The 2022 summer season was rather ugly: Almost nothing worked at the airports, towel wars were fought at the pools, and climate change can no longer be ignored. Traveling isn’t fun anymore, is it?
The 2022 holiday season was known to be chaotic. My suitcase, which I had checked in on my London flight, was not delivered to my home until two months later – just in time to be able to take my sunglasses and rain jacket with me to the USA. I only flew across the Atlantic with hand luggage, as a precaution I left my suitcase at home (note to myself: that’s enough).
In order not to become a victim of the very spontaneous Lufthansa flight cancellations like a friend, I also gave up my booked feeder flight from Hamburg to Frankfurt and took the train. The train station was so overcrowded that security people blocked the platform and didn’t let anyone on it, and so I arrived in Frankfurt quite late. No problem, I had planned a whole night’s buffer because the train is always late.
When boarding in Frankfurt the next morning, I was informed that my ticket to the USA had been canceled because I had not taken the shuttle. After degrading begging, I was finally let on board, but not in the window seat I had booked, but in a lousy middle seat. First, no driver could be found who could push the machine onto the runway during the pushback, and after arrival there were no stairs through which one could have exited.
Before I got there, I had already experienced more thrills than an adventure vacation that included bungee jumping and swimming with sharks.
Traveling is no longer fun
Trouble at every corner and endless stress: traveling is no longer fun. I saw that in the panicked or already dead eyes of other travelers who were trying to deal with the fact that the security line at the airport was 110 kilometers long, their flight was canceled or their luggage was gone.
I discovered a poster at Frankfurt Airport that advertised the construction of Terminal 3 with the claim “Building the Future”. To me, however, the acclaimed new terminal smelled more of the past than the future, of the long-gone golden age of travel. Because where is all this supposed to lead: more flights, overtourism, sell-offs, displacement, environmental destruction? The price of travel is high.
Especially since nowadays we always travel with the knowledge that our vacation contributes to the destruction of the planet – with the CO2 emissions on arrival and departure, the wastage of water and food through pools and buffets in the countries that have been degraded to “vacation spots”, and the displacement of Locals from cities like Venice or Lisbon.
Despite everything: It’s worth it
But it’s not just now that I’m sitting at my desk at home again that I can say: It was worth it. Both trips got me further, got me out of the tunnel of everyday life, which keeps getting narrower and longer as long as you don’t even turn off and take detours. Above all, the encounters have opened my eyes, enriched and inspired me. Experiencing again how people in other countries live, what they think and why, inevitably leads to questioning one’s own certainties. I now know again that it can be perfectly normal and even desirable to have a multiply broken biography, what it does to people when they don’t have a social network, that it feels like a cathedral in a very old forest, and that there is so much more happening in the starry sky than the Evening Star and the Big Dipper.
The world is a better place as long as we don’t stop measuring our ideas and prejudices against reality.
Unfortunately, my memory is like a muscle that goes limp if you don’t exercise it. The memories and insights from past trips are not gone, but they fade and lose their impact over time. That means: I will do it again.
Fortunately, there are forms of vacation that can be enriching for everyone involved. Couchsurfing, for example, or at least accommodation where the money stays with the locals and where environmental protection and social standards are seriously valued. Being out and about by bike or on foot, working on an organic farm like my colleague Franziska Wolffheim did in Provence, and always making contacts, all of that makes sense. But isn’t traveling still a selfish privilege? no I think the world is a better place as long as we are out and about testing our ideas and prejudices against reality.