In early July, The Telegraph sent a bunch of travel writers out to write post-lockdown travel stories, many around the UK, a few abroad. The commissioned writers inundated social media with the hashtag #GreatEscape. There was something undeniably exciting about it. A dip in COVID-19 numbers afforded us the cautious journeys of this #GreatEscape: a return to pubs; hotel check-ins over plexiglass barriers; lazing about on quiet Mediterranean beaches.

None of it had real legs, as we now know, and the legacies of that burst of summer travel have been mostly negative. European summer holidays were partially responsible for a boom in infections in the late summer and autumn in many European countries. But even at the time, it didn’t quite feel right. The initiative was a response to what was allowed, not what was smart or cautious in terms of COVID-19 risk. I skimmed those tweets, watched those videos, and read the resulting articles with a sense of dread.

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On the one hand, there should have been greater emphasis over these last few months not on what lies in wait for us once things are back to normal but rather on two different but related subjects: [1] How to travel during COVID-19 with as little risk as possible to oneself and others; and [2] how to reconceptualise travel altogether, to make living through the pandemic easier and more joyful.

In the first category, we needed more stories about RV and campervan holidays, camping, properly sanitised rentals, and hotel accommodations – suites, cottages, whatever – with private entrances. We needed more pieces like this one by Stuart Emmrich, which really commits to masks and outdoor dining throughout, and discusses how travel has changed in detail. Less fantasy, more nitty-gritty, more attention to navigating life and travel responsibly. Leading travel sections might have highlighted staycation pieces that were actually about staying in place, or very nearby, avoiding public transportation and travelling by private auto, bicycle, or foot, and emphasising new ways to remain outdoors. We might also have spent less time freaking out about people on beaches or in forests and more time steering people away from indoor dining and boozing. Instead, in the Anglophone travel media at least, the predominant emotional undercurrents have been impatience and expectation. And this makes sense – I breathe impatience myself these days. Avid and occasional travellers alike are ready to travel. But it turns out that what we want and what we can responsibly have are not the same thing.

Adjacent to this, some travels are unavoidable, and people need to know how to make these journeys in as safe a manner as possible. Exposure mitigation stories like this one and this other one on flying are helpful. We need similar stories about travelling on buses and in taxis, both of which are very likely considerably riskier in COVID-19 terms than sitting on a short-haul flight.

The second category: how do we reconceptualise travel for the moment? Are there ways to recapture the excitement, the novelty, the sensory pleasures of travel at home – or close to home?

I came across this extraordinary article published in November in Die Tageszeitung the other day, written by Christel Berghoff and Edith Kresta, titled Tourismus neu denken: Reisen als sinnliche Erfahrung (Rethinking tourism: Travel as a sensual experience). Berghhoff and Kresta, influenced in part by political economist Maja Göpel, look at tourism as a form of identity creation: the travel experience has become about who we are as people – both an extension of the self and the construction of it. As here:

Vielleicht ist reisen wertvoller, als man gemeinhin denkt. Nicht als Konsumprodukt und Lifestyle, sondern als sinnliche Erfahrung, als Empfindung von intensiver Körperlichkeit, Lebendigkeit und Erotik. … Das Reisen hat uns substanzielle Selbsterfahrungen ermöglicht, an unterschiedlichen Orten, die auf uns zurückgewirkt haben und sich in unsere Wahrnehmungsweisen und unser Selbstsein eingeschrieben und ungemein bereichert haben.
My translation, which might leave something to be desired:
Perhaps travelling is more valuable than is commonly thought. Not as a consumer product and lifestyle, but as a sensual experience, as a sensation of intense physicality, vitality, and eroticism. … Travelling has made it possible for us to be aware of ourselves in a range of places; these places in turn impact us and inscribe – and immensely enrich – our ways of perceiving ourselves and being who we are.

In the years leading up to the pandemic, the authors write, travel gradually became more and more about immediate gratification, about straight-up consumption and ticking off expectations, all while the climate emergency surged. They ask: what if we rethink travel culture to focus on the senses? They point to the beach as a site where all our senses are activated, where there is freedom of movement, where time can only be wasted. There are good, self-evident reasons why people love beaches – these sensations are gifts. Where else might these sensations be located? The article leaves readers by suggesting travel of longer duration, and of access to local nature via forests, hiking trails, and cycling paths.

Berlin-based LOST iN city guides put out four issues this year, but instead of their traditional focus on individual cities and the creatives inhabiting them they shifted gears to embrace different topics: cooks, vegetables, and exercise & well being. They also released a notebook (issue 0), urging readers to “get lost in a world you can create”. What’s so interesting about these issues in the context of Berghoff and Kresta’s article is that they relocate novel experiences and enjoyment associated with travelling to other places and drop them into our more limited, homebound lives. The sensuality – honestly, I’d prefer a different word – associated with travel is given a new lease on life in a very local, even strictly domestic, context.

What is important about all of this, as the end of the pandemic is on the horizon? Right now, we don’t know and are not fully able to grasp how climate change will alter our travels in the coming decades and beyond. Nor do we know what sorts of limitations around travel we might encounter in the coming years – beyond geopolitics and climate, there is the natural limitation of old age. It might well be a good idea to develop our ability to achieve certain forms of personal satisfaction – cultural shifts, novel sensations, new experiences – at home as well as on the road. (I might mostly be talking to myself here, admittedly.)

Here are some ways to rethink travel:

– Exploring pockets close to home: the places we ignored or didn’t ever properly notice.

– Developing the ability to be excited about familiar things and places that are not, on the surface, extraordinary.

– Learning to find novelty and the unexpected in familiar places.

– Embarking on very detailed, careful wanderings.

– Recognising that even homogeneous places have their own, local forms of diversity, and seeking them out.

– Trying to recreate the sensations of travel at home.

– Building on initiatives like the Bureau of Unknown Destinations and Latourex, which launched the Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel.

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The great news is that this pandemic will come to an end, and sooner than it now feels it will. We already have three very good vaccines and a fourth, Novavax, has just entered stage 3 clinical trials. The world will make it out of this terrible time, even if many of us individually will not. But we are changed people. It remains to be seen how we will return to travel – let alone how the travel industry will be re-established.

Years ago someone I care about told me that he had once been deeply anxious and asked for and was prescribed anti-anxiety medication. He took the medication for a while and then stopped. The medication didn’t nullify his anxieties but it did give him, just briefly, the realisation that he could choose to think about his life in a different way, that his particular constellation of anxiety-producing thoughts, his anxious internal realities, could be considered from other angles.

I wonder if the COVID-19 pandemic might end up functioning a bit like this, as a mechanism for sensing that we can travel differently, that we can look for different experiences and encounters when we travel, and that we might dig just a tiny bit deeper to understand which needs we are trying to fulfill by travelling.

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But wait! There’s more. In 2018 I launched a magazine called Fields & Stations. It spent 2020 on temporary hiatus and will resurface in early 2021. The issue after the just-completed one will be devoted to some of these questions, and I’m still looking for contributors. Feel free to get in touch: fieldsandstations@gmail.com

And Happy New Year!