27 December

Imagine places are people. Which of course they are, too. We had these Time Life books as kids, and I’d sit and look at different locations in the world, for hours. Now people just go there. They travel. Let me argue how stupid that is. Again, if places were people, we could sit and look at books or magazines with beautiful people in them, that we admire. If we then travelled to the homes of those people to try to get a more ‘authentic experience’ of them, what would that be called? Stalking. That’s what travel is. Geographical stalking. We feel the right to not just admire other places, but to possess them, to stalk them. We have no such right, and worse, it destroys those places when we do it. Let each part of the world be beautiful, including our own. And admire the beauty in other places, from afar. There’s no need to invade everywhere else to ‘experience’ that beauty, doing that destroys it, just as stalking destroys the lives of people. I know very many will disagree with this. I will always ask them, why is travel only good when nobody else does it? How many people should be allowed to ‘experience’ the world in the way you like?