I’ve never bought the travel-as-transformation narrative fluff that’s mongered in such tracts as Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild” or in Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love.”

Travel, at least the kind of travel so often coded as “real” or “authentic,” as opposed to, say, the family resort vacation, the Instagram trip, the business trip, or the perfunctory list-ticking of the much-derided “tourist,” is today treated as a kind of secular pilgrimage in which we find out who we really are only by untethering ourselves from those elements of our identities too closely linked to habit and home. Only when we are away from our daily routines, this ideology implies, from our bosses and spouses and children and friends, when we are Challenged by language barrier or public transit mishap or unexpected romantic chemistry, only then can we come to know who we really are.

My gorge rises at it.

We can find this spirit of secular pilgrimage in travels explicitly coded as such: journeys to, say, the grave of Oscar Wilde or Jim Morrison in Paris’s Père Lachaise, or to Graceland or Dollywood, or even those “White Lotus”–style family journeys to the imagined Old Country: ancestral villages of which hyphenated-Americans might have no particular individual or even collective memory, but where distant cousins and a nebulous sense of roots might be found. If you travel to a spot you’ve seen on Instagram, vous aussi, J’accuse…! We can also find this new spirit of pilgrimage in travel that is specifically advertised as “wellness” related: a five-day yoga retreat in Mexico or Nepal, for instance. We can find it far more broadly in the ideology underpinning a backpacking trip or a teenager’s gap year, or the call for solo travel, especially the “authentic” kind that turns away from established sites and historical monuments toward “off the beaten track” underground bars and “best-kept secrets.” Travel qua travel, as an experience of self-transcendence through alienation, is not about the visited place itself but the traveler’s own interior journey: one made possible less by a particular encounter with a city, a church, or a historic site, but simply by the mere fact of being away from home.

That’s all vomitous rot. Just emigrate. Go emigrate. Or go talk to an immigrant. There: that is real personal change. That is the real pilgrimage. That is the real internal change: emigrating to a new country.

Merely dipping your toe in, into an according to Hoyle “off the beaten track” and “best kept secret” five days of personal growth, makes me never want to have a beer with you. Slim Shady, you a basehead.

tl/dr: Lonely Planet owes Thailand an apology.

Gleefully pilfered from and improved over “The Pilgrimage and Package Tours — The Spiritual Good to be Found in Modern Travel” by Tara Isabella Burton, summer 2024. Go read Burton. She writes well.

All photos stolen off the internet.

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: camino-de-santiago, journey, pilgrimage, spirituality, travel