OpinionHidden travel gems you can’t wait to reveal and other great holiday paradoxes
- Here’s another one: when we go away we want luxury services but without the tourist numbers needed to bankroll them
- Perhaps 2020 has taught us that staying at home has its merits after all, or at least now we’ve time to examine the paradoxes inherent in being a tourist
Leisure travel is full of contradictions, such as how rushing halfway around the world for a last chance to see Greenland’s glaciers, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef or some palm-fringed speck of an island only hastens all these sights’ demise. Other travel paradoxes are as old as travel itself.
As early as the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher Socrates observed that change rarely turns out to be as good as a rest.
“How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away.”
The Roman philosopher Seneca, a Stoic, amplified this idea five centuries later.
“How can novelty of surroundings abroad and becoming acquainted with foreign scenes or cities be of any help? All that dashing about turns out to be quite futile,” he pointed out.
Seneca did not even anticipate modern-day instant communications that result in us taking not only our anxieties with us, but our friends, too, making a “getaway” a contradiction in terms.