as I continue my adventure. I hope you will, too, in your adventures.

Namaste.

-Dani