Each mode of traveling has its pros and cons, whether you walk to India like Thomas Coryat in the 16th century, or travel with caravans like John Mildenhall in the 17th century, or cycle, hitchhike, drive, take a bus, train, plane, or boat. Of course, walking or cycling from Stockholm to New Delhi would have been possible, but it would have taken a long time and been risky in more ways than one.
Hitchhikers are constantly meeting new faces and have a good chance of getting to know local people, but traffic was often quite light through eastern Turkey, northern Iran, and Afghanistan. Of course, on trains you can also meet interesting people, but you might as well spend days isolated in a compartment where no one speaks English. Moreover, there were no railways in Afghanistan, a consequence of the fact that the British never managed to colonize the country.
The advantage of taking a charter bus was that it was cheap and allowed us to gradually approach Asia instead of getting on a plane in Europe and landing in New Delhi 12 hours later. The flight is fast and efficient, but you don't experience any of the countries you fly over. On the bus, we spent much of the time looking out the window and experiencing the changes in landscape and culture. Besides, we had to go out among the common people every day to buy food and beverages. The disadvantage of travelling by bus was that we were stuck with the group and always had to return to the bus. We couldn't join people we met along the way or stop at a place we found exciting. The journey had to go on.
Maybe it would have been better to go by car, or take local trains and buses, but that would have been much harder, required more time, experience, and preparations. In contrast, a cruise I took with my family in the summer of 2014 included visits to Istanbul and Ephesus in Turkey. This is, of course, a very comfortable way to travel, but the ship locks the traveler into a world that he can leave only briefly and temporarily. The boat docks, you go ashore, take a tour, photograph, eat and shop, but then you must get back on board. It’s almost impossible to break out of the safe bubble of the boat to reach people on land.
You might think our journey was slow – five weeks to New Delhi – but it was hardly slow enough for John Ruskin, a highly influential English art critic in the Victorian era. In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton recounts Ruskin's critique of travel at the time.
”He deplored the blindness and haste of modern tourists, especially those who pride themselves on covering Europe in a week by train (a service first offered by Thomas Cook in 1862): ‘No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, wiser. (…) The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace.’” (p 218)
The only way to truly appreciate beauty was, according to Ruskin, to understand it and it was through writing or drawing that one gained this insight. The most important and underrated of the two was the art of drawing, which is why he founded the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. The school's mission was not to teach the art of drawing, but the art of seeing.
Ruskin was, according to de Botton, initially enthusiastic about photography, but would soon conclude that photography easily became a way of not seeing.
”The camera blurs the distinction between seeing and noticing, between seeing and possessing; it may give us the option of true knowledge, but it may also unwittingly make the effort of acquiring that knowledge seem superfluous.” (de Botton, p 220)
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As for myself, I kept a diary on my journey, but the quality of my notes was low, and they were too egocentric. I had no professional training in either travel writing, drawing or photography. And I hadn't read Ruskin, so I didn't understand the importance of drawing to see. Rory Stewart, in his account of traveling on foot through Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, The Places Inbetween, describes how he works with drawings and systematically describes what he sees, whether it's the inside of a room where he's staying or the nature he's traveling through. I would be surprised if he hadn't read and learned from Ruskin.
Anybody who has reflected on photography knows that there is a conflict between taking pictures and experiencing. I've often thought while looking through the viewfinder that I should put the camera aside and just watch, just experience, but it's a difficult choice, especially when you're traveling fast and don't think you have time.
We write, draw, and take photos because we know our memory is limited and therefore sacrifice experience for documentation. The advantage of writing a diary, of course, is that we do it after the fact, but it also means we miss things that we simply don't remember. A drawing happens in the moment. And a photographic image replicates a two-dimensional slice of an experience. But in defense of photography – and Ruskin agreed – the camera allowed me to capture a piece of reality, at least virtually. When I go through my images from the India trip forty years later, it becomes a journey of discovery, a detour, allowing me to see what I was not ready to see at the time. The camera was only a complement to my experience, but today it is this complement, combined with print and digital resources, that allows me to reconstruct the journey and dig out memories that have been lost.
(Transl. from my January 17, 2015 post on my Swedish blog, Sandbergs hörna.)
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