Has the romance gone out of travel?

Has the romance gone out of travel Travel used to be a byword for carefree glamour and adventure. But have cheap flights, mass tourism and terror alerts killed off the magic Here, Michael Bywater and Alexander Frater give their views:

Pack up your troubles There's nothing glamorous about airport delays. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images Yes Michael Bywater The old conjugation used to be: I am an explorer, you are a traveller, they are tourists.

It won't do any more. Everywhere has been explored, and even the most intrepid are not so much explorers as artistes in self-declared record-beating (such as Ranulph Fiennes) or magnificent crackpots like Redmond O'Hanlon.

Even the greatest of travel writers - the incomparable Jonathan Raban, for instance - have largely retired into their novelistic shells, while the more contemplative, such as Robert Macfarlane in Mountains of the Mind, hunt down the sublime, not in its outward causes but in its inward effects.

Exploration, and to a great extent travel itself, have become enterprises which are not so much recollected in tranquillity but actually constructed back in the workroom - seated at the desk and staring, not into the volcano, the void or the eyes of some tribesman, but into the paper-white glare of the computer screen.

I am a traveller; you are a tourist; they are punters. That's the best we can hope for now that travel has become not just an industry but a rite; not a rite of passage, because we return more or less unchanged, but something closer to Saturnalia or the old Feast of Fools: what anthropologists call 'rites of status inversion' where, for a little while, we leave our normal selves behind and ape the manners of our superiors.

Finding superiors to ape was once easy. Now it is harder; now we ape those we believe to be somehow leading better lives. The sophisticated media couple who buy the run-down gite, decaying Tuscan bakery or collapsing Ionian olive press are indulging themselves by temporarily adopting the status of people they consider superior not in wealth but in 'authenticity'.

For a brief while each summer, they can persuade themselves that they are part of an ancient, wizened community, with a chain of twinkling, wizened ancestors, all steeped in wizened, benighted but nevertheless twinkling belief-systems and festivals.

Martha makes her own rough pat, from local (and wizened) rodents and lets her armpits flourish, while Jed munches dried pizzle and swigs a rough retsina (made from imported Chilean rejects and a bottle of turps in a garage behind the traditional wizened bar, the one run by people who head hell-for-leather back to Athens or Paris the moment the tourist season ends).

You might justifiably argue that everyone needs a bit of make-believe in their lives and at least this way the money gets spread around. Of course; but there's no such thing as a free Saturnalia. Jed and Martha's healthy disposable income is pricing locals out of their own locality; the word 'unspoilt' must always be read with the implied '...until now'.

And, like all make-believe, the experience of the fantasy is nothing like the experience it is a fantasy of. The possibly apocryphal Red Indian proverb 'you cannot understand a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins' barely scratches the surface.

The truth is that you cannot understand a man until you have walked a mile on his feet, operated by his own head. Anything else is playtime or costume drama. But we carry on with the happy fantasy that travel is somehow tough, intrepid, life-shaping, when the reality is that the toughest part is generally Heathrow or Gatwick when, once again, it all goes tits-up because of fog or snow or imaginary bazookas.

Different scenario

It used to be different. Travel, once, really was an adventure, involving brigands and hardships and mal-de-mer, fleas and bedbugs and secret police and letters of credit. Some of us look back at the travel of our own childhood, when a fortnight at Bournemouth was planned with the precision of a military campaign and lunch booked on the way at Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

And as for Abroad ... Abroad required a whole year of planning, the acquisition of AA itineraries in little booklets ('Road winds 3 1/4 mi. through rolling downs'), not to mention the GB plates and the yellow things to stick on the headlamps and a special Briefcase which my father only ever used for Travel Documents.

The casual ease of travel now is a source of bewildered distress to my father's generation ('What do you mean, you're going to Bruges? For the weekend On a whim? But you haven't even booked the ferry!')

It has become too soft, too easy. And so we have to go to more and more outlandish places in order to find our alternative reality. It has to be somewhere that seems either insanely authentic or suicidally intrepid; and since the very presence of tourism destroys authenticity, and most of us aren't prepared to be that intrepid, we settle for a synthetic version of that, too.

