#14: The Internet Transformed Me From Traveler to Tourist
Looking back on journeys in Croatia, Slovenia, and Montenegro, I wonder if it is now impossible for my mind to ever again be so free from the Internet
Above: Dubrovnik, Croatia (all photos are my own)
February 2009. Dubrovnik would be the fourth city I’d ever visited alone as a “tourist.” But this was a label which I shunned and even dreaded at the time. I preferred the more romantic title of “traveler.” So, apparently, did the American guy I met on the bus from Split. Like me, he had yet to find a place to sleep in Dubrovnik. He told me that this was because he was not a tourist. He was a traveler. Soon he found out that I, too, lacked plans for my own accommodation. Please with my lack of preparation, he bestowed on me that holy label of “traveler,” as if upgrading me from squire to knight.
The tourist, we agreed, is a person who plans things. The tourist cares deeply about comfort and luxury on the road, always keeping the familiar close at-hand rather than fully embracing novel experiences. He is eager to check off all the items in the guidebook. He books hotels and tours in advance, sticking aloofly to the well-trodden paths, standing out instantly as foreign to all around him. He clutches in his hands a tightly structured itinerary, with activities for each day and even every hour. The tourist is more likely to know something surface-level about his destination, since he planned to be there rather than spontaneously arriving. The tourist does not think of himself as being in the midst of some immersive odyssey through distant lands. He is just on vacation trying to have fun, ideally surrounded the whole time by people he already knows or by people with a similar background. Absorbing the local culture is one component of his entertainment. But it is really just like being at Epcot. The strange, alien people he meets are like the incarnate cartoon characters with whom kids take pictures at Disney World. It is almost unheard of for a tourist to travel alone.
But a traveler will go virtually anywhere and lacks an advanced itinerary. As much time as possible is left unstructured. The traveler’s mind is open to abandoning plans entirely in favor of impulsively going to the bus station and heading to a different country or a different city with hardly any idea what to expect there. The point is exploration, assimilation, and learning. When asked why he is going to some place or other, the traveler has no real answer to the question. He is going because he is a traveler and he needs to go somewhere. He is going because his very identity depends upon the unceasing expansion of his horizons. He must accumulate more tales of enlightening encounters with variegated natives whom he meets along the road. For the traveler, the locals he encounters are less like cartoon characters and more like un-contacted tribes, within which he seeks to integrate for a while. In the traveler’s ideal, his initial starting point is one of total ignorance about the destination, like the first human to have ever set foot on a desolate Iceland. He aspires to wake up each morning with no idea where he will end up that day. The stronger his ignorance about the discoveries to come, the more dopamine will be released by his cartographic and expeditionary pursuits. There will surely be days when no one back home even knows where he is. He will be lost, he hopes, maybe somewhere in the mountains far away.
“Tourists,” wrote the great travel writer Paul Theroux, “don’t know where they’ve been. Travelers don’t know where they’re going.”
Yearning maniacally to feel as if I were moving through the thick fog of an uncharted world, I was pleased to have no idea where I would be sleeping once I arrived in Dubrovnik. It enabled me to believe more easily in the truth of my mythologies. This is the final factor separating the traveler from the tourist. The traveler harbors a self-aggrandizing and partly fabricated narrative which allows him to feel superior to the guy who booked a - *shudder!* - organized tour.
Above: A view from the window seat in the Split-Dubrovnik bus
I was better than the organized-tour guy. Not only because I didn’t have a lanyard around my neck, but also because I couldn’t even name anything specific I wanted to see in Dubrovnik, save for its legendary walls. I had heard bits and pieces about it from other travelers in Split and Ljubljana, but beyond that I was simply going to Dubrovnik because I’d seen it on an online list of “top places to go in Croatia.” And because the whole basis of my trip was that I had booked a flight back to Germany from Bosnia. I needed to get to Sarajevo so I could board that plane. Thus, unlike the tourist, I was a sophisticated and daring adventurer, boarding buses to cities I’d hardly heard of before without anything pre-booked. I wanted to arrive knowing almost nothing about what I would see there, enhancing the wonder. Freed from the control of the totalitarian tour guide, I would authentically absorb the local environment.
