Travel Is Dead, Long Live Travel

Did you ever hear the story of the Cambodian boy who’s best friend was a giant python?

Uorn Sambath grew up with his serpentine playmate, Chomran, in Setbo Village and spent every possible moment united, they even slept together. Stories like these are the stuff of legend beautifully entwined with the intoxication of ancient Angkorian myths. Sadly the myth was broken by wild desire, after years of resisting temptation, Chomran could hold back no longer. Uorn was lucky to have gotten off lightly with a bite to his leg. The inseparable were now torn apart, one to college the other to zoo.

Tales like these inspire some of us to travel and see the world in search of wonder. We all want a piece of what Uorn had, an undeniably unthinkable experience, to augment our lives and enlarge our horizons, to cherish for the rest of our days. Yet, like Uorn, we have been bitten by the repercussions that come of playing with the innately wild. Zoonotic spillover has dripped a virus of pandemic proportions into our arms, sucking our lifeblood and putting an end to a once carefree joy of unbridled travel.

A long-term traveller in Cambodia, during the covid-19 pandemic has much less to complain about than the millions of people confined to their homes in virus-stricken countries across the globe. Here, in the kingdom of the Khmer, we are relatively free to roam and graze within the boundaries of the nation’s borders. Whilst the government’s edict preventing tourism is steadfast, as it is in many parts of the world, the aviation industry is in freefall as we consider a new world order that should be governed by climate science instead of eternal expansion. This was an inevitable cliff edge that could not be avoided, with or without a pandemic. We are mourning the end of mass transit tourism that kept millions of us simultaneously juggled in the air by perspiring traffic controllers, and hailing in the renaissance of slow long-term travel that inspires experience, exploration and adventure.

“Travel is dead, long live travel!”

These were the thoughts that crossed my mind as I loaded up the bike. Khalla, my navigator and occasional backseat massage therapist, set our course for an anti-clockwise journey around the perimeter of Cambodia.  We waved goodbye to the dogs and took to the road.

My thoughts returned to Uorn and his slippery ‘friend’. Where are they now? Does Uorn visit Chomran at the zoo sometimes, to recall a once symbiotic relationship? It must be a double edged emotion of nostalgia and sorrow, much like those who have had their wings clipped, confined to their homes pouring over photos of journeys past.

By this time almost all the backpackers and many expatriate workers had scuttled back to their homelands in the belief they would be safer and better off surrounded by the health systems and technologically well provided governments of the rich. We have since heard of their lockdown misery of course, surrounded by indifferent citizens led by incompetent short-termist leaders. The pandemic numbers don't look good where they are, and whilst we might not trust the authoritarian regime of Cambodia to report numbers faithfully here, we can see with our own eyes that life is carrying on and the hospitals are not under pressure.

Whilst this year’s rains were still not as heavy as they should be, they were still with us in the first week of October forcing us to don the various bits of waterproofing that never seemed to keep us completely dry no matter what we tried.  As is so often the case when driving solo, similarly when driving two up without an intercom, my mind was left to ponder the future of travel as the combustion engine beneath me purred reliably above the rain-washed asphalt.

Whilst we wait for a vaccine to kick in it will be years before we see anything like the numbers that once took to the skies in search of respite from their toxic workplaces. I hope we never see those days again. I like that the skies are quiet, I can hear the birds twittering, and that the streets are filled with local business instead of pandering to the demands of a continuous international invasion of tourists. This lull in avionics gives us all, and the planet a chance to take a deep breath and exhale in meditation of our circumstance.

Long-term travellers like myself won't look at this as an upset, but rather more the opportunity of a lifetime. We don’t see ourselves stuck in a country, but instead as being given an opportunity to discover its lands and people without the distraction of other foreigners gumming up the experience. It's a bit like travelling back in time 40 years when there were just a handful of foreign visitors that might be pleased to make a novel encounter with a fellow traveller, instead of having to avoid hordes of happy snappers stumbling out of buses disturbing the peace of previously serene vistas.

My concentration returns to the road as I need to negotiate the space between flapping plastic capes atop slow moving scooters on the inside lane, a flooded dip in the road as an oversized and inconsiderate 4x4 pickup wants to overtake on the outside as oncoming traffic struggles to get out of its way. This happens routinely along Cambodia’s highways, so it’s no surprise to be engulfed in a wave I’d rather surf than be drenched by. Expletives pass from my lips, but no one can hear me, not even Khalla sitting patiently behind me. Once the idiot driver is safely beyond our sphere of potential danger, I return to the subject at hand.

At first many businesses only prepared themselves for a few months disruption, but anyone who had read the history of the Spanish Influenza, as I did in February this year 2020, would be able to predict a similar pandemic could take 2 years to run its global course around the world, delivering its worst damage in the first winter. Yet with all the historic knowledge and 100 years of scientific advance, the popularist governments are failing to get a grip, whilst the authoritarian regimes are succeeding in their damage limitation.  

The drop in tourism and international trade due to the pandemic have killed many businesses in Cambodia, and I’m only too aware that my participation in a small scale food bank, serving a village in Siem Reap province, has little sustainable impact on the lives of 25 families weathering the downturn in work, but humans are finding a way to adapt, just as they always do. Cambodians are 80% farmers, so they do have more access to on-hand necessities, but it’s the city dwellers who need to make a bigger shift in lifestyle to adapt and survive.

