Fake Travelling

While reading Chen Jia-Ying's travel log back in the 80s (he was only 29 years old) I was caught by a line from the future philosopher:

真正的旅行应该是履行，用自己的两脚来走；走马观花已差得远，乘车又差一层；坐飞机飞来飞去就不用提了。

True travelling should be on foot, to walk with one's two feet; [Here's a Chinese pun hard to translate: travelling (旅行) has the same pronunciation as walking on foot (履行, which can also mean "to fulfill, to carry out") in Chinese.] travelling on horse is already far off, by car even further off; by airplane, not worth mentioning.

At that time China just got out of the Cultural Revolution Holocaust, and a young man like Chen, lucky enough to study philosophy in Peking University and about to gain a master's degree, by lucky I mean you're lucky even to be living in the city back then, not to mention the fact that he had the opportunity to do philosophy in THE top academy of the country. But that doesn't mean he had the privilege to travel by plane and go wherever he wanted. He basically travelled poorly around southeast and south China with in 2 months, only to witness an even poorer China of the common people. Still, he had the privilege to travel, mainly by train, by car or by boat, and he felt sorry for it.

What got me thinking was his appreciation of walking. You see, if you walk from one bus stop to the next, and the next, and the next, you kind of build a mental map for the route, and become, as it were, familiar with the surroundings. But if you only go from the first stop to the third on bus, without ever walking through it, you still build a mental map, only it's not the same as the real map, because the only things on your map are the first and third stops and their surroundings. If some day you by chance go to the second stop for some errands, the mental map is lit up, and you fill the gap between the first and the third, and your mental map matches the real map, so that you can actually mentally walk through the real map now.

The longer distance the transportation we choose, the larger the gap we create for our mental map of the world. For those who only travel by plane, a trip to Rome may very well be mentally separated from a trip to Vatican City, even though the one is only 4km away from the other. (I'd definitely choose to walk the 4km if I had the chance.) And so the transportation actually became the barrier, not the carrier, for your exploration of the world. You tend to think of the world as separate locations and fail to see the connections in between. Yet, isn't travelling all about that? To connect ourselves to the world, and, more importantly if possible, to connect the world through ourselves, in ourselves, and by ourselves. 

And so Chen's words contain a timeless truth about travelling: all that fail to connect is fake travelling, however amazing that may well be.