Assuming, at least, I really wanted to subject myself to what I’d heard about the locals’ cruelties. Many travelers had complained to me about the insufficient hospitality displayed by the Croats. They are disillusioned, it was said, by the hordes of tourists who descend each summer upon these mystically alluring Adriatic coasts. The ungrateful Croat natives, unappreciative of the employment provided them by tourist-supported hotels and restaurants, were now always plotting some sort of scheme to rip off the unsuspecting visitor. “I really don’t like Croatians,” a British guy told me in the capital, Zagreb. “You’ll see. They are awful. Don’t trust them.” Can’t fault them for it, I thought. It’s the tourists who are to blame, not travelers like us.
Above: Split, Croatia
In Split, I hardly cared to test these theories about Croatian hospitality. The city was so physically beautiful that I simply walked around aimlessly for two days, taking in the aesthetics of the Roman Emperor Diocletian’s ancient retirement palace. I had hiked up into the hills overlooking the city, where I savored views over the old town.
Now I took pleasure in a sweeping view of the Adriatic Sea as the nearly empty bus hurdled along the Croatian coast. My fellow passengers were mostly other backpackers. Some alone like me, others seated beside friends and significant others. I suppose there might have been a few Croatians on board, but this was clearly a route well-trodden by Anglospheric gap-year kids.
That’s where I struck up a conversation with the Orange County native who acknowledged me as a fellow child of our revered Lord and Patron, His Holiness St. Christopher. And I coveted the blessings of the knighting ceremony he granted me. Together, we aggrandized and mythologized the scope of our glorious adventures.
I was of course eager for this Real Traveler’s approval. Unlike me, he was here on a break between semesters during a year-long study abroad. He wasn’t even in school at all. In fact, he was taking a year off university to travel the whole world for twelve months. “My parents say it’s worth more than them paying for a year at a university,” he explained. Like me, he was 21, or maybe 20. And also like me, he lacked any pre-booked accommodation. We both had our Lonely Planet guide books, which said it would be fine to just find a place to sleep once we got to the bus station.
We got off the bus in Dubrovnik. Well, not really in Dubrovnik. Or I guess technically it was still Dubrovnik. But it was a 45-minute walk outside the old town where the cool walls are. At the bus station, crowds of shouting old people surrounded us. They pressed into our faces the laminated images of the sketchy and unappealing lodgings which they could offer us. They shouted that all the hostels and all the hotels were sold out. We pushed through the crowd at first, intent on finding something closer to town. But two elderly women, eager for our cash and sensing our indecision, followed us relentlessly. Soon, we agreed to fork over some money and sleep in their house.
This is the real way to travel, I told myself. Who needs a hostel in the old town near all the tourist shit? I was going to experience the real Croatia, was I not?
We followed the ladies toward their house. There, they set us up in our room, from which it was at least an hour-long walk to the old town. And although the ladies had insisted they had “heat,” it was freezing that night. We continuously boiled water in a small pot. We placed this between our small twin beds in the hopes that the steam would keep us warm.
During the day, we walked to the old town. There, in the restaurants and cafes and museums most frequented by tourists, we spent absolutely all of our time. We dared not leave the shadows of those beautiful historical landmarks. We resisted forsaking the stunning views over the Adriatic until it was too dark to see beyond the shore’s immediacy. Only once darkness had finally fallen could we regretfully return to our distant and uncomfortable lodgings.
Above: Stradun, main street in Dubrovnik
While we were walking down Dubrovnik’s central artery, I unexpectedly spotted two acquaintances who were studying with me in Freiburg, Germany, where I was attending university that year. I had just run into them in a hostel in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. It was an experience to be repeated throughout my many travels in the Balkans: recognizing the same backpackers repeatedly in different locations on a common, well-trodden circuit around the former Yugoslavia.
The four of us wound up spending much of the day together. We explored the walls, went on a guided tour of the city, hung out in coffee shops, and walked along the wintery edges of the sparkling and chilly Adriatic Sea. We saw the bullet holes which the Serbs had left behind in the 90s, a surreal reminder that this Mediterranean paradise had recently been in a war zone.
We told my Freiburg acquaintances about the living conditions in the room we were renting from the old ladies. This sparked great amusement and laughter from two boys who were far more well-traveled at that point than were either of us. These, I thought, were the true gatekeepers who would need to permit me to rest my head in the divine bosom of His Holiness St. Christopher, anointing me as a traveler at last.