No digital nomad could have ever influenced the global population into remote working the way this pandemic has, and now as the light is dawning on distanced participation, there is less reason to commute and every reason to uproot ourselves into long-term patterns of migration. Afterall homo sapiens did spend the majority of their 300,000 year evolution in a constant cycle of transition as they moved with each season. It’s only in the last 12,000 years that the advent of farming suddenly transformed us into sedentary creatures. This dramatic change in our lifestyles brought forth more advances in shorter periods of time finally culminating in the birth of the industrial revolution in the 18^th century, that sent our species into exponential growth at a speed never seen before on earth. We have become the collective bacteria in a petri dish, consuming all in its path, reaching the very limits of the clear plastic enclosure, until nothing is left to feed on.

At this point Khalla and I need to stop for a break, the rain has subsided a little and we are glad to strip off our various sheets of waterproofing to sit in-front of a hot bowl of noodles at a typical ramshackle roadside restaurant draped in plastics of sun bleached advertising for the local tasteless beer. It’s hard to imagine the sun in all this rain. We sit on the commonly found, but wholly out of place ostentatious, and likely illegally cut hardwood furniture, in our own pools of water shed from our clothing. The restaurant staff look-on at a sight they may not have seen for 6 months and might not for another half year, a barang tourist with his Khmer partner. It’s difficult to know if they are just timid or scared they might catch a foreigner’s virus, as they keep to a distance, but that’s also a common mannerism of the Khmer, to give as much respect as they can to their visitors. Khalla strikes up a conversation and in the exchange, we learn of their plight in these difficult times. There is a solemn quiet as we contemplate the rain and the hardships around us. We later pick ourselves up to continue ploughing our way through the rains once more, our onlookers watch in silence.

Back inside my helmet I consider that there is still hope for our kind if the emergence of the green and sustainable economy is embraced, where carbon credit takes priority over the balance of credit cards, ecocides become equated to genocides and where we all aspire to be a more conscious society that cares for every aspect of our environment. The tide seems to be turning, and I’m very excited about the possibilities, but has it begun too late for us to save our species?

We are certainly in the firefighting stage of damage limitation, having already felt the intensification and frequency of climate catastrophe. Over the last 16+ years I was often disappointed as I drove through each continent, forever met with the disappointing sacrifice of our environment to the gods of commerce. Whilst the gruesome sacrifice of human lives at Mayan temples to Hun Hunapu, the god of corn, may seem unpalatable to our modern sensibilities, we have few qualms about flattening the last remaining forests we have, only to feed more unsustainable cows, that will ultimately gas us out of existence. The Mayans, incidentally, are not as I once thought, lost to the preservation of museums and archaeological sites, but are very much alive and continue a tradition of permaculture farming practice that predates any European that came upon the concept.

Yikes, my mental tangent has been interrupted for the umpteenth time today as I slam on the brakes just in time to avoid a cow crossing the road. To be fair the cows at least look both ways regularly, and my head was stuck far too high in the clouds. Actually, moments like these are a welcome jolt back to reality and a break from the zen of motorcycle road warrior. But the moment doesn’t last long and I’m back to the hundreds of road calculation per second as I battle with my quandary. 

Time and again, the dominant Eurocentric culture has obliterated all in its path either by force or through the spread of aggressive ill-considered technologies and practices. Sure, European, or more specifically British culture, are not the only ones to blame for the onslaught of commerce over environment, but I can’t help noticing these are the most responsible for our current circumstance. It’s no wonder that the nations and people abused by the colonists are not too impressed with the hypocrisy of being told the practices they follow are misguided, and being requested to do without all the luxury that continues to be enjoyed by the colonial states. Double standards, sounds familiar to anyone who sees the gap between rich and poor grow ever wider. Travel in the future is likely to be once more an elite activity, the astronomical costs of reaching Mars are beyond us plebs, and even the flight to a distant land on Earth will likely fall out of the reach of many, as rising costs of maintaining the now devastated aviation industry make cheap travel a distant memory. Unfair as this may sound to some of us, it’s still a first world problem since the majority of the world’s population cannot afford a holiday of any kind whatsoever. More importantly poverty and capitalism are unfair and unsustainable, screw your cheap flights and carbon emissions.

Khalla and I roll up to our night’s accommodation in Battambang, sodden to the core, we are relieved this first day in the wet is over. There won’t be enough time to dry everything before we must continue in the likely downpour that awaits us tomorrow morning, but it doesn’t matter, we’re lucky to be allowed the luxury of an adventure, we’re enjoying every minute of it.

This will probably sound selfish, but for the sake of travel and the spirit of adventure, I love that the pandemic threw a spanner in the works of mass transit. I look forward to a future where importing produce from around the world becomes untenable, forcing us to take long journeys in order to grasp exoctic seasonal fruit or wrap ourselves in a foreign textile. Limiting our access to commodities otherwise shipped at great planetary cost will make longer term travel that more rewarding in our more susteainable world.

Now when we meet people on the road, we are treated as novel as the virus, and our experiences are not fleeting check-list moments, but deeper connections with the locality.

Today was not exemplary of this, since we were confined to a dull stretch of national highway, but I expected we might find more of it tomorrow along the path of wilderness to the Cardamom Mountains.

Wait, what happened to Uorn and Chomran?

I hear you ask.

Well if anyone knows the answer, please let me know. It’s as if they both slipped quietly into the jungle, that itself is sliding out of existence into an extinction of no return.