How to be both an economically privileged and morally superior traveler
It’s Christmas holidays again! After going through a very intense period at work, I can now finally take some time off. My intention for the holidays is to do nothing but basking into the sweetness of the Christmas atmosphere and enjoying the magic of this time of the year. I am so good at being mindful and fully focused on the present moment that a hammering question has been obsessing me since the day I switched my Teams status as offline: what am I going to do for my holidays next summer?
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Like any other good millennial out there, I am not really interested in the final destination. Canada? Japan? Seychelles? Who cares! What’s most important, instead, is the feeling that will accompany me throughout the journey. Do I want to experience being spiritual after having gossiped about my colleagues and friends for the whole year? Then I shall book a retreat in Bhutan and spend two weeks meditating and doing yoga, so that I will gossip in a zen way once I’ll be back. Do I want to experience being feminine again after having worn home clothes marketed as gender neutral fashion since the breakout of the pandemic? Then I shall take belly dancing classes in Morocco and make sure my sexual orientation is the same as the one I had before Covid by going to bed with as many guys as possible. Do I want to experience being environmentally friendly? Then I shall hop on two intercontinental flights and three more domestic flights to reach a remote beach on the other side of the world and clean it from plastic and trash.
Last summer I went on vacation longing for a frivolous experience. I wanted to stare at beautiful sunsets from the rooftop of a luxury hotel, sipping champagne and eating oysters. And I wanted to do that in Hawaii. I wanted this experience to be frivolous right from the start, since the planning phase of my vacation. In fact, I wanted to do zero planning. I didn’t feel like wasting my precious free time booking flights, hotels, looking for interesting places to visit etc. All I wanted was to click “Confirm” somewhere on a browser (and do that only once), do a bank transfer and then show up at the airport the day of the departure.
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A friend of mine suggested me to book through Viaggi e Avventure nel Mondo (“Travels and Adventures Around the World”), an Italian tour operator, among the largest in Europe, organizing trips for folks who regard themselves as travelers and not tourists. Viaggi e Avventure nel Mondo was founded in the early 70s by two young guys who were passionate about doing difficult travels in difficult places, right when in Italy the so called “economic miracle” began. Back then, the economic growth started lifting the working class out of poverty and made going on vacation affordable to plenty of people. While organizing the honeymoon in Paris was becoming more and more common, these two young guys decided that sleeping in a five-star hotel in the French riviera was not cool any longer. Together with other folks who grew tired of the luxury lifestyle, they embarked in extreme trips in every remote and dangerous corner of the world. Promising sons of lawyers would find themselves spending a few nights in the prisons of countries where a fresh dictatorship had just been established. And feminists visited countries where they would have stones thrown at them by local men just because they were… women. Rumor has it that #bestexperienceever would have been the most inflated hashtag if Instagram existed.
Viaggi e Avventure nel Mondo grew a lot since the early beginnings and the platform nowadays offers different types of trips, some of them even including sunbathing at the beach or family friendly itineraries. My itinerary to Hawaii consisted of visiting three islands and a lot of hiking. Knowing that the wealth of the 80s and 90s as well as the sponsored posts on Instagram turned even the most frugal traveler into a wannabe bourgeois, I clicked on “Confirm” (only once) and booked my vacation in a matter of minutes. The day before departing, I packed my luggage with a long dress, a pair of high heels and my handmade sunglasses to show off at the rooftop. Some sportwear and a pair of running shoes for the hikes too. And my fancy emerald swimsuit in case the rooftop had a swimming pool, of course!
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I met for the first time the seven people I was about to travel with the day of the departure, directly at the airport in Milan. It was only when I saw them at the gate that I realized that what I was joining was not a group of travelers who would turn into tourists and drink champagne on a rooftop, had I insisted enough. Not at all. These were hard-core travelers, dressed in colorful clothes of some advanced technical fabric, probably resistant not only to water, but likely also to nuclear radiations. Their shoes were not just normal shoes: they were bulky trekking shoes of brands that in the common culture are linked to expeditions in Himalaya or Patagonia. Or the Gulf War. They were carrying huge backpacks, those that are taller than humans and make you curve when you walk. I could not reconcile their Armageddon gear with my outfit: I was wearing skinny jeans, a pair of white leather shoes, a pullover in cotton and a light pink scarf. Were we flying to the same place? I sat next to them, quickly pulled out the ticket with my sweaty and trembling hands and checked if, by mistake, I had booked a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. My booking was correct: I was going on a 17-day long trip to Hawaii with a group of post-modern flagellants looking for the experience of atonement.
