2020 is our Chance to Travel Local
Perhaps it’s Ryanair’s fault.
The infamous Irish airline frequently serves as a lightning rod for opprobrium but that’s only because we in Europe have such a fetish for filling their flights. They carried 146 million passengers in 2019 and 2020 was due to be even more of a budget-break bonanza. Ryanair has changed how we holiday in Europe but 2020 will be the year we dispense with the notion that travel must be international for it to be worthwhile.
Recent decades have seen Irish people swap Bantry and Bundoran for Bucharest and Bratislava as our horizons relentlessly expand, our tastes grow more cosmopolitan and we demand to travel further, faster and more frequently. When people profess their love of travelling, it is both implied and accepted that this is a love of international travelling. Of experiencing new cultures and sampling alien cuisines, immersing ourselves in the unfamiliar and reveling in the peculiar. Foreign has, by definition, come to mean better. More glamorous and interesting. More worthwhile and beautiful. In our world of budget city breaks and backpacker expeditions we have formed an indelible association between luxury and distance. The further removed from our origin the better as each site grows more grand and enticing in proportion to the air-miles required to reach it. Nothing is a better guarantee of likes, follows and up-votes than a Mayan ruin in a different hemisphere or a quaint temple down a backstreet of Bangalore. Unfamiliarity and novelty are a central part of their appeal, just as critical as their cultural significance, aesthetic form or their pliability to an Instagram filter
But the paradox at the centre of this craze is almost too obvious to mention. Everywhere is foreign to somebody. And everywhere is next-door to somebody else.
Many Irish, including myself, would likely be surprised to hear that over 11 million people visited the Emerald Isle in 2019. That’s almost two tourists per person that actually calls Ireland home. And they didn’t all come for golf, Guinness or Grafton street. It’s a country teeming with tourist traps and we that hail from the Land of Saints and Scholars are likely unfamiliar with a lot of them. I certainly am.
Last Summer I found myself in Glengarriff, a village nestled in the Beara Peninsula. I certainly didn’t arrive by design, my bus having abruptly abandoned me there due to the vagaries of the local timetable. My initial inspection revealed it to be a village of several pubs, a post office and a steady stream of North American tourists heady with excitement to see Garinish island, which I initially struggled to pronounce. I was perplexed. What could possibly draw Canadians to this corner of Ireland? Why do they even know Garinish island exists? How could people from a country that boasts Whistler and the Niagara falls justify a trans-Atlantic flight for what I presumed was a distinctly unremarkable rock in a forgotten corner of the land I call home.
It turns out that Garinish Island is a splendour. A delightful collection of castles, gardens and stunning, mesmeric views. My Canadian companions were enraptured and aghast at the beauty on show and in truth, so was I. However, awe did not enjoy a monopoly on my mood given that it was tinged with more than a little embarrassment. To a fault, Tina from Toronto and Mike from Montreal traded facts about the island’s history and heritage, its exotic flowers and the gamut of viewpoints on offer. I demurred and instead flustered my way through myriad conversations as I tried to mask the fact that the island’s very existence was a recent revelation to me and that I wasn’t even sure whether I was in Cork or Kerry.
And my ignorance extends far beyond Garinish Island (of Cork, incidentally). Until very recently, I had lived my entire life in Dublin but have only been to 5 of TripAdvisor’s ‘Top 10 Dublin Attractions’. In fact I’ve hit a higher proportion of sites in London, Mumbai and Sydney than in the city I’ve called home for 27 years. Although none of those years has been anything like this one.
Coronavirus has been misinterpreted as a reason to abandon dreams of travelling. In truth, this reaction speaks to a poverty of imagination. The virus simply asks us to dream differently. To dream local and dream familiar. Because 2020 may not be the year that you explore the ‘Rose City’ of Petra, nor will it be your time to scale Table Mountain and survey Cape Town from its summit. Such dreams need not be abandoned, but merely postponed.
Local wonders will own this year and when 2021 begins we will likely be glad that they did. It is our time to not just cocoon and quarantine local but, when the time is right, to travel and holiday local as well. I guarantee, no matter where you call home, that your immediate environs have a far richer story to tell than you realise.
They are stories worth hearing so that when we do take to the skies again, we will do so with a more tangible understanding of where we are flying from.
