Motorcycle Diaries
Jan. 26th, 2010 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaLast night, while winding down from the convention, Stacey and I watched The Motorcycle Diaries, a film about Ernesto Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado traveling across South America by motorcycle. It's a good film, well worth watching. Put a few things to ponder into my head.
I'm sort of wondering about the transformative nature of certain types of travel. I don't mean hopping in a car with your family and road-tripping to DisneyLand but rather the type of journey where you don't have a lot of money, stay at hostels, hitch-hike, talk to people in little towns that barely show on the map, to be a true wanderer for a while.
I had some degree of this in my life. When we were doing rendezvous when I was a child, we traveled slow from remote place to remote place, staying in camps and on reservations, cooking big pots of food and sharing them with people, sitting at campfires, making friends singing and playing music and telling stories. These places were an important part of my life. I feel like I got something from them that was well beyond the experience I got simply living in a rural/suburban area.
I've gotten the feeling before that most conservatives are prattish momma's boys who've lead a sheltered and insular life. Particularly the ones I've run into online. On the other hand, most of the liberal people I know seem to be ones who have traveled, spent time with others, been poor, been wanderers, and I've seen dozens of stories like that of Guevara where a journey like this has changed someone and made them awake to the world. Makes me wonder... Is my vision skewed or does wandering change people?
I'm sort of wondering about the transformative nature of certain types of travel. I don't mean hopping in a car with your family and road-tripping to DisneyLand but rather the type of journey where you don't have a lot of money, stay at hostels, hitch-hike, talk to people in little towns that barely show on the map, to be a true wanderer for a while.
I had some degree of this in my life. When we were doing rendezvous when I was a child, we traveled slow from remote place to remote place, staying in camps and on reservations, cooking big pots of food and sharing them with people, sitting at campfires, making friends singing and playing music and telling stories. These places were an important part of my life. I feel like I got something from them that was well beyond the experience I got simply living in a rural/suburban area.
I've gotten the feeling before that most conservatives are prattish momma's boys who've lead a sheltered and insular life. Particularly the ones I've run into online. On the other hand, most of the liberal people I know seem to be ones who have traveled, spent time with others, been poor, been wanderers, and I've seen dozens of stories like that of Guevara where a journey like this has changed someone and made them awake to the world. Makes me wonder... Is my vision skewed or does wandering change people?
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edited reply
Date: 2010-01-26 11:02 pm (UTC)And money plays into this as well as other factors. You notice that Europeans are on the whole more open-minded than Americans - and they live in countries much smaller than the USA, with things like TEE and hostels as a way of really making travel friendly. And you notice that the civil rights movement in the USA, stymied during the 1920s-40s, really picked up with more money and a more mobile society. Compare this to now - when you have something like Katrina, where very few people could just pick up and spend months volunteering for the relief efforts.
Poverty breeds survival-mindedness, survival-mindedness breeds inflexibility; travel is only possible where there's money or other resources that make it possible. The two interface.