we’d have any means of contacting anyone
if something went wrong. (In the event,
folks were fine, as folks usually are, though
Bucharest itself felt clammy and putrefying,
like some recently vanquished monster.)
Pulling out of Budapest’s Keleti station this
time, however, it struck me that I had every
idea what to expect. I had known what the
sleeper compartment on the train would look
like before I opened its door. I knew where I’d
be staying once I arrived in Bucharest, and what
colour the walls and bedsheets in the room were,
and that the hamburger place across the street
was supposed to be good, though it was unclear
what the deal was with the décor (sort of hipster
brothel gothic, with peanut shells scattered on
the floor, for some reason). I knew what was on
in Bucharest if I felt like going out, and if I felt
like staying in I knew I could watch almost any
film ever made or read pretty much any book
ever written, or just chat to my friends. And
if anything were to go askew, there were any
number of personal and professional contacts
who’d respond to a call, text or email.
The traditional lament of the tedious travel
purist down the ages has been that the places
have changed, that once exotic destinations
have become homogenous, identikit. There
is something to that, but I for one would
not – for example – seek to imprison half
of Europe all over again just to make visiting
Romania feel like more of an adventure than
it does now. At any rate, such erosions of
the rugged authenticity of places – or, as the
folk who actually live there usually call them,
“improvements” – are nothing compared to
the way that people have been changed by the
bewilderingly swift globalisation of humankind
which has occurred in these last few decades.Meeting Eastern Europeans in the early ’90s
felt like meeting people who’d grown up on a
different planet – for the reason that they might
as well have. At one point on my more recent
rail journey, I was passing the time with a bunch
of my fellow passengers, as one does. Parties to
one particular conversation were this Australian,
along with citizens of Switzerland, Sweden,
China, Canada, Bulgaria and Poland. I was struck
by how little difficulty we had understanding each
other – not merely in terms of everyone else’s
excellent English, but in terms of our shared
frames of reference, in culture, politics, sport,
media and other subjects. I felt like I’d come a
long way to be having a discussion I could have
had in the pub up my street – or, indeed, in
pretty much any pub up pretty much any street,
outside maybe Pyongyang (although having
written that, it occurs that even were I visiting
North Korea tomorrow, I’d be able to find out
more in advance than I did before going to,
I don’t know, Finland 25 years ago).It is, on balance, good that travelling has
become easier (it is, on balance, good when
most things becomes easier). But travel has
become so easy that it requires an act of almost
perverse will to make it seem like any kind of
challenge – akin to determining to grow all your
own food from scratch rather than sticking
something in the microwave. Even the things
that people once felt like they had to go and see
at some point have become much less worth the
hassle of going to see: you can probably get
a better view of most of what’s in the Louvre
from your laptop than you can from schlepping
all the goddamn way to Paris and standing
in the queues at the actual museum.Up until the last 20-odd years, for all the
fathomless millennia humans had wandered
this Earth, two of the best reasons for doing
it – certainly for doing it recreationally – were
the instructive experience of living on your
own wits in unfamiliar surroundings, and
the possibilities of surprising yourself. Both
of those incentives are now largely gone.
The distance from your usual social, familial
and professional circles was once disorienting,
but ultimately invigorating. Now, everyone
might as well be in the next room along the
hotel corridor. Or the Airbnb across the street.It used to be just the major attractions that
looked like the pictures. Now, everything does. •045 SMITH JOURNALI’D COME A LONG WAY TO HAVE A
DISCUSSION I COULD HAVE HAD
IN THE PUB UP MY STREET – OR IN
PRETTY MUCH ANY PUB UP PRETTY
MUCH ANY STREET.