Astonishing things

In the luggage of any tourist in any major Western city there will be astonishing things. Not just the terrified nonsense of the Magellan catalogue - with its portable oxygen supplies, its emergency wind-up radios ('nothing provides peace of mind in an emergency like it'), its Steri-Pen ('harnesses the power of ultraviolet light to purify your drinking water') and its Cool-Max Travel Sheet ('a comfortable [and sanitary] alternative to hotel sheets that may or may not be as clean as you'd like'); not just the insane 'practical' clothes with multiple secret pockets and a thousand zips and a level of technological sophistication that would be excessive even for a member of the Special Forces on a survival mission - no, you will find lavatory paper, toothpaste, razor blades and headache pills and all sorts of things that are available just by going to a shop.

But such is the myth of travel as hardship that people need to cart all this stuff around; they actively enjoy it, and the easier the journey is, the more people seem to take with them. I am still utterly mystified as to just what the hell it is that people put in those huge suitcases to take for a week's package holiday on Corfu. Emergency generators Heart-lung machines Tranquillised sled-dogs Who knows

The massive global enterprise that the tourist industry has become has done its best to remove the unexpected and the authentic. I stopped going on press trips years ago, after two PRs in succession - on a tropical island and in Arizona - went apeshit when I tried to have a look around on my own. On the tropical island, I could understand the chap's worry: that I might talk to some locals (as indeed I did) who might tell me just how much they hated the rich white sods who were buggering up the island (which they did).

Arizona I couldn't understand, though. Maybe the woman was worried that I would buy a western hat and fall off a horse into a jumping cactus (which I did).

The luggage, the kit, the fannying about; the gites and the olive presses; the yachts and villas; the special boots and emergency-beacon watches: these are our props, our guarantees of a real false authenticity. Perhaps a Roman slave kept a toga virilis under his straw mattress for when Saturnalia came round again; the trainee hairdresser happily buying her Tilley Adventure-Cloth shorts in January while, across town, the white goods retailer studies marine charts of the Aegean for his flotilla holiday, are doing the same thing.

Travel is easy now. It is no longer exciting; so we have to bring our own excitement with us, in our luggage or our mind's happily deluded eye.

Lost its magic

No, Alexander Frater says the late Eric Newby was the first person I knew who complained that travel had lost its magic. And that was back in the Seventies, when he resigned his job as The Observer's travel editor because everyone was being 'moved around the world en masse, rather like air freight'.

At the time I thought he was wrong (and still do). Had Ryanair operated a twice-weekly service to the Hindu Kush - landing on some cloud-bound goat pasture - would he still have made his famous Short Walk Probably not, he said, because an invasion of holidaymakers from Blighty, with English being spoken in every cave and behind every rock, would have changed the nature of the place entirely.

So he would have smiled wryly at the fix we find ourselves in today. Not only is the notion of leisure travel under attack from the anti-airline, carbon-footprint brigade, but travellers are now threatened by everyone from terrorists to George Bush's aggressively unwelcoming immigration authorities.

Yet any good journey should entail a slight element of risk. I have a friend who once made a point of going only to places the Foreign Office warned Britons to stay away from. He had been around the Axis of Evil long before it was identified as such, choosing his destinations so he would feel the way he felt the very first time he went off on his own (aged 16, to visit a pen pal in France): heart beating faster, eyesight keener, mind fully engaged.

It was his enthusiasm for North Korea that persuaded me, masquerading as a teacher - journos aren't allowed anywhere near the place - to join one of the organised tours that catches the overnight train from Beijing up to Pyongyang.

We stayed at the Kyoro Hotel which, although 45 stories tall, had fewer than 20 guests. Aside from the members of my group, I saw only a gloomy man from Tass, a few Chinese generals, a Mongolian girl who wore sensationally short skirts, and a Belgian engineer who, each evening, after a few beers, would sit weeping at the bar.

