On Wanderlust

Imagine that you stand on the tropical shores of Indonesia, staring south into the endless tropical blues of sea and sky bisected by the distant horizon. Imagine, just for fun, that you decide to board a wooden canoe and paddle it 400 miles to Australia. Even equipped with advanced weather forecasts and handheld GPS units and satellite phones, you would have to be pretty batshit crazy to even get in the canoe. Now, imagine this is all happening 50,000 years ago. You have at your disposal a family to power your canoe and a map of the stars by which to navigate, but you nor anyone else knows for sure whether Australia, or any other landmass for that matter, actually exists beyond the horizon. And still you say to hell with it and step off the edge of the known universe anyways. 

Do you see where I’m going with this? Our species is, as supported by a mountain of historical evidence, batshit crazy. We have been marching a nonstop parade of exploratory suicide missions since the dawn of our time, repeatedly reeled in by the siren song that calls to us from beyond our known horizons. For whatever our reasons, we succumb, leaving our familiar lands often without any real knowledge about what exists beyond, even knowing there’s a good chance that the leaving could spell our doom. How many people have died in the name of this quest, and more importantly, why on earth do we keep doing it?

My unbiased molecular ecology opinion is this: wanderlust is in our genes. We are hard-wired to follow the siren song, regardless of (and maybe partly because of) the risk. By now, we as a species have sunk our roots deep into every habitable scrap of land, and even into some frankly uninhabitable ones that we should have left well enough alone. And yet the wanderlust persists. Like most biological drives, there’s no off button. That breathtaking drive to go is still lodged deep behind our breastbones, even though the world was long ago “discovered” by our crazy lemming forbearers. 

On our increasingly crowded planet, true novel discovery in particular carries a promise of unparalleled glory. We are driven to experience something, anything, that has never been witnessed or recorded or climbed or tasted by any human ever before. The underlying logic is mildly ridiculous, as though inexhaustible things like the beauty of a mountaintop can be diminished solely by the number of people who have already laid eyes upon it, but clearly my stance here is that wanderlust doesn’t care about logic. Exhibit A: after we had successfully circumnavigated the globe, we pretty quickly turned our eyes and imaginations vertically towards the black depths of the oceans and space, boldly going where no man had gone before. We set foot on the moon once or twice before deciding the novelty had worn off, and then our collective wanderlust seized upon Mars as we envisioned a future as a multi-planetary species. 

For now though, we are still firmly planted on Earth, and the simplest way to placate the extant madness of our wanderlust is to pack up our bags and travel to places new to us as individuals. But in an already mapped world, the question remains: what is it we’re really looking for?

On Earth

I’m standing in a Venetian piazza, studiously ignoring our tour guide in favor of ogling some peculiar windows nearby, when I hear it. I knew it was only a matter of time before someone asked one of The Questions, and as I look around to locate the offender, I’m secretly glad that someone didn’t have to be me. “Excuse me, do you have some non-touristy restaurant recommendations?” a very touristy-looking tourist asks our tour guide. Without missing a beat, our guide whips out a laminated A4-sized list of restaurants and passes it around so we can all take obligatory photos. I swing by one of the recommendations later and although the food is delicious, I am not particularly shocked to find the cafe literally overflowing with tourists while the locals dutifully avoid the entire city block like it’s on fire.

A lot of humans I’ve met are rather pissed that the world has already been discovered. Modern travelers are consumed with romantic ideals like “getting off the beaten track” and finding “hidden gems,” the latter of which racks up 200 million hits on Google. It’s intoxicating to think that there still might be an unknown Shangri-La corner of the world that’s out there waiting for you – yes, you – to find it first. A place that’s not already inundated with tourists taking up your breathing room and wandering haplessly into your photographs like befuddled cattle. But in this increasingly crowded anthropic landscape, novel discovery is becoming more an art form based on perspective rather than a guaranteed benefit of travel. 

This was a hard pill for me to swallow. As a kid I was fed a steady middle-class suburban diet of National Geographic and Travel Channel documentaries that filled me to bursting with expectation. All you have to do, they sang to my wanderlust, is step beyond your known universe, and the benevolent travel gods will instantly bless you with excitement and novelty. I too could discover new species of Peruvian birds unknown to science, or find a secret Parisian café that would be Michelin-starred if anyone but the locals knew about it! The opportunities would be so thick on the ground that I would practically stumble over them! I couldn’t wait to go.

As a teenager I began experimenting with gateway travel by sticking my toe in the shallow end. I spent a few weeks living with a German family being generally delighted by castle ruins and Nutella, and then a few months in Australia being generally delighted by coral reefs and TimTams. I was delighted, but then I’d expected to be delighted. I’d expected to love clambering about in ancient ruins and snorkeling over technicolor reefs, had in fact been building up preconceived expectations about these exact experiences in my head for years. It was all very fun, but it wasn’t particularly life-altering. Besides discovering that I am generally not delighted by Vegemite nor spiders the size of my face, I didn’t achieve much by way of personal novel discovery. 

