This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘How to stop worrying about the ‘right’ way to travel’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hi listeners, this is Lilah. A quick note that I will be off after this episode for August, but we are planning a lot of really great episodes for you while I’m out. We’ve got some of our favourite guest hosts to come in. We have our menswear expert and host of Unhedged, Rob Armstrong, host of the FT News Briefing, Marc Filippino. We have our food and drink editor, Harriet Fitch Little. It’s going to be great. I’ll be back soon. I hope you have a wonderful August. And in the meantime, you’re in excellent hands.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. I have some questions. When we travel somewhere, should we be seeing the popular tourist sites or living like a local? Is it OK if we sleep late or skip that famous bakery? What even is actually authentic? And why are we chasing it? These are questions that a lot of us quietly ask ourselves when we travel, but don’t always really wrestle with out loud. My guest Shahnaz Habib does wrestle with it out loud. She wrote a whole book about it, which recently came out and I love. It’s called Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel.

Shahnaz is from Kerala, India. She’s lived in Turkey, spent a lot of time in the Middle East and her home is now New York, so she’s felt like a local and visitor in many places. And because we’re in the middle of summer and peak trip season, I’ve invited her on to give us some new ways to think about how we travel and think about what we want from it. Shahnaz hi, welcome to the show.

Shahnaz Habib
Hi. Pleasure to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
We’re so happy to have you. I wonder if you could start maybe by telling us a little bit more about yourself. So we have a sense of where you’re coming from as a traveller and a writer. You write about your many identities in the book, but I’m curious what your trajectory has been like with travelling. Did you kind of always know something was up with it, or did you start formulating that over time?

Shahnaz Habib
So I grew up in South India, in Kerala, which is on the west coast of India, and I grew up in a small town, which of course, over the last 20 years has now become a big city. And I grew up just so eager to get away, and I grew up reading all this travel writing. And of course, looking back, there were all books written by white men, right. As young as like 8 or 9 I was reading, like, the abridged version of Robinson Crusoe and fancying an island for myself, or people like Paul Theroux or Bruce Chatwin as I grew older.

So as soon as I could, I moved out of home. I moved to Delhi for graduate school, and then I moved to New York for more graduate school. And looking back on it, I think it was just an excuse to get out and travel and see the world. And I’ve basically used every opportunity I can to travel. And I would also keep pitching travel articles to publications and magazines. And it took me some time to connect the dots that, you know, the kind of writing that I was doing about my travels was not the kind that travel magazines wanted to publish.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So what did you do?

Shahnaz Habib
So I ended up writing all these essays about not travelling and feeling sort of really uncomfortable in various travel settings and just, you know, kind of trying to understand this cognitive dissonance between this idea that travel is this experience that will broaden my horizons and make me a well-rounded human being and the deep discomfort that I would feel when I was travelling because I was not living up to those expectations.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. I love this book because it puts words to a lot of things that I felt and I haven’t really seen written before, but it also sort of looks at the history of travel writing that came before and sort of pokes at it. And you start the book talking about some early guidebooks and how this journey, called the Grand Tour, was the origin of modern western travel. Can you tell listeners briefly about that? What was the Grand Tour? Why did so many people aspire to do it?

Shahnaz Habib
So the Grand Tour was this rite of passage in the 16th, 17th and even well into the 18th century where European aristocrats would set out on these journeys to see the big destinations of Europe. They often had tutors in their retinue. They travelled with retinues. They had, you know, servants. So it would be this huge, basically like a huge group tour, right? But it was all centred around travel as a kind of high education. So the Grand Tour in many ways created a template for travel as an educational experience.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, you can really see the vestiges of it, too. I mean, obviously in the way that people think of travel now, but also like, you know, there’s like that sort of gap year trip that a lot of people take, especially in the UK, a lot of British people, after they graduate from school, they go to south-east Asia and take this trip around the colonies.

Shahnaz Habib
Yes. Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Another kind of amazing thing that you include in that chapter is this guy who popularised the first tourist guidebook who died at 58 from overwork.

Shahnaz Habib
That’s right. Yes. Karl Baedeker. Karl Baedeker is such an interesting person because he belonged to a bookselling family and he became a publisher. And then he noticed that guidebooks were becoming really popular. And so he started writing and then eventually publishing guidebooks. And Baedeker is especially interesting because he really internalised the enlightenment ideal that using human reasoning through the logic of classifying and cataloguing, you could get to know the world.

