FOR THE PURPOSES OF WRITING WHAT
I’M ABOUT TO WRITE, I CATALOGUED
EVERY COUNTRY I’VE VISITED OVER
THE LAST 28 YEARS OR SO OF BEING
VARIOUS KINDS OF JOURNALIST.
..........................................
Such lists are not an exact science, there being
no rigid definition of what even constitutes a
country. My minimum qualification was that a
given entity be recognised by at least one other
country – so I reckoned Abkhazia and Kosovo
(to name but two) could be counted, while I
filed Ambazonia and Republika Srpska (to pick
a couple at random) under Cameroon and
Bosnia-Herzegovina respectively. The Turkish
Republic of Northern Cyprus made the list;
Catalonia did not. Also, I had to have actually
cleared customs and spent some local currency
there – so I did not count the likes of Malaysia
and Singapore, of which I have only seen the
inside of the international airports, but did
count Mexico, even though my experience
of the latter amounts to crossing the border
from Del Rio for dinner in Ciudad Acuna
one night in about 1999 or something.
The total I arrived at was 86, and I’ve been
to most of those more than once. (Indeed,
waiting for a recent flight from London to
Dublin, I passed the time by trying to list
every visit I’d made to Ireland, and then
spent much of the trip suddenly recalling
another I’d forgotten, and/or hadn’t thought
about for years.) I’m not announcing this to
show off – not exclusively, anyway – but to
establish my credentials as a well-travelled
chap, the better to underpin the contrarian
provocation which will very shortly ensue.Which is, in sum, that I’ve genuinely started
to wonder if there’s all that much point to
it – the gallivanting, the going to and fro, the
gadding about. This is, I should stress, not a
matter of personal regret – in the main, it has
been a whole bunch of fun, and besides which,
it’s my job. But I’ve been doing it long enough
to notice things changing, and it sometimes
occurs to me that they’re changing to an extent
that may render travel, if not entirely redundant,
then less crucial to the moulding of character
than it might once have been.Earlier this year, I had cause to take the sleeper
train from Budapest to Bucharest. I was braced
for this trip to prompt a measure of compare-and-
contrast reflection, for I’d done it once before,
back in early 1991. I had just turned 22, and my
then-girlfriend and I were undertaking what
was then a common rite for young Australians:
blundering about Europe for a few months of
collecting bedbug bites and annoying the locals
by bumping them with our rucksacks on trams.We had arrived in Budapest from Belgrade, and
discovered to our delight that the post-1989
dismantling of communism’s price-fixing
mechanisms had not yet reached the railways:
first-class sleepers between Eastern Europe’s
capitals could be had for less than $10. We spent
Christmas in Prague, then returned to Budapest,
saw some more of Hungary, and then steeled
ourselves for the trip to Romania’s capital.And here’s the thing: we had almost no idea
what to expect. The travel guides of the time
contained little information, and what information
they did have was likely to be useless. These books
had been published in 1990, so had likely been
researched at least a year before that, when
Romania had been, in every practical sense,
a different country: a cloistered, paranoid
dictatorship to which few tourists, and almost
no backpackers, ever went anyway.The overthrow and execution of the Ceausescus
a little over a year previously had made Romanian
visas easier to acquire. It was not nearly as easy to
work out where we’d stay when we got there, or
what there was to do of a Friday evening, or even
what sort of welcome might generally be extended
to a pair of clueless kids from Sydney who had
more cash in their money-belts than most of the
locals earned in years. The last was an especially
pertinent consideration, given that nobody knew
precisely where we were, and we didn’t know ifopinion