Immigrants are the only real travelers left

[tom]

Travel was once the domain of the adventurer, the intrepid explorer who dared leave behind all he knew and set off into the Great Unknown with little more than his wits about him.

Today’s generation of travelers have guidebooks to tell them what they should see, do and find, travelers’ checks and credit cards to keep them solvent, networks of hostels and hustlers (ahem, agencies) to arrange their itineraries and a good old return ticket to see them back home safely in time for their new job/university course/Mormon initiation rites.

But the days of hard core travel are far from dead.

As a significant counterweight to the insipidity of consumer travel, there are whole new generations of young people hitting the road to countries where they have little idea of what awaits them, no guidebook and no idea of where or how long they’ll stay. Who are these bold adventurers?

They’re the immigrants who run borders across the world in search of a better life. From Latin Americans dashing across the frontier into the US, to Moroccans clinging to the bottom of trucks to get into Spain, to Africans risking their lives in boats that frequently sink off the shores of Italy, to Bangladeshis who leave house and home to squat on the streets of Bombay, the immigrants are the last great travelers left.

Unlike the smug Gap Year generation, the immigrants have no money, probably no education to speak of and certainly don’t own the kind of passport that gets an approving smile from the police officer who checks their papers. They get beaten up, raped and killed by the tens of thousands each year and are made to feel as welcome as cockroaches on toast.

They encounter cultures entirely foreign to them, look for work without speaking any of the local language and basically ride their luck as best they can, making use of their wits and whatever Fate throws their way. What courage, what determination.

And why do they risk all of this?

Because they have to. There’s no money back home because there’s no work and maybe war. There’s no work and maybe war because of their corrupt governments who do daily business with western governments and corporations, posing for the cameras as they sign new nuclear fuel deals.

The money sent home to families by immigrants abroad amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars and is way, way above all the international aid given by governments across the world.
And all this is done for love.

So the next time you consider the road’s been treating you a bit rough, light a joint and consider what the average Somalian might have to go through if he ended up hitchhiking through your neck of the woods.

[ohio]

It's the truth. Alot of the kids that come up from Honduras or El salvador ride trains across Mexico, face robbery and murder, and come out of it to find a better life here. They'll even scale our fucking wall! Cheers to those with enough balls to die for a dream!

[rocco]

Migrants are indeed the ones who take it the hard way! I've been crossing several times the Libyan/Algerian/Sudanese and Egyptian desert and 3 times we found human skeletons and clothes, which very probably belonged to poor migrants who were trying to cross the desert on board of a truck and have then been abandoned for whatever reason.
What we should think about is how desperate a human being must be to prefer to risk his ass and make his way through the mighty Sahara rather than stay home ...

[jim]

I disagree with this one. Here in California there are tons of migrant workers from Mexico and Central America who usually gain employment in agriculture. I don't think real travel implies it can only be travel due to hardship, although it never hurts to point out the plight of the impoverished billions as mainstream media never does.

The question boils down to where on the human needs pyramid 'traveling' lies: if you're moving for survival, like war refugees, is that traveling? Whereas, if you're wealthy and moving around for your own pleasure and self-fulfillment, eating banana pancakes, is that not 'real travel'?

I don't think migrant Africans or Mexicans if you asked them would say they are traveling.

[ohio]

Yeah, but it's still a great fucking journey, Jim. Most explorers traveled to find riches. It doesn't mean there aren't badasses till out there with white skin and money in their pockets, it's just that immigrants are forced to eat the dirt a little more, if you can dig. It's no better or worse to travel with little or no money, but it's definitely alot fucking different.You see a different side of a society when you're homeless in it, you know. i don't know which is more real. It's been a little while since I was homeless, and it wasn't for very long, so maybe that seems less real to me now. I don't know.

[tom]

i'm sure the migrants wouldn't call themnselves 'backpackers' but travel is as old as the stars and i think it encompasses every form of mvoement, nomadic, commuting, emigration, exploration, the lot.

Either way, they're hitting the road and heading off into new cultures with just their wits about them. I also hit the road to make money abroad and it was still traveling, nothing else would have taken me to the streets of Tokyo to sell fake rolexes, ho, ho.

Watch out soon for a road junky video special on central american migrants jumping the border to the states...

[Redslinger]

The ability to book a return ticket or plan your trip so you're staying in Hostels and not a dumpster is a blessing.

The reason migrants immigrate is to get better jobs and have a better standard of living so they can have the luxeries that us westerners don't appreciate. Not for the sake of traveling.

[jim]

One has to draw the line somewhere. My two cents is that dispossession is not travel, either. The Cherokees forced west on the trail of tears weren't traveling.

This thread does bring up some poignant issues about social injustice though.

[rocco]

I think some of you are missing the point: travel does not refer to the purpose nor to the cause, it is a matter of fact: people move from one place to another for business, pleasure, cultural enrichment, for any other reason, but it is still travelling. No matter why you do it, the fact that you move to a place different from your home/country/culture implies some travelling.

In the very first beginning of the era of travelling it was the herder, the merchant, the trader, the soldier, the slave who covered distances and reached new places. Travelling is about leaving your home, hitting the road and exploring new places, dealing with different cultures, facing the uncertainties of the unknown, which can be fascinating or scaring, positive or negative. The great Arab traveller Ibn Battuta says "I know extasies unknown to the most, and I would never exchange them for any certainty". And who faces the uncertainty and the unknown more than a migrant who leaves sub-saharian Africa, crosses the desert, ends up on the Libyan coast and faces the sea on board of a nutshell to reach Italy or Malta?

[tom]

Absolutely, Rocco.

Travel is about moving. period. Just because it's become a cultural activity and a fashion doesn't give licence of the word to Lonely Planet and co. No more than city traders are the only people who are doing business - farmers subsisting on whatever spare corn they can get a few pesos for are doing the same, even if it's only from necessity.

Check out songs from the dust bowl refugees like Woody Guthrie singing about "Hard Traveling" or gypsy laments about being on the road.