And so his guidebooks really reflect that idea where, oh, these places are good for this, this and this. These places can be avoided. And then he came up with also the star system where, you know, he would sort of allot stars to the places that we must see or must not miss, which is something guidebooks have just continued — that tradition of some places being must-see and some places are not must-see things.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s sort of, it’s such a nuts thing. I was thinking about that. The idea that this man just showed up and said, like, OK, this, you got to see. This, skip it. And we still kind of do that. The idea that, like, some things are just skippable actually isn’t objective is like totally subjective is interesting. And so it’s sort of funny that we have this guy who sort of taught us to be checklist people as travellers to say, we’ve done this, we’ve done that. We we’ve done this, end up dying of overwork.

Shahnaz Habib
I know, right? And it seems like a really interesting metaphor for the way we have made travel into a kind of overwork, right? This is leisure travel. This is people sort of seeking a refuge from their everyday working life, because the Industrial Revolution has made it not just possible for people to travel, but also really necessary to travel, because the cities have grown so crowded and filthy, and travel is almost this thing that you have to do now because you need to escape your working life.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s interesting.

Shahnaz Habib
So it is really interesting that at this very moment, travel then becomes another form of work.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
So, Shahnaz, your book is a critique of this legacy of tourism where all of us are still kind of pretending to be 18th century aristocrats without realising it, even though the world has changed a lot. You know, colonialism is over. Many more people are travelling now from all kinds of backgrounds than were travelling during this grand tour. The idea that everyone has the same checklist of things to see in a place we know is absurd.

But the other thing is that travel isn’t for everyone. And you have this really sweet story about your own family where you took them on a surprise helicopter tour, I think, of Manhattan, and your dad’s reaction was really funny. I’m wondering if you can tell that story. He’s the kind of guy who prefers to just sort of, like, check out the local fruit stalls if he’s forced to go somewhere versus going to the Statue of Liberty.

Shahnaz Habib
Yes. I mean, I forced him, he didn’t want to do it, but my parents were babysitting, I just had my baby and I really wanted them to see New York. And so I surprised them with this helicopter tour over the city. And my mother was super excited. She was like, oh my God, this is great. And my father just got off the tour and he was, like, eminently avoidable. He just nobody was less excited about a helicopter (laughter).

Lilah Raptopoulos
You know, it’s just really like, it’s like kind of a beautiful encapsulation of what it means to be anti-checklist. And the thing that I took from him and your story about him is this idea of like resisting the iconic, right? That like travel doesn’t actually have to be a source of self-improvement. And the interesting thing about travel doesn’t have to be the grand thing. It can be actually like the fruit seller that’s had something in season they haven’t seen before.

Shahnaz Habib
Totally. Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting because I think for my father, travel just has not registered as this horizon-broadening activity. As I said earlier, I love to travel, I wanted to travel. And then at some point I realised that, oh, I’m such a tourist, I want to be a traveller, I don’t want to be a tourist. And so I tried that for a while.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What did that mean? What did trying that look like?

Shahnaz Habib
So it would mean things like, you know, deliberately avoiding the places that, you know, the guidebooks said are a must-see, but then you feel this niggling doubt that maybe you’re actually missing out on something really special. Or there was this idea, right, just this idea, very prevalent, that tourists don’t try to be local somewhere. Travellers try to, you know, meet locals and have this authentic local experience. And that’s also really such an illusion because how can you possibly be a local, you know, maybe you’re travelling for a few more weeks or maybe even a few more months than somebody who’s on, like a two-week trip or like a five-day trip. But a few months is hardly enough to become a local. That itself is the ultimate tourist illusion, that you can just go somewhere and then become part of that place.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. You know, the fluctuation between those two desires is felt very honest. And there’s a moment where you talk about standing in line at the Colosseum in the heat, thinking about your dad’s advice, like, you know, nothing in the world is a must-see. And then saying to yourself, like, but here I am. You know, like we’d probably be fluctuating around these questions our whole lives. I wonder if you can speak to that sort of question of like we should somehow be doing both. How do you hold those?

Shahnaz Habib
Totally. Yeah, I’m such an expert at this particular confused, mixed feelings, straddling of tourism and travel. You know, pretty much every trip I go on, I’m just, like, afflicted by these feelings of, like, well, I really shouldn’t be here. What am I doing here? And. Oh, my God, this is so amazing. I’m so glad I came. And I think it’s such a familiar place for most of us who travel now, because we are very cognisant of how tourism is changing. The places that we are going to. We are very cognisant of how we are part of the way, you know, these historic districts get sort of like frozen in time.

