This week’s Guest Nomad is Ethan Gelber. Ethan manages media and communications for the WHL Group, which is the largest local-travel company in the world and whose member companies include whl.travel, Urban Adventures, Green Apple Transfers and WHL Consulting. Ethan also writes and edits the whl.travel blog.
There’s always a lot of banter about travel “back in the day.” Each generation of sojourners loves to lose itself in a halcyon haze, reflecting back on a time gone by when travel was clearly at its best… and then lost to the ever-denser droves of insensitive and irresponsible touring ogres.
My golden age was long after Across Asia on the Cheap (Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s famous ground-breaking guidebook in 1973), but solidly pre-Internet. I too get a bit misty-eyed just thinking about it.
I first hit the road in the very late 80s, when the four Ks – Kao San Road (Bangkok), Karachi, Kathmandu and… just what was that fourth K? Kerala? Kochi? – had been thoroughly Lonely Planetized and “going local” was a frayed hippie cliché, although there was still arguably way more world off the beaten path than on. They were the days when the most cost-effective way of keeping in touch with home involved a full afternoon visit to the main post office to send an expensive telefax. That was already a quantum leap up from the earlier wallet-thinning times of international direct dial.
It was also a period of spreading local realization that travelers were not just willfully displaced and resourceless refugees out to experience the world. They were increasingly seen as commodities to be caught and rolled, ambulating banks with loose controls. This process has accelerated considerably since the cyber revolution vulgarized travel.
Some people believe – as I do – that with these changes, a wedge has been driven between travelers and hosts. Both parties now float through a common space that is, alas, no longer a shared one. Most locals keep to residential areas (or keep to themselves when outside the gates), while travelers Spirograph through set circuits complete with canned commentary, the delivery vehicles of which (from buses to guidebooks to smart phones) are little more than horses of a different color.
Those same ‘some people’ – actually not an insubstantial bunch – now wonder how we can ever experience Oz again the way its emerald citizens do? Just how can we bridge the divide between host and visitor, and resuscitate the merits of “going local” without any of its past discredits.
The answer? The Internet. One primary reason for the lost link between local and guest has been the absence of an easy direct line of communication. For too long, all travel arrangements were left to agents and handlers. Not anymore. Today, multiple new travel services have found solid footing in the favorable, responsible and mutually beneficial fusion of locals’ and visitors’ interests.
So as more and more mindful travelers jump for the pendulum as it sweeps back toward instructive and constructive one-world travel, let’s set aside reveries about when in the past travel was best and try to make better our shared future. Let’s make it one in which we’re all happily local wherever we go.
Interested in adding momentum to a growing Local Travel movement? The sergeants-at-arms have called for the bugles to sound. Stay tuned to this space (and others) for more news to come very soon.