The seventeen days in Hawaii went by smoothly with the following routine. We would wake up every day at 5:45am, quickly have breakfast and leave at 7am. We would drive between one and two hours to the starting point of a trail and then hike for several hours to reach a beach, or a canyon, or a waterfall. Or just nothing. We would eat what we had packed in the morning. Depending on the level of atonement, that could have been a sandwich, a salad, some carrots, a bunch of Oreo, just water. We would then hike back to the cars, passed by a supermarket to buy dinner and the lunch for the following day, shower and go to sleep. The days when we changed island, we would do all of the above plus packing the luggage, going to the airport, returning cars, hopping on the plane, hopping off the plane, renting cars, driving to the hotel and checking in.
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I was the only one in the group going on a trip with Viaggi e Avventure Nel Mondo for the first time. All the others were veterans and had been flagellating themselves and atoning for their sins trip, after trip, after trip. After trip. For one of the flagellants that was the 20th time. Stories of the past pilgrimages were the basis of our daily conversations. In the same way I cannot fully enjoy the current Christmas holidays and I am already projected to the next vacation, they could not endure the present suffering without recalling the suffering they had gone through already. Someone shared a story of when she spent her 7th week of annual vacation to go to Senegal visiting orphanages and donating clothes and toys to the kids. Someone told us how difficult it was to cruise around Latin America with jeeps, mounting and dismounting their tents, sometimes in the darkness and under the rain. Luckily, he could count on the torch and the long-lasting battery of his latest iPhone, which resisted rain, the freezing nights in the Andes, fire, inner turmoil and even the Che Guevara screensaver he selected. Someone else remembered her trip to Japan, when they would wake up every day at 4:30am to visit the country. “Those were really harsh trips!”, she kept saying with the same nostalgia felt by certain Italian people missing the “old good times” of Fascism, when trains were on time.
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As days were passing by, I got to know them better and understand that they all had different reasons for embarking on a flagellating vacation in Hawaii. For someone it was being vegan for ten years only and not having jumped on the train of eating dull food earlier. For someone it was having a job that did not align with the person’s real values and aspirations. For someone it was curing kids with mental diseases who were too rich to be called unfortunate. For someone it was having an uninteresting life and nothing exciting to tell at Christmas to the relatives if it wasn’t for the flagellating trip. For someone it was having failed at finding a sensible partner for yet one more year. For someone it was having failed at breaking up with the current partner for yet one more year. At one point, I was asked the most feared question of all: “Why did you choose to join us with Viaggi e Avventure nel Mondo?” When everybody is sharing their most secret demons, how can’t you not do the same? I couldn’t lie to them inventing that I had a terrible childhood, or a bad relationship with my body, or a secret passion for dinosaurs. I had to spit out the truth. That I joined because I was too lazy to book the trip myself, so much so that the day of departing I didn’t even know the names of three islands we would visit. That I actually believed that I knew at least one of names and realized while hearing them talking at the gate in Milan that “Honolulu” was not the name of the island. It was the name of one of the cities of the island. That it took me until San Francisco to learn that the island’s name was Oahu. And that I desperately wanted to watch a sunset while sipping champagne from the rooftop of a luxury hotel.
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This is not going to be one of those stories where people have compassion for your weak character and frivolous lifestyle and decide to compromise with their atonement routine and make an exception. Nope. The closest we have been to a rooftop was when we parked next to a Four Season hotel and sat on the sand to see the sunset. While staring at that stunning orange sky, someone looked at the guests of the Four Season and blamed them for their vacation was too luxurious, empty and non-relatable with the local common people they were for sure not interacting with. Her point was interesting. I counted all the ground-breaking interactions and exchanges with real-local-common-people we had until that point and, to my disbelief, we made zero of them. Zero interaction despite our frugal and down-to-earth vacation style, sleep deprivation, kilometers of atonement, sleeping in a tiny quadruple room and sharing the bed with a flagellant who snored like a large mammal. What was the difference between us travelers and the tourists at the Four Seasons after all? Simply the fact that we had half of their budget? Being already so fortunate for having the chance to be on a two-week vacation in Hawaii but not affording the five-star hotel was really what made us morally virtuous flagellants?
When I finally landed in Milan, I felt I was ready for a week of partying in Saint-Tropez. I hoped till the last moment that a limousine was waiting for me outside of the terminal to drive me to the South of France. Needless to say, there was no limousine waiting for me and my holidays were over. Instead, I continued my trip back to Switzerland, sitting for four hours on the floor of a fully packed train. The day after, I resumed my regular regime of twelve hours of work per day and atoned till Christmas for the privilege I had of going on holidays in Hawaii.
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Now I would love to hear from you! Tell me what is the most important thing for you while on holidays? Is it visiting new places you’ve never been before? Is it meeting new people? Or is a feeling that guides your trip choice? Let me know in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe to the Breaking Thirty Newsletter for more blog posts.