Rhine River << D E L I G H T E D >> Great Barrier Reef

As a marginally wiser adult, I graduated to the high-dive and submerged myself deep into the expat lifestyle. I changed my focus and went abroad looking to discover something more significant than the pure hedonism I’d engaged in so far. I was determined to discover inner stability and peace, and thought maybe those dangerous sirens would be silenced once and for all if I just shoved all my belongings into the proverbial canoe and followed them. But it seemed that every time I uprooted my life and moved to a new country, those damn fish-women would shift with me, so that they were always calling from just out of reach, from Turkey or Ireland or Madeira. If living in a foreign country was not enough to quell my wanderlust, what on earth did it actually expect?

On Expectations

While I was living in San Carlos de Bariloche, I met a young North American couple on vacation who expressed disappointment about the number of basic amenities that were available in the city. To be clear, they were lamenting that there were too many basic amenities, and that this was somehow ruining their trip because they’d expected Patagonian life to be rougher. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the locals would agree that having electricity and running water was indeed overly luxurious. I also had to wonder what exactly this couple had expected. A gaucho outpost plucked from the 1850s, perhaps, or a llama train to give them a ride into the mountains? 

Wanderlust, like the wild animal it is, abhors a cage. It wants to roam free in the world with little restriction. Preconceived expectations are the functional equivalent of titanium bars, and these mental restrictions are forged by myriad sources. Travel advertisements and photographs taken from strategic angles are some of the more obvious offenders, but even word of mouth, related personal experience, and personal dreams can help build the cage. The documentaries never told me that a highway now sits right next to Stonehedge. The commercials failed to reveal that the mighty Niagara Falls had long ago been encroached upon by a gauntlet of tacky tourist traps. The North American couple’s dreams apparently hadn’t included a modern Patagonian city.  We go to these places expecting to find them exactly as we have always pictured them in our heads, and are sorely disappointed when they all inevitably fail to live up to our impossible, and very personal, expectations.

Which is not to say destinations that inspire lofty ideals are always a disappointment. I loved Stonehenge despite its modern accoutrements. Venice, Istanbul, Dubrovnik, Queenstown, Banff National Park: these are some of my favorite places, even though they have been waypoints along the beaten path for a long time. They are predictably inundated with tourists and the homey comforts that always spring up around them, the weedy seeds of commercialism having hitched a ride in on visitors’ boots. People love to vilify the beaten track, but the destinations along its labyrinthine route have good reason to be popular. Being victims of their own fame is rarely a good enough reason to skip them entirely.

What highway?

At some point I started to see the bars of the expectation cage for what they really were. I stopped obsessively researching destinations before I went. I gave up guide books and avoided tourist information booths, opting instead to follow the whims of my senses and hand the navigation reins over to my wanderlust. By putting no cage around the beast, I found that it was suddenly content to just be, like a lioness perched on a boulder looking out over an open savannah. Any destination will have its downsides and ugly bits. By simply not forcing a place to fit within my ideals, I started to see any negative aspects as facets of a real place, rather than letting them cloud my perception of the overall gem. 

Having no idea what to expect means I am generally in awe of whatever I do stumble across. In Bruges I once wandered into a normal-looking church, since churches are usually filled with stunning architecture and famous art that everyone can view for free. I made it one single step inside the doorway of this particular church and froze in my tracks, waiting for my brain to confirm what my eyes had found. Yep: there in the middle of the empty church sat a woman on a wooden swing, its support cables stretching all the way up into the gloomy heights of the rafters. As she swung in slow motion across the church like the pendulum of a great grandfather clock, paper airplanes engaged in a dogfight before her, thrown by another group of visitors back where the solemn pews once sat. This redundant church (called Heilige Magdalenakerk, or Church of St Magdalene) had been turned into a free interactive modern art exhibit, and if my feet had simply turned in a different direction I would never have known that it existed. 

Discovery is meant to be unexpected and organic. Wanderlust needs to be let free to experience a place as it really is – in other words, authentically.

On Authenticity

I spent the summer of 2015 working from canoes in Nebraska’s Niobrara River, a relatively wild tributary to the Missouri River. There were entire stretches where we’d see little to no evidence of humanity, our entire world bounded solely by the endless flowing water and the eagles soaring overhead as they’ve done for millennia. Every few weeks, though, as we floated around a particular riverbend deep in the wilderness, the sound of drums would abruptly thunder down from the bluffs and gallop across the water. The sound would arrest my entire being, and I had no choice but to pause and listen with my oar hovering in midair. I would stare up into the impenetrable forest of the Reservation, unable to see the natives but viscerally aware of their presence. I let the current carry me until the distant pounding blurred with the susurration of the river, and only then was I able to paddle on.