“We just walked to the old town and found a hostel,” they said.
After a day or two in Dubrovnik, the four of us spontaneously decided to head to Kotor, Montenegro on a bus together. Once there, we followed the maps from our Lonely Planet guidebooks until we found a hostel that was adequately cheap and minimally comfortable. We walked around the old town and hiked up toward spectacular views over the fjord. My Freiburg acquaintances told us scary stories about overnight train robberies in Eastern Europe, including an occasion where one of them was a victim. They gave me advice for what to do and where to stay once I reached Bosnia, where I’d finally be on my own again.
While the four of us sat in a cafe in Kotor, we realized that no one in our lives even knew what country we were in right now. We didn’t have smartphones, and our cheap cell phones would have incurred heavy charges here. We had already gone several days without any active link to the Internet, indeed without utilizing any channel of communication to the outside world at all. Except for the Californian, who in Dubrovnik was always trying to connect his Macbook Pro to the WiFi of various restaurants. His efforts were an ill omen of the dark future to come, when the Internet would prevent us from ever again feeling as far away as we did that day. But once we were in Kotor, waxing lyrical about our isolation, even he joined us in refraining from sending home any updates. Thus he too could partake in the happiness of no one knowing what country we were in. I had not even planned on going to Montenegro at all. I had intended to go straight to Bosnia from Dubrovnik. I relished this spontaneity.
Of course, I was aware that I seemed to have deviated from my initial project of traveling alone and self-directed. Being with people I already knew from Freiburg, taking their advice, following in their footsteps - it seemed like a knock-off. I wanted to be exclusively with strangers. I wanted to make new friends with other travelers. Fortunately, I was on my own again after Kotor, from which I went by bus to Bosnia.
Above: Kotor, Montenegro
A year and a half later, on an overland trip from Germany to Armenia, I was determined to maintain a higher level of independence than I had possessed in those early days. To be sure, I often was alone on the road the first time. But I wanted this new trip to involve being entirely self-directed and truly separated from home for months, not simply days or weeks. Meeting someone in the morning and then sharing a private room with them in the evening would ideally be a very ordinary experience throughout my trip, and it was. My independent and solo arrival at every hostel would be a new opportunity to make a new group of friends. I would be far away, I resolved, from everyone I knew, immersed only in my immediate environments and without any distractions that might pull my consciousness outside of these. Without a smartphone, that turned out to be extremely easy. And I enjoyed the knowledge on certain days that no one in America even knew what country I was in.
Arriving in Ljubljana, Slovenia in the summer of 2010, I introduced myself quickly to the first people I encountered in the hostel. The four of us - two solo travelers and one couple - then spent the day together exploring the city and sharing meals. I would repeat this process countless times in the destinations to come. I loved waking up every few days in a new bed, surrounded by new people and a new group of friends, in a new city or a new country, eventually even on a new continent. Putting myself in these situations where I needed to be open to new social experiences and new relationships was a central part of why I was so eager to travel alone. It was like I was a completely different person when I was on the road - extroverted and confident with strangers, easily making new friends wherever I went.
Each of those groups felt so important and close, and yet each of them dissolved forever. But every time it was worth it, even if only for the sake of the memories we would always share. Sometimes I think about these people who are out there. I’ve lost touch with nearly all of them. These were mostly friendships of a particular moment, intense when they existed yet finding no ground once the surreal reality of a shared isolation so far away from home had dissolved. Still, I take solace in the fact that, if somehow I ran into them, we’d still share something. And if I never see them again, even then we’ll always share something, something special and sacred. A wondrous bond with another human being is precious no matter how long it lasts.
Above: Ljubljana, Slovenia
Thinking back on those experiences is a bit haunting to me now. Something was different, and not just my age or hormones or knowledge about the world. Something about the nature of my consciousness itself was different. The fundamental way in which I experienced my surroundings was different. It’s a way of being which I feel like I can never have again. Even when I travel alone now, it doesn’t come back.
