Cool & Luxurious—No More!

I was just looking at photographs of some old travel posters and thought how cool and luxurious all the posters seemed. Now one is more likely to see backpackers wearing camouflage shorts with cargo pockets and staying in hostels. What you don’t see is the pilferage that takes place in their youth hostel and the lost sleep resulting from drunken young partiers who stay up to the wee hours of the morning. Nor do you see the TSA groping your private parts to make sure you’re not carrying a Thompson submachine gun there.

Travel has become at one and the same time more proletarian (no problem with that) and more security-conscious (using procedures that are more annoying than efficacious).

Also, since the heyday of those old posters, the United States has become a whole lot less popular than it used to be. Border crossings are fraught with arcane rules and odd fees such as reciprocal entry, departure and airport taxes. When Martine and I went to Argentina in 2011, for instance, we each had to pay a reciprocal entry tax of U.S. $160.00 to match what we were charging Argentinians entering the U.S.

Of course, it is nowhere as bad as my visit to Czechoslovakia in 1977, when my parents were held at a police station in Presov-Solivar because their papers weren’t in order. (Mine were, but that’s only because I used a visa service that was up on all the regs.)

Still, there is nothing in the world like travel. Whether you plunk yourself down on some sandy beach or—like me—go all over the place taking in the sights, it is at the evry least a balm for the tired soul. At best, it is life at its most exciting, with every minute being a new opportunity for learning.