What Are We Doing Here?

  For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake.

 The great affair is to move. – ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Precisely.

A long time ago, when there were still independent bookstores, I found some little tour books about Soviet cities – Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev – published by the Novosti Press in Moscow. I still have them today.

When I see the odd travel guide to an offbeat destination like Yemen, say, or Gabon, I buy it without even opening the front cover. Far away places are just plain alluring, and the more exotic the better.

But how to find out about them? Lots of travel books detail the author’s vast, grimly accumulated knowledge of this or that historical oddity, and sometimes it’s only tenuously connected to the traveling they’re actually doing. Lengthy explanations of 14^th century funerary rites in Assam, or the surprising mating rituals of arboreal reptiles can grow quickly tedious – and I’m pretty sure it’s not just me.

And on the internet, let’s face it: Nobody cares what Phil and Jenny paid for every hotel room in every town in Andalusia (converted to dollars, to the penny), and nobody wants to read the loving list of every dish at every meal Mr. and Mrs. Kincaid enjoyed on this, their seventh trip to Kerala.

I want to know what I’d find if I hopped aboard a flight somewhere. What’s it like right now?

Since my first meek little trip off the continent, to London in 1984, I’ve poked around odd parts of the planet, mostly with my beautiful wife Mirja, an intrepid Finn I met in Helsinki.

Jeffrey Tayler says that to stay young, we need novelty in regular doses. Within the constraints of our day jobs, Mirja and I have seen little snips of places that previously existed only in books, from Greenland to Madagascar to Papua New Guinea, to Albania just after it threw off totalitarianism.

The stuff here on Common Sense and Whiskey may not always be steeped in history or detail. Sometimes it's more about the trip than the destination, and sometimes the other way 'round. I hope some of the stories make you feel how it felt to be there. In any case, I’m pretty sure everything here is sufficiently unencumbered by ponderous history and unnecessary tram schedules.

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