Back then when I was traveling, when I was constantly surrounded by new groups of people, it was as if the world back home had temporarily dissolved and no longer really existed for any of us. We were all connected in a dream together, never to see each other again once we’d woken up. But as long as we were dreaming, we were unable to be present with anyone but each other. The travel dream was all there was, and there were very few methods by which we might communicate with anyone outside that isolated dream world. This was a sensation I found quite addicting, like I was lost somewhere, like I had truly disconnected. I was drenched only in the moment; my mind was saturated only by the immediate reality around me.
But now behold the omnipresent smartphone, which comes with me when I travel and can link me in a millisecond with anyone I want. Suddenly on many trips, I have found myself wanting not just my close friends but apparently nearly everyone to know where I am. I feel compelled to integrate a virtual global network into my physical surroundings. The moment is no longer one of far-away isolation, or of separateness from home. It comes instead to include distant people and their commentaries, even the viewpoints of people I have not seen in a decade. All reality suddenly seems augmented, as the space around me expands to include the globe, and even minor news events from across the ocean are conveyed to me in meme format.
This global network reaches out to me whenever I seek to ignore it. It shoots text messages, social media updates, and news headlines right into my pocket, incessantly demanding my attention. It seems impossible to truly be so far away from home like I was over long periods back then. Wherever I go, I am besieged by the instantaneous influence of people across the ocean. It is now as if my mind can never truly and only be where I physically am, as if my brain is already somehow living in a virtual reality which follows me. It pursues me no matter where I go on vast the surface of the Earth.
Before, if I was traveling alone, the environment around me and whatever books I had brought along were the only inputs which might enter my mind. I had minimal access to communicate with home. Except for when I was willing to go through the hassle of using a desktop computer at either a hostel or Internet cafe. But that usually seemed like a waste of time unless I was conducting research for future legs of my trip.
So I went days on-end without any kind of interaction with anyone from back home. No texts, no phone calls, no social media updates. For most of my nearly 12-week overland trip from Germany to Armenia in the summer of 2010, I successfully banned myself from checking Facebook, even on the desktop computers at hostels. I sensed then that even the briefest Facebook checks would distract me from being present throughout my trip. Thanks to my efforts to separate myself from the virtual reality which would later consume me, I only had the people around me. I made the most of that, building brief friendships in a matter of minutes. I was blissfully ignorant of the nightmare future to come, when social media would find its way into my literal pants.
Above: Sunset view of Dubrovnik, Croatia
Could I not have that immersive experience again by simply deleting social media from my phone and deactivating all my accounts, particularly while traveling? I have done so. But even when I do that, it is still not quite the same. Because it’s not just the obvious fact that social media nurtures a sense of pressure to post pictures. It’s not just the repulsively instinctual finger movements geared toward checking the likes.
It goes beyond social media. It’s everything about mobile phone technology itself. Back then, there was no WhatsApp in my pocket over which someone might send me updates and photos from thousands of miles away. There was no possibility of instantly sending a text to a friend back in America. There were no news headlines buzzing in my pants, urging me this instant to read about a school curriculum controversy in Virginia. I couldn’t have even laid eyes upon the news at all unless I sat on the desktop computer at the hostel or bought a local newspaper on the street.
There are too many forces now that pull me away from wherever I am, and all of them come from the same source. There are too many things to pay attention to in my pocket, almost none of which have anything to do with the physical reality around me. I fear sometimes that the very nature of my consciousness has been computerized or somehow dehumanized. Not just when I was traveling, but even simply in the context of my ordinary day-to-day life. I am afraid that true immersion into my environment is no longer possible, at least not if it is to be sustained over the course of weeks and months rather than for a few hours while I have airplane mode on.
It used to be that the airplane itself was a refuge for the weary, but now the Internet is there too. Once landed in a foreign country, many travelers now consider buying a local SIM card to be a priority task. But even if they resist this, WiFi is everywhere.
With the Internet permanently lording over some substantial domain within the traveler’s mind, none of the relationships and none of the experiences on her trips can ever be the same as they once were. The mere idea of a truly immersive experience, in the sense of one which extends itself over the course of several days and leaves the traveler’s mind firmly saturated only by the immediate reality around her, is now lost forever to a disturbingly recent past. Fewer and fewer people even remember that past, and those of us who lament its loss sound increasingly like melodramatically conservative elders. We hypocritically belittle the young for their addiction to the technologies which we ourselves were the first to buy.
