Hello.
Happy New Year and all that.
Since my last post, I received my uni results and confirmation of passing the Masters of Social Work (Qualifying) degree. I got a High Distinction average, which means a lot to me as I feel like I finally understand academia and have the maturity to make the most out of a university experience. I don’t know what getting good grades will mean for my career, but I guess it reflects how well I engaged with the content of the course.
I also had a holiday to Thailand and Singapore. It was great. I was reminded of why I love travel and Thailand quickly became one of my favourite destinations.
In the lead up to the trip, I watched a handful of travel vloggers on YouTube to get some ideas of places to see and food to try. Navigating these travel vlog channels can be cringey — you have to sift through ‘digital nomads’ with nothing interesting to say, culture-bound Westerners fumbling their way through minor differences, vacuous influencer-types with Good Vibes Only, superficial takes on the places they visit (sometimes these are the same person). Once the YouTube algorithm tweaks to your new interest in videos on South East Asia, you start to see that most vloggers go to the same sites and destinations, try the same types of ‘out there’ food, and title their videos with “Trying the Craziest Fruit In Kuala Lumpur” or “You Won’t Believe How Cheap It Is Here” with a thumbnail picture of them wide-eyed staring at a Durian. Having some insight into how a YouTube creator is obligated to play this game in the attention economy, I understand that unoriginality coupled with audaciousness helps build an audience. It just means that finding people that go to the trouble of filming themselves while travelling and that you actually want to spend time with can be difficult.
This type of research, however, is new to me. I started travelling when twenty minutes at an internet cafe to check emails was the main interaction with the internet while overseas. Sometimes this only happened once every few days. Otherwise, I would go to a bookstore or the library before a trip and skim the pages of Lonely Planet for Things To Do. The travel agent would recommend places, or they’d give you brochures with glossy photos of where to go. Or, you would have someone at your destination to show you around.
Now, you can gaze for hours at Google Maps before you go, clicking on hotels and restaurants and places of interest, checking out reviews, scanning menus, and seeing exactly what the street outside your hotel will look like. On YouTube, you can watch people walking around the districts of the city you’re going to, interacting with locals, showing you the prices, and guiding you through the public transport system. You can watch videos that teach you how to say basic phrases in the language of your host country.
Before I left for my trip I wondered if all this would ‘detract’ from a ‘real’ travel experience — knowing too much about a place before getting there, having too many expectations, or having too narrow expectations based on what’s popular for tourists on the internet. It made me question what I get out of travelling, especially if I can ‘travel’ from the comfort of my home, with all of this information available to me and fifty vloggers all filming mildly different versions of the same tourist spot. I was worried that I would go on my trip and not feel the same excitement I have in the past. Would the holiday be a waste of money? Will I have lost one of my main sources of joy?
The trip began badly, almost confirming these anxieties. I got to the airport hours early to avoid check in and immigration headaches. It went very smoothly and I found myself in the international terminal with four hours to kill. I did my usual thing of milling around the duty free perfumes, sniffing each bottle, deciding on the defining scent of my trip. This holiday it was Issey Miyake’s ‘a drop d’issey eau de parfum fraîche’, which markets as a 'feminine’ scent, but I think is very gender neutral (destroy the binary!). The description of the scent reads: “[it] embodies the adventure of a raindrop”. After spraying myself liberally with the tester, I walked around the terminal checking out the parked planes and watching people. It felt surreal to be finally travelling overseas again. I noted with unease how few people were wearing masks.
We boarded the Qantas flight and then sat on the plane for three hours. I watched the entirety of the movie Bullet Train (2022). Three stars. During this time, the captain let us know that there was a technical issue that engineers were working on. By hour three, the decision was for everyone to get off the plane and do the old “turn it off and on again”. As we exited the plane, flight attendants gave us a debit card with $15 on it to spend in the terminal. We waited another hour before they declared the flight delayed for 24 hours. We had to wait for our luggage to be offloaded and go through immigration to check back into the country. They took non-locals to a hotel in Darling Harbour, while locals were given $100 Cabcharge vouchers — until they ran out of them (I didn’t get one in the end). It was a disaster. A real spanner in the works. I had to change a hotel booking, let another hotel know I would be a day late, and forfeit a flight and rebook with another airline. I would miss an entire day of my holiday and I might not make the tattoo appointment I had made in Bangkok. I started to see this misfortune as a bad omen for the rest of the trip. It almost made me want to stay home.
But I went back to the airport the next day, did it all again. Boarding was delayed an hour, in which time we were told there’d be no inflight entertainment. Thankfully, the reaction from the passengers was a good-natured “lol” as we all scrambled to download podcasts and videos for the 8 hour flight. Then, midway through boarding they announced the entertainment system had been fixed, met with much rejoicing. The other passengers I spoke to all had the same “what can you do” attitude and I was pleasantly surprised to not see any entitled Karen behaviour. This cheered me up and from then on the rest of the trip’s logistics went as smoothly as possible. I even made my tattoo appointment in time, even though I had to go straight there from the airport.
More importantly, I found the same buzz that I have always had from travelling. I reflected on what the buzz was exactly to better articulate it. Generally, being in a new place helps me become present. Getting to know new systems, interacting with new people, new cultural expectations, new languages, finding new places to eat each day, trying new things — it all forces me to concentrate on the here and now. I found it difficult to think about my life back home — to care, even. For the time being, I could just exist and observe myself moving through the world. From the observations on this trip I saw a 38-year-old at peace with himself, pushing himself out of his comfort zone when needed, but feeling no embarrassment about getting things wrong or about his boundaries when it came to calling it a day and retreating back to the hotel. It was simply an enjoyable time being me in a new place. While I thought a lot about how nice it would have been to share some moments, I was content travelling alone.
Besides this zen-like state, I just love the small stuff of travel. Supermarkets and street food stalls. Night markets and metros. Constant excuses to try new drinks from 7-Eleven. Smelling the city air — what combination of flowers, pollution, sewerage, and food is there? Museums, galleries, street art, the globalisation of hipster cafe cultures, free mall concerts with popular local bands I’ve never heard of. Signs with location specific directions, like seating for monks and fines for durians. Advertisements of products from Australia I’d never seen before. Going to a cinema. Spotting different types of birds. Cycling, hiking, wandering around, getting lost, knowing how to ignore friendly strangers with other agendas.
Everything on the trip went well, except for the first and last flights. Across the aisle from me on the return flight a man coughed, maskless, the entire time. I’m sure I saw a guilty look on his face as he glanced at my mask. I write this now COVID-positive. After being a diligent mask wearer the entire trip (along with all the Thai and Singaporean locals), it’s frustrating I couldn’t avoid the cavalier and selfish Westerners on the flight home. At least I am only mildly sick and it’s post-trip and during a quiet time of year.
Still. Gah.
Travel Vlogger YouTube channels that don’t suck:
Oskar and Dan
Thai Talk with Paddy
2Passports 1Dream
If you’re interested, I can write about where I went exactly in another post. I just wanted to reflect on why travel is a constant passion for me and maybe hear what makes it exciting (or a waste of time) for you.
Thanks for reading!
Sam