And the truth is, I, I don’t know, I don’t know what we should be doing. I think we just have to accept the limitations of the tourism project. It’s a little bit like smoking. It’s bad for you. It’s very pleasurable. It’s bad for the world. It’s bad for the people around you. And we have to accept that we are not going to be these, you know, adventurers, intrepid travellers who are so sustainable, who are so thoughtful that they don’t cause any harm at all. They don’t impact the environment at all. That’s also a fallacy. So I think we kind of have to accept that.

I mean, for myself not trying to be prescriptive here, but for myself, I tried to question my intentions and my motivations for wanting to travel to a particular place because we are constantly being fed images and ideas and, you know, just even these fantasies by travel magazines, by the tourism industry, by Instagram. And I just sort of, like, check in with myself about how far my desire to go someplace or do something is just from the this constant like social feed that’s happening. And what part of it is coming from a deeper place?

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Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so you and I together can’t solve travel or each of us individually when we choose to go somewhere, solve everything. But your book does give us a lot of ways to think about how we travel. Like different ways to think about how we travel. Like, it doesn’t have to be this binary of I’m a checklist person, or I’m an authentic local person, and I wonder if we can talk through how we go beyond that. One thing you suggest we could do is look at travel accounts that haven’t been included in our history of travel, necessarily. Yeah, this isn’t just Marco Polo and, you know, the guy who died from writing the first guidebook. It can also be learning from the Queen of Sheba, whose desire to travel was really about curiosity and looking at religious texts as travel writing.

Shahnaz Habib
Yeah, absolutely.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What are other things we can learn from? Yeah, tell me.

Shahnaz Habib
That was something that I loved finding during my research. Just the incredible travel literature of the medieval times, right? So much of it written by, for instance, medieval Muslim travellers, medieval Muslim writers who, you know, because of the prominence of the Islamic empires of the Middle Ages, they were able to travel very freely, much the same way, in fact, that Americans and Europeans travel today.

And yeah, one book that really helped me reframe, like when I was in my 20s, I picked up this book edited by Tabish Khair, and it’s a wonderful compendium of writers from African countries, writers from various Asian countries, writers from the medieval, you know, Muslim empires writing about the way they travel the world. And one of the points that Tabish Khair makes is that, first of all, religion often offers opportunities for pilgrimages. Islam, for instance, says you should go to China in search of knowledge. So many religions actually encourage people to travel in search of knowledge. But also many of the founding myths of religions have travel at their heart. So many of the Indian epics that I grew up with are, you know, stories of travel, stories of expeditions, stories of adventure. And they’re very different from the leisure travel that we’re used to, but they are nevertheless travel stories.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, it’s funny that all of these things already exist. I love that, sort of like if you look far back enough, they exist.

The other thing that you brought up that I hadn’t really thought about quite in this way is this idea of sort of internal travel, like travelling within your own hometown. You have a whole chapter that’s centred around taking the bus kind of to nowhere all over Brooklyn when you became a mom. But it was sort of an urging to be pointless. You know that the point is the pointlessness sometimes. Yeah. What’s that about?

Shahnaz Habib
In the very early days of motherhood, when I think my baby was maybe three or four months or six months, I just got into this habit of just getting into buses and just going wherever the bus went. And it just became this really lovely way to sort of dip my toes back into the world of travel. And it’s about paying attention in a very particular way. And I think as writers and maybe as artists, that kind of attention is so essential, that kind of curiosity about the world and being able to sort of replenish that curiosity about your surroundings, about the most familiar things, is such a big part of being a writer, too.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, it’s really true. Shahnaz, I want to come, as we start to wrap up, to some of these bigger questions again that we’ve been circling around. One of them being sort of that like, I guess, how to think about this, the fact that we’re all really chasing when we travel an earnest and genuine experience. And somehow in this chase for it, sometimes we’re making it harder than it needs to be. My question for you is like, what is your best advice for this? Part of what I think it makes me think is maybe it’s just cutting ourselves a break, like maybe this is partially about an obsession with optimisation that we’ve been sort of taught and that actually when we go to a place, it’s OK if it’s not all perfect.