Almost a decade prior, I visited a rainforest theme park near Cairns, Queensland, a relatively tame corner of Australia. The usual suspects were present: free-roaming kangaroos lounging around waiting to be hand-fed, sleepy koalas being passed around like eucalyptus-scented bricks for the sake of tourist photos. The advertised capstone of this paid experience was an aboriginal music and dancing ceremony. Painted aboriginal men perched on a covered stage in the middle of a freshly-clipped lawn and we tourists spread out within easy viewing distance around them. They skillfully beat drums and circle-breathed into didgeridoos and taught elated audience volunteers how to hop about like flightless cassowaries. I was 19 at the time, so I was absolutely thrilled by the whole shebang, despite and maybe partly because of the familiar atmosphere afforded by the theme park. 

Both were novel cultural experiences to me. The former in the American hinterlands was of the organic sort, something I’d literally floated into rather than sought or expected, and the raw authenticity of it shook me. The latter in Australian suburbia was a carefully orchestrated performance by paid employees for the sole benefit of tourists, and while I enjoyed it, the experience didn’t stick. The power of the ceremony had been diminished when it had been plucked from its spatiotemporal origins and put on display, like a wildflower bouquet picked from a meadow and left to wither in the center of a dining room table.

<< Niobrara River ^^ Kangaroos at Rainforestation >> Piping Plover chicks on the Missouri River

Authenticity is a high that modern travelers chase to satiate wanderlust. If we must see and climb and experience things that thousands of tourists have visited before us, we at least want those experiences to be real. But in a similar vein to the wanderlust it seeks to soothe, authenticity is not something that happily conforms to expectation. Imposing expectation on authenticity is how we end up with rainforest themeparks where all the dangerous bits are carefully kept outside the fence. It’s how we get online schedules predicting when geysers will erupt and how we get visitors who forget that a city is more than just a place to fulfill personal vacation dreams. When we pave over the authenticity of a place with our collective expectations, we slowly start to turn it into the very beaten path we were trying so hard to avoid in the first place.

Authenticity is unpredictable, inexplicable; it’s not always positive, and is sometimes downright unpleasant. It might be breathtaking, like when I waited on the shoulder of a frigid, cloud-soaked volcano until the mist finally parted and I could see into the valley beyond. It can be disgusting, like getting whacked in the face with inflated pig bladders in the Black Forest or eating freshly harvested raw bivalves. It can be small joys like spotting wild tree kangaroos at night in the rainforest (look them up, they’re adorable) or huge and life-changing, like meeting a stranger from the opposite corner of the world and discovering that your souls harmonize. It turns out those televised whispers from my childhood were right after all: the travel gods can decide to lay blessings at your feet at any moment. But these are trickster gods, just as ready to deliver a six-hour carferry delay in Tierra del Fuego as they are to drop a wild toucan in front of you. The trick to fully appreciating the value of these enigmaic gifts is to never try to guess when they will arrive or to expect them to take any specific form. Being open to the possibility of their existence is enough.

Ongoing

So here I am, on a mapped world with a beaten track that still manages to be filled with inexplicable authenticity, trying my best to let my wanderlust roam free (while keeping an eye on it so it doesn’t chew up the couch whenever it gets bored). Like a ringing in my ears it seems I can always hear the siren song, even after so much time spent living and wandering abroad. When I can no longer ignore it, I go, but I try to bring along as few expectations as possible. I wander the streets of great cities with no particular destination in mind, keeping moving but letting the place reveal itself organically to me. My existence becomes futureless, pastless, tied exclusively to the second hand. Rapid and constant decision-making occupies the over-analytical part of my brain that’s normally so hyperactive, allowing the rest of my mind to open and my creativity to cavort out, to play.

In such a state, dazed by wanderlust and with a head full of wonder, I become a willing plaything of happenstance. Just as I once went on a whale-watching cruise and didn’t see so much as a fish, I know there’s never a guarantee that I’ll actually find anything out there. I just have to believe – like those erstwhile Indonesians did when they dreamed of an Australia they didn’t know existed – that something real exists, somewhere out there. And that, right there, is why I keep letting the wanderlust win. That’s why I took up the mantle of doing the batshit crazy explorer thing. I go to inspire my dreams rather than enforce them. I go for the unexpected risky authenticity of it all, for the sake of being and remaining open to the possibilities of this world.

And I forever follow the siren song, because the song comes from me.

The world isn’t calling to me; I am calling to the world. My wanderlust is just the one sitting at attention up on its uncaged perch, ears cocked to the horizon as it listens for the echo.