Bewildered Travel: The Sacred Quest for Confusion

3. The Pilgrim’s Progress

there’s something about the huge cruise ships, anchored out in the harbor, that makes some insistent on drawing a >rm line between “tourists” (on the ship) and “travelers” (in the streets). The ships are so aggressively modern, so sleek, so gleaming that they seem a Hollywood version of the ane cuisine is there, ?oating e=ortlessly by. The other image is from Heart of Darkness. When Marlow sails along the coast of Africa, on his way to that utterly disruptive heart, he sees a French man-of-war >ring into the jungle. “There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush.” It seems incomprehensible to Marlow, “>ring into a continent.”1 Conrad is a >ne counterpoint to Matthew Arnold’s self-building, for while Arnold was con>dent of our ability to see and consume what we visit, as we can read and absorb the great literature of the West, Conrad presents so great a gap between “o= the coast” and “in the interior” that not even violence has e=ect. Maybe that is because of the clichéd “unbridgeable gap” between “West” and “East,” but it may also have to do with all travel: there is simply no getting “there.” There is no moving from ship to shore, and the utter disparity between the hypermodern cruise ship and the dusty town proves it. It is images like those from Fellini and Conrad that lead many >ne writers to draw a very hard line between tourists and travelers . Tourists come in ships that are exaggerations of home, and while the tourist may venture o= ship, they are always able to return to the ship—and will. They are safe, protected, risking nothing . Travelers, on the other hand, go to the “jungle” or the winding streets and remain there, giving up their homes for the duration of the trip. Travelers risk discomfort, illness, foul odors, beds with bugs, and maybe even insanity. And they scorn those who do not. And it’s not only about vacation trips, of course; it’s about the religious import of travel. In the religious quest for disruption, too, we tend to separate the tourists and the travelers: those who take it easy and those who take it hard; those who maintain the 56 • bewildered travel comfort of their selves and of their lives and those who crawl on their knees for miles, who endure the worst discomfort and pain, and who travel as a scourge or as an ordeal in order to e=ect the most profound changes in their selves and their lives, the most challenging test, and the most extreme results. The travelers, it is claimed, risk most rupture. They tolerate it, seek it, value it, while the tourists never leave the ship or the surfaces they depend upon and so avoid rupture. Pilgrimage had its rankings. For medieval Christians, it was the pilgrimage to Jerusalem that was the apex of spiritual value, although it could easily involve many months and considerable danger. Historically some argued that pilgrimage was not necessary, God being as present in the home as in Jerusalem, but soon pilgrimage took >rm hold, and there was, in fact, more merit in traveling to Jerusalem or other pilgrimage sites than in visiting the village shrine. We have a bias toward su=ering when it comes to religion, and a bias toward rarity. If it’s down the street, it can’t be of as much value as if it’s around the world. If it takes place once in a lifetime, it’s of more religious value than if it takes place every afternoon. Religiously we tend to value travel and prefer the “true” pilgrim to the mere religious tourist. Scorn is ?ung at both travelers and tourists—and anyone else who moves into other cultural worlds—by those who see a virtually inevitable colonialism still taking place in any contact, and they condemn the very literal killings, enslavements, and rapes, as well as the savage physical and emotional su=erings in?icted historically by the European nations (and their extensions, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the rest) upon the non-West. In the present day, such violence continues in the destruction of cultures, economic exploitation, diseases allowed to ravage, and political subjugation. These critics are angry and zealous in rooting out every evidence of continuing colonialism. Traveler or tourist...