Shahnaz Habib
Yeah. No, I absolutely agree with you. And I think everyone who has travelled has probably had this experience of this moment when you’ve finished your list and you just are wandering somewhere in a place that is not particularly in a guidebook or on your list, you just sort of settle into the place in a way that your list does not give you the leisure to do. And you just feel just a tiny bit more, I don’t want to use the words at home because it goes back to this idea of being local. But you know, it just makes you feel a little bit more . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
In your body.

Shahnaz Habib
Embodied. Yes, exactly it’s a little more embodied, a little bit more present to yourself, to what’s going on in your mind. And it just gives you an opportunity to think of yourself in relation to this place that you’re in. And maybe deal with all these, like, emotions that we keep at bay, like being confused or, feeling guilty or maybe feeling resentful that you don’t get to, you know, spend more time here, just being able to be attentive to that. And, like you said, cutting ourselves breaks.

And at the same time, I think we should rage. We should rage at the way industrial tourism has kind of shaped our lives and shaped these places. We should rage at the way our working lives have taken over so much that we feel so much pressure to go and see 20 different things in two days.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Totally.

Shahnaz Habib
And we should feel rage at the way the travel industry kind of collude to keep us kind of ignorant about what’s really going on in the places that we travel to. So yeah. Embracing all these, yeah, weird emotions.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I also feel sometimes rage at this expectation that travel is going to change me.

Shahnaz Habib
Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I mean it’s great. I often feel broadened and like curious and like I come home with a ton of questions. But this sort of pressure to be changed by it is sort of a one that I don’t really know what to do with sometimes.

Shahnaz Habib
Yeah, the pressure to have an epiphany.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes, epiphany totally.

Shahnaz Habib
The fault of travel writing, because travel writing is just so, it has this structure where, you know, the writer goes somewhere, the writers see something amazing. The writer has an epiphany. So much of travel writing has that narrative, right? And so when we travel, we feel like, oh, that is the narrative that our travel should have. But you know, how many epiphanies can one possibly have? So yeah. Absolutely.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Shahnaz, the other big question I have is in your book, you trace a lot of ways that historic expeditions and even like military conquest actually affected how we think about and write about travel now. And I’m wondering, like what we do with that, you know, beyond just knowing that history, what else do we do with it? It feels like there’s some sort of reckoning that needs to happen, and I just don’t know what that is.

Shahnaz Habib
Yeah, that was also, for me, a learning point in my research, realising that this is actually a framework, this idea of travel writing narratives being predicated on this idea of going somewhere, seeing something and sort of reproducing it for the audience back home, right? That was very much the narrative of these natural science writers who were the first travel writers who would accompany colonial expeditions. And of course, it was not a benign, you know, scientific expedition, right? It was a way of claiming that place for your country by seeing this place and by describing it, I have sort of like planted a flag on it. And travel writing has kind of kept that framework.

And one of the things I wrote in the book about is how we can have other frameworks. Medieval writers often thought of wonder as the framework through which they travelled. They were full of awe at how different it was from their experience of life. I wonder, how is it possible to bring that framework of wonder back into our travels? And would start with just sort of like really kind of reckoning with the fact that we are actually these really limited, subjective consciousnesses when we are travelling. We are actually these, you know, kind of confused and have ignorant but earnest, like you said, travellers who have so many gaps in our knowledge of the world and just being able to accept our limitations.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. It makes me want to ask you, just like what it means for us individually to not be planting a flag, but actually to be, you know, going in with wonder.

Shahnaz Habib
I think it would be to look at something and know that you will not know it fully. That you’re getting a very limited first impression or second impression or third impression, but that there is this huge gap between you and the place you’re travelling to, the people you’re meeting there that you have to approach this experience with, like, an appreciation for the mystery and with a sense of all of that you got to have this experience, but also humility that you will never fully understand it. And then being able to sort of chew on that mystery for, you know, months or years after you return home. So knowing that your travel experience doesn’t end with that place, but it will be something that will be just working away in your brain for years.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I love that. Shahnaz, thank you. You just, thank you for your work. Thank you for this conversation. I just enjoyed it so much. It’s wonderful to have you on the show.

Shahnaz Habib
Me too. Thank you so much for having me.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’ve put some relevant links in the show notes, including the things that Shahnaz mentioned, a link to the survey that’s still going on about the show, a link to a discount for a subscription to the Financial Times and places to reach me on email and on Instagram. I always love hearing from you and I will see you at the end of August.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is our talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our intern is Prakriti Panwar who cut this episode. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.