Any trip should provide a defining memory that, years later, still has luminance. Although we saw some astonishing things - in Kim Il Sung Square 70,000 adults clasped raised pink umbrellas which, on a barked command, seamlessly turned to crimson - my golden moment occurred at the end of a day spent at a coastal reclamation project.

Driving back, we came upon a crowd of gracefully gowned women dancing to a drum and a melody they sang for themselves.

'Peasants,' said our minder, Mr Li. 'A letter pledging devotion to the Dear Leader will pass this way. They are waiting to cheer the letter.' We jumped out to applaud the dancers who, smiling broadly, applauded us back.

A grandmother with a lean, deeply bronzed face, approached. She halted before Sylvia, a retired museum worker from Guernsey, and gave her an extraordinary look: affectionate, sisterly, rippling with intensity. Then she held out her arms.

Off they went, waltzing down the West Sea Barrage with such grace and energy that others soon ventured to do the same brave thing, they danced with the enemy. The singing grew louder and the drumming faster as, for half an hour, mutual curiosity and interest overcame years of hostility. It was the best party I have ever attended. At the time 'joyful' seemed the appropriate word and, today, it's still the one resonating through my head. Mr Li, whey-faced, kept muttering, 'Unthinkable, unthinkable.'

So I don't knock group travel or package tourism; it can make remarkable places accessible to adventurous souls on fixed incomes.

Yet, some argue, too many of us are now on the move; the sheer spread and sprawl of the travel industry is beginning to overwhelm the planet's more fragile regions. But how do people in those regions feel Once, on a particularly beautiful South Seas island, I angered a local by hoping it would remain forever 'unspoilt'. 'You mean,' he said, 'our kids must keep dying from malaria?'

Then he listed the amenities that foreign capital - meaning tourism - would provide. The hospitals, schools, potable water, power, sanitation and so on were entirely predictable, but implicit in all this was the self-respect and peace of mind that came from citizenship of a very rich country like mine.

Walking home along a quiet valley smelling of lemons and visited today by wheeling frigate birds, I thought of the uncertain government and faltering economy that characterised his, and knew he was right: tourism could be the engine that got things fired up.

Ladakh, set in a snow desert on the Tibetan Plateau, occupies another landscape entirely. There a narrow road crawls from the vast rocky concavity in which its capital, Leh, sits into a range of frozen razorback mountains, and when, one day over afternoon tea, the Queen of Ladakh told me this road was the world's highest, I knew at once where I was headed next. 'It's off-limits, of course,' said the Queen, 'and administered by Colonel Patel of the Indian army. But if you were lucky enough to meet him ...'

I met him - luck being a key component of any journey - at dinner that night. 'Last week,' he grumbled, 'I lost a bridge up there [also the world's highest, knocked down by a glacier], along with three officers and five men.' But he agreed to support my permit application; which was why, three days later, I sat in a Jeep climbing a rutted, skiddy yak track past miles of dripping ice walls. Then, abruptly, it stopped. 'Khardung La Pass,' said the driver. 'We are here.'

It was very quiet. Faded Buddhist prayer flags hung across the road, the morning brilliance coming off the Karakoram mountains seemed to light up Asia. A sign said: 'You Are Nearest To Heaven And Can Have A Dialogue With God.' As I entered a tiny wayside temple a bearded young soldier followed me in, demanding to know who I was. What astonished him was that I had come of my own free will. 'But it is such a terrible place,' he kept repeating.

I tell this story to counter the claim that, since we no longer tolerate genuine risks, imaginary ones must be created.

To those who say the excitement has gone out of travel, I say 'cobblers'. Curiosity continues to tug us around blind corners and over interesting hills, so that even something as innocuous as a sightseeing day trip in Ladakh can become a small adventure, a genuine golden moment.

It is claimed too that travel has become self-delusional, that we only do it to make ourselves seem sexier, more glamorous and important. So what All that matters is that it continues to lift the spirits and quicken the senses, and keep us alive to a world which, despite the state we've got it into, remains a place of astounding interest, beauty and variety.

We're only here once, and I simply cannot understand why absolutely everyone isn't consumed by an unquenchable desire to get out there and see every last bit of it.