The Information Gap That Vanished

Contrasting the DIY travel of yesterday with today

Our fellow passengers in the DC-3 were all cargo boxes. How my father figured out we could take this plane across Borneo will forever be a mystery to me.

I have many bittersweet memories of traveling thirty, forty, and even fifty years ago, compared to how it plays out today.

It is the same sort of conflicted emotions that come with realizing, after the better part of a lifetime, that as relieved as you are to leave the dumb, embarrassing things you used to do behind, you sorely miss having the freedom of being dumb and still blissfully carrying on.

I traveled long before I was the party responsible for trip planning. But the inevitable stress and uncertainty of what we attempted trickled its way down the family hierarchy, and I was rewarded with the same anxieties. Our first trip of substance, overland from Washington State to El Salvador, was a masterclass in what can be achieved without knowing virtually anything.

My parents can’t be entirely to blame for that. Information was a fickle treasure, rarely appearing when called upon. There was always someone out there who could unlock the mystery, but where to find them and how to ask? And in what language could they answer?

We managed anyway, most of the time. Other times, it was a disaster. We once stood at the dock in Ceuta, Spain, not understanding why it was so difficult to proceed into Tangier. Weren’t we in Morocco already? That whole ferry ride across the Strait of Gibraltar to the African continent, just to be told we were still in a Spanish enclave and that the real border and all its onerous formalities lay ahead. If only we’d had a clue beforehand.

Connecting with knowledgeable people was the key. By 1981, our first year living in Egypt, we had an arsenal of useful tips for navigating the country by car, as well as personalized trip reports from their excursions in the country and beyond. The information came slowly but surely, all by word of mouth.

There were always glossy tourist guides in those days, like the kind of enticing advice you can read in in-flight magazines. But they went no further than singing the praises of the Hilton and bespoke personalized tour companies. These sterilized fantasies were well out of our financial reach.

Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, 1990.

By 1990, I was cut loose from my parents and was wandering on my own. I discovered the wealth of information that had been accumulating over the preceding decade. My first Lonely Planet - Africa travel guide was a thick, heavy tome that looked like a Bible, and I revered it like one.

It unlocked a myriad of secrets. Details I so desperately needed to know, like which embassies would issue visas, and whether the black-market currency exchange was open and tolerated, or illegal and clandestine. Practicalities that a Frommer’s guide would never sully its hands with. Between my frayed Lonely Planet and word of mouth from other travelers, I was emboldened to try things I would normally have steered clear of.

Once I got used to it, not having such a useful guide was unimaginable. Over the next decade, I had accumulated a veritable library of them.

However, communication was a constant issue. I remember trying to book rooms by phone. Not a phone I carried with me, but one in a call center or a phone booth, that I had to pay for on the spot. Reconfirming an airline ticket meant a trip across town to an airline office, which might be closed for lunch. Buying an airline ticket could only be done in a travel agency. I spent a lot of time on these simple, mind-numbing logistics.

Mauritania-Senegal border crossing at Bogué in 2024. I would not have known of this border crossing’s existence were it not for a random mention on the internet.

When reading stories about people’s experiences traveling in the last ten years, there is that eerie feeling of having passed into another reality. My own travel experience has also been transformed in fundamental ways.

I never could force myself to sell or donate my boxes of Lonely Planet, Footprint Guides, and Brandt Travel guides, or notebooks of photocopied and handwritten notes, but none of them are useful now. My phone has a million times more information than that. And it is updating every minute.

Deciding where to go or sitting down to plan a trip is like a feeding frenzy. There is more information out there than I have time to read. A planned week turns into two or three when I realize my originally allotted time isn’t enough to do the place justice. It is no longer a blank canvas of mystery but a map bristling with potential experiences, annotated with recent trip reports and photos.

Travelers on the internet forums are continually reporting on what they’ve achieved. Even if the comment is written in, say, Latvian, I can run it through a translator app in seconds. Just when I think some border crossing is impossible, someone writes that they went through it. Regions formerly classified as off-limits to casual visitors are getting them, maybe not in droves, but there is always someone who’s done it and sent back a victorious selfie.

Oh, Dubrovnik, what have you become?

I am not one to wax nostalgic about how things used to be. It is a waste of time pining for an era that is lost forever. But in nearly half a century, the contrasts in how travel is planned and what experiences one can reliably expect to have could hardly be starker.

It is easy to become addicted to the convenience of online hotel booking with free cancellation, flight aggregator sites that compare all possible connections, times, and prices, ATMs that dispense money in local currency directly from a bank account in another part of the world, and phone-based language translators. These powers would have seemed miraculous thirty years ago, and I began using these tools as soon as I learned of their existence. There are even apps that calculate how long a bus, train, ferry, or car is likely to take between points, even in remote areas. They aren’t always accurate, but serve well as a general guide.

All of these modern tools free up time that can be spent having experiences more in line with the trip objectives. Back in the day, I once spent my whole afternoon walking through a Turkish town looking for a spare bed, only finding one at the eighth place I tried. That sort of mindless pavement pounding would be unthinkable now.

These tools also remove the burden for everyone else looking to visit the same places. One can get the sense that it is all too easy now, and the emphasis has shifted to maximizing limited time. Speed replaces the built-in pauses that used to come with uncertainty. On online forums, people lay out their travel plans to solicit advice with questions like “Do you think I can visit all the Balkan states in one week? Here is my itinerary and route map.”

I stop short of outright criticizing such comments, even though I know those itineraries rob their trip of any meaningful experience. Admittedly, I also want to see a gazillion things, and there is never enough time. Today’s tools make such frenzied planning possible. The surge in visitor numbers in famous tourist attractions bears this out, year after year.

Imagine what it would have been like traveling the Croatian coast forty years ago. I know people who visited then, when very few tourists walked the cobbled streets of those historic towns, even in the summer season. That would have been glorious if one could ignore the many inconveniences and eventual war that attended those times.

These days, cities like Dubrovnik are looking to place a daily cap on the number of visiting tourists, lest the crowding become a health and fire hazard. I had my moments of despair while walking around the old town in 2022, wondering why I didn’t think to go there long ago, when surely it must not have felt so much like Disneyland.

Woman in white, you’ve overstayed your welcome in that stupid pose by at least five minutes. I guess I’ll never get a photo of the candi bentar without you in it.

There is no simple conclusion to make, contrasting the travel of yesteryear with that of today. It is a mixed bag. Part of me misses experiences like the 1978 flight my father and I took across Borneo on a loud DC-3 cargo plane, where the pilot switched on the autopilot to make us sandwiches because there was no flight crew. It is the sort of experience that today’s world of travel cannot give in the same way.

I have to be grateful for the abundance of information that allows me to experience the world as I do now. I am older and can no longer recreate the feats of endurance and stress that were a staple of my younger travel days. The new tools are welcome, even if it means sharing a beautiful, remote sunrise with four hundred of my closest friends and failing to get a decent photo without some random person in it. It’s still better than sitting at home.