The whole concept of a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveler” has always contained a certain level of absurdity. But now the “traveler” might truly be extinct, at least as once idealized in terms of an adventurer far away from home, entirely alone and disconnected. Today’s most typical traveler knows intellectually that she is thousands of miles away from home. And she might have to deal with time-zone differences to set up a FaceTime. But with communication so technologically easy, to what extent can she actually feel like she is thousands of miles away? To what extent can any Internet addict feel that way again?
The ideal “traveler” is now a glamorized digital nomad who lives off her blog and her social media accounts. She is constantly posting pictures of the food she is eating in Italy, the castles she is visiting in Germany, the champagne she is drinking in France. To be a great traveler is to be recognized as such on Instagram. It is to realize the dream of becoming an influencer living off ad dollars, constantly online but forever freed from the dreaded workplace. The travel industry itself, meanwhile, is now a crucial component of capitalism’s self-care industrial complex, with its unceasing online promotion of consumerism. The full-time traveler is now essentially inseparable from the Internet - partly because it is visibility on the Internet which provides existential meaning, and partly since the Internet itself enables her lifestyle. And yes, of course I am extremely jealous of her.
Perhaps the entire preceding interpretation of the world is simply an elaborate fiction I have concocted so I can blame all my issues on the Internet. Why? In order to excuse the social anxiety which leaves me terrified of interacting with new people.
But social anxiety was never an obstacle for me on the trips I took twelve years ago. I had no issues introducing myself to new people or telling new people about myself. Now, unless I have a close friend beside me for backup, there is almost no quotidian behavior more horrifying to me than speaking honestly with a stranger. Before the smartphone, this was something I found relatively easy and natural. Or at least I more easily recognized it as something I needed to do if I wanted to have any friends. Now, the smartphone acts as a catalyst for me to give in entirely to my social anxiety.
These days, I carry digital manifestations of my friends around with me in my pocket. This is a new kind of reality which enables, encourages, and facilitates my tendency to recoil from nearby strangers. Because now when I feel even just a little bit scared to socialize with new people, the Internet beckons me to retreat into the supposed safety of its omnipresent embrace. I quickly yield to any nervousness I feel by scrolling on my phone or texting someone. How many friendships have I lost out on thanks to this socially debilitating addiction? It is sad in those moments to recall the thrill of easily bonding with so many new people on the road. It was that which drew me before to solo travel, and yet now it seems like a psychological impossibility even where I live.
I traveled alone to avoid hiding behind the people I already knew. To prevent myself from even being capable of retreating into my comfort zones. It was scary sometimes, but for that very reason I enjoyed being in situations where it was necessary. That’s what it meant, really, to be a traveler and not a tourist. The difference resided in a greater willingness to uninhibitedly engage with new and unexpected experiences, instead of clinging to whatever plans I had created. It meant being eager for new friendships instead of obscuring myself within those I already had. It meant fully immersing myself into the space around me, whether while traveling or while sedentary, instead of always keeping a chunk of my brain inside the Internet.
Only since 2020 have I significantly reduced the role which telecommunications technology came to hold over me. For several dark years before that, the Internet was the ultimate guardian of the inputs which were permitted to enter my mind. That force seemed to control the very manner by which I might engage with and think about reality itself. “Whatever’s on Facebook, whatever’s on Instagram, whatever memes are trending, whatever the headlines are in The New York Times app, whatever political arguments are happening on the NewsFeed: that’s what you’ll be thinking about, talking about, and writing about today. It is even your duty to engage with it.”
Sometimes, having reduced my dependency, I feel as if I am finally in the sun again. I no longer pass every day beneath the exhausting rows of hideous fluorescent lighting which the Internet provides, while coveting reality’s natural rays. I think I am free.
Then I glance at the sinister iPhone in the corner. It tugs at my consciousness. It demands that I hasten my inevitable return to the hopeless night of the endless scroll. It reminds me that I am just temporarily feeling a more refined imitation of reality’s long-lost sunlight. Even if I escape for a while to the most distant corner of the Earth, the globalized virtual reality will come for me. And it will find me. My brain might never again feel the freedom from the Internet which it enjoyed so long ago.
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All photos by Andrew Jelinek and friends