Travel sucks

Visas, terrorists, aeroplanes, taxicabs, tour guides... Travelling just can’t get any worse these days – unless you’re a Turk.

Why would anyone put themselves through the humiliation of travel? You spend a bunch of money and time going through the degradation of visas, security checks, airlines, queuing, language barriers, constant communication breakdown, endless acquisition of tickets to go anywhere and see anything, closing/opening/meeting/departure/arrival times you’re always rushing to, mosquitoes, illness, sleeplessness, people constantly trying to rip you off with insincere gestures of friendship, and all for what? A bunch of lame photos, stupid souvenirs, and endless inane anecdotes which people will only politely feign interest in listening to, along with the vague sense afterwards that you can’t really tell if it was all your own lived experience or just an endless succession of impersonal images you could have just seen in a book or on TV.

But if you’re not from a Western country, travel is that much worse. Let’s face it, travel today is designed for white people. Everybody else has to stand in different lines at airports and form degrading long visa queues outside embassies and consulates in the attempt to try and prove they’re not terrorists, expected to produce bank statements, electricity bills, declare property and possessions, have somebody in the country of destination who can invite and vouch for them, and generally be stripped of all dignity in front of sadistic visa ogres who treat visa applicants like they’re the only thing they will ever get the chance to act superior to, thus relishing the task at hand. So unless you’re a Westerner, you’re guilty until proven not-guilty-yet. Oh, and then you have to pay a bunch of money when they give you that all-important official stamp that declares you now have the honour of going to their precious little country. And if you’re a Westerner? Usually either no visas needed, or just a quick visa that could be got at the airport. Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Rich White Currency Spender, you’re our biggest industry!

That’s not to say that we Turks often don’t deserve rigorous visa procedures. Unfortunately, for every decent Turk who travels according to the rules, there are a bunch of others who readily export our misplaced impish genius for cutting-corners-through-duplicitous-schemes over to the host country, and generally prove such a nuisance that some sort of rigid screening and filtering process becomes inevitable. And who suffers? The decent ones. So the lowest common denominator becomes the procedural starting point for the whole visa process. Add to all this the further doucheness of terrorism, which has achieved nothing except making the whole world a much more annoying place for everyone. Terrorism will never liberate Palestine or Iraq, bring about a golden age of Islamic prosperity, or even ever have more of a statistical chance of killing you than death by donkey kick. All it’s done is augur in a shitty age of worldwide inconvenience. Thanks for that, fuckos.

So what does all that add up to? It adds up to me in transit at Charles de Gaulle airport, standing in my socks at the head of a long queue of depressed people who resembled convicts, passing in and out of an incontinent trigger-happy metal detector, waiting for some Algerian guy to finish inspecting my shoes, trying to pick up coins I spilled while emptying everything from my pockets (cargo pants are no longer convenient travel attire), taking my laptop in and out of its bag, and suspiciously wiping the sweat from my brow as I stood before a mini-inquisition about why I was where I was before I was there and for what purposes (they only asked me these questions because I had a Turkish passport – everyone else was white, innocent, and fluffy, like bunnies), before boarding my plane – which, by the way, was sprayed with disinfectant by flight attendants with fake smiles when entering France from Turkey and Mexico, but not vice versa, even though it was the same airline (I won't name names, just suffice it to say that the initials of the airline in question are: AIR FRANCE)

So is there nothing salvageable from the whole travel thing? Maybe I’ve been a little harsh. After all, the first five minutes when you decide to go somewhere and the last five minutes when it’s all finally over are both pretty sweet moments. Unfortunately it’s just that large-ish middle bit that sucks. But a peppy voice inside me says: “Wait a minute, travel expands your horizons, you meet new people, gain experiences and memories that last a lifetime, you see incredible things and appreciate your own country more, while at the same time overcoming your own prejudices, and you realize that despite superficial differences, we’re all really the same, floating away on this crazy spaceship we call Mother Earth!” Wrong. That stuff is only believed by the sort of people who think travelling makes a person interesting ipso facto. It doesn’t. The similarities encountered make travel boring, because you realize that – despite a few opulent monuments – everywhere and everyone is the same, while the differences encountered make travel annoying, because you’re bummed that such trivial things should inconvenience you so much, thereby bolstering extant prejudices rather than dispelling them.

So what’s the solution? Stay put. There are a lot more interesting things that are already all around you than all the cheap and trivial surface novelties that are stumbled upon while travelling. Plus you’ll spare all of us the six megabyte mass email full of uncompressed photos of you standing next to stupid statues with a sheepish grin. It’s worth you not-travelling just for us to not-receive that.