Number fo words – 1,051

When I travelled in my late teens and early twenties, my only communication with home was by postcard. My parents would reply with letters addressed to, for example, “Poste Restante, Kathmandu, Nepal”.

I still remember the feeling of heading to a central post office and fingering through a huge box of letters in the “S” box in the hope of finding a flimsy airmail missive with a few fragments of news from London. Even more powerfully, I remember the thrill of success – of walking out into a sweltering street buzzing with the sounds of chai-sellers and rickshaw horns, already ripping open an envelope that had flown out to find me from a distant place I could picture in every detail, but had barely thought of for days or even weeks.

International phone calls were prohibitively expensive, with every minute costing the equivalent of a night’s lodging. Compare this to the modern backpacker, selfieing on every mountaintop, sending daily or even hourly updates to family members, friends and acquaintances with details of their journeys, achievements, hotel rooms and meals.

Every traveller throughout history has always stored up anecdotes to surprise or impress the folks back home, but while I had to hold mine in for weeks on end, today’s adventurers have a tendency to behave as if an experience hasn’t actually taken place until it has been shared online, and “liked” by an approving audience.

The idea of the Grand Tour has been part of our culture since the 17th century. We have long accepted that for our moral and intellectual development, a long trip away from home, involving total immersion in languages and customs that are unfamiliar, is essential. To understand the world you have to see more of it than the small corner into which you happen to have been born, spending more time than a mere tourist who passes through in a protected, home-like bubble.

Travel, for the young, ought to be a profound experience which, through cutting us off from everything that has previously been familiar to us, challenges our beliefs and makes us see the world in new ways. But when so many relationships and social support networks are conducted digitally, and with every backpacker hostel from Machu Picchu to Dharamsala offering Wi-Fi, is it actually possible for millenials to cut themselves off from home? What has this done to the nature of travel?

Twenty years ago, I published the novel Are You Experienced?, which the Lonely Planet guide to India (despite being heavily mocked in the book) has hailed as a backpacking classic. It is a satire on young travellers, telling the story of a couple who represent two of the most prevalent responses to the subcontinent. She loves everything and is taken in by every pseudo-mystical hippie she meets on the road; he hates everything, and can barely handle life without First World comforts.

Their romance does not flourish. When they eventually separate, they find themselves utterly alone, cut off from anyone who can offer the slightest word of support, in a country they simply do not understand. This word, “alone”, no longer means what it meant as recently as the nineties.

One of the strangest things about entering your third decade as a professional writer is that your early novels begin to read like historical fiction. When I try to describe the pre-internet era to my own children, I can see in their eyes the same look I gave my grandmother when she described milk being delivered by horse and cart.

Researching an updated version of Are You Experienced? for a screen adaptation I recently stayed in a few backpacker hostels in Rajasthan, and what I saw saddened me. There used to be significant distinction between a holiday, where you took a short break from your routine, and travelling, where you went far away, for a longer time, expecting to return in some way altered by the experience.

Middle-aged tourists want a western-style bubble of air-conditioned buses and continental breakfast buffets, and this is no doubt still sneered at by backpackers; but for the young, the bubble that really matters is social media, and this is a bubble few of them seem willing to step outside.

Wherever you are, from Kerala to the high Himalayas, hostel lobbies will be filled with young people wearing the same Thai-dyed T-shirts and sandals as in my time, eating the same dhal and rice, but instead of reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, they will be staring at screens, updating friends at home on what they’ve done that day, keeping up on the gossip from whatever town, suburb or campus they have supposedly left behind.

A modern traveller will probably be more concerned about whether their room has Wi-Fi than whether it has a bathroom. To be disconnected is unthinkable.  Tourists have their physical bubble; travellers have their virtual bubble. Both groups have one foot firmly planted at home.

So where does this leave the idea of travel as a journey of self-discovery? My novel makes fun of middle class white people who think they have “found themselves” in India, yet two decades on from having mocked this idea, I find myself affectionately nostalgic for it. While I would no doubt still be annoyed by pompous hippies giving off on this subject while sipping bhang lassi in traveller hangouts, it seems a terrible loss that young backpackers bring so much from home with them, via their smartphones and iPads.

However much I may have satirised the notion of “finding yourself”, I do feel that a central purpose of this kind of travel is in some way to “lose yourself”. Through childhood and our teenage years we develop at an astonishing rate, our interests and personalities morphing from year to year, yet among family and friends groups it is easy to feel trapped in an older self.

Part of being young is to feel yourself changing at a faster rate than the people around you want you to change. From the Grand Tour to the Gap Year, this is why it is important to get away – to leave behind parents and friends – to untether yourself from other people’s expectations of who you ought to be.

Excerpted from an article by William Sutcliffe, in the Guardian dated 17-Aug-17