Travel Bugged and Bogged

Most of us are good at a few things and bad at a longer list of other things. I am a bad traveler and I wonder if others share my infirmity.

In the past few months, I have taken trips, one to New Zealand, another to England and Ireland, India and am currently in Peru.. These were the result of invitations to give a talk or participate in a conference, but in each case there was ample time left over to do the things that travelers do.

I tried, but I just couldn’t get the hang of it.

The manifestations of my incapacity were physical, although its root causes were not. In the course of a week’s touring of Ireland, all my usual little ills returned — ­mouth sores, intestinal difficulties (a euphemism), clogged nasal passages, and what one might call “strategic fatigue.” Strategic fatigue sets in whenever I enter a museum (when I saw that the display case containing the Book of Kells was surrounded by other tourists I didn’t have the strength to push myself forward) or when I approach an ancient site (at Clonmacnoise, the location of an ancient abbey, I retreated immediately to the coffee shop and never saw the ruin) or when the possibility of getting out of the car to enjoy a scenic view presented itself (I protested that it would take too much time, or that we needed gas, or something equally feeble).

The one time I tried to be a good sport and a good tourist was at Carrowmore Megalithic Cemetery in Sligo, which, as far as I could tell, consisted of clumps of small rocks placed at inconvenient distances from one another. These rocks were, I was told, tombs and significant stone circles. It was lost on me, but I dutifully trudged around a large circle taking pictures. The reward for my efforts was the discovery later in the day that, sometime during our exercise in archaeological reverence, a backpack containing my ex-boyfriend's clothing and techie gadgets had been stolen from our rental car. That’ll teach me!

It was the fact that my ex-boyfriend was with me on this trip that alerted me to the extent of my problem. Hhe was supposed to have accompanied me to New Zealand, but couldn’t make it at the last moment. I attributed my inability fully to respond to the considerable glories of New Zealand to his absence. Had he been here, I told myself, I could have fed off his enthusiasm and taken pleasure from his pleasure. But in Ireland both his enthusiasm and his sense of pleasure were abundantly visible and still I couldn’t do much more than go through the motions. It’s not that I didn’t recognize the beauty of the landscape or the majesty of the monuments. I couldn’t rise to the level of appreciation they deserved.

Why not? What’s wrong with me? There are two answers to these questions. First, I just don’t care about seeing sights. In London, I ended up at Milton’s burial place by accident. I was there for a concert. Churches, famous squares, wide rivers, forests, cobbled streets, scenic vistas, castles, grand gardens . . . I go Spiro Agnew one better: when I’ve seen one, I’ve seen one too many.

But behind the lack of interest in sightseeing is something deeper and more unsettling. When I ask people what they like about traveling, they usually answer, I enjoy encountering different cultures and seeing how other people live. I am perfectly happy with the fact of other cultures, and I certainly hope that those who inhabit them live well; but that’s as far as it goes.

By definition, a culture other than yours is one that displays unfamiliar practices, enforces local protocols and insists on its own decorums. Some of them even have different languages and are unhappy if you don’t speak them. To me that all spells discomfort, and I don’t see why I should endure the indignities of airplane travel only to be made uncomfortable once I get where I’m going. As for seeing how other people live, that’s their business, not mine.

For a while, I tried to attach my feelings about travel to some honorable moral or intellectual tradition. I recalled some poems by Ben Jonson in which he praises Sir John Roe for the Roman virtue of being always the same no matter how extensively he traveled (”his often change of clime, though not of mind.”) But I had to acknowledge that the springs of my own sensibilities had more to do with parochialism and sloth than with some noble capaciousness of mind. In the end, I just have to admit that I was born without the travel gene, which probably means that I was also born without the curiosity gene, and that I’ll just have to live with it.

Or, rather, my ex-boyfriend will.