Trust Me: This Is All Made Up

A random, brief, navelgazing post, brought on by my experiences traveling through Cinque Terre, Milan, Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro... Jump, etc.!


It struck me at some point in Serbia, after a few days of dirt-cheap rentals there and in Romania, accompanied by low-cost street food and free park-strolling and city-wandering, that money can absolutely be a barrier to thoughtful travel. If I'd been running on a high per-day budget, I might have opted for hotels instead of family-run rentals, or higher-end restaurants, missing out on conversations about the lives of my hosts in Oradea and Novi Sad and generally able to retreat into my own comfortable sphere. This isn't a new observation; I think Arthur Frommer (maybe Rick Steves?) talked about the old-school model of tourism, where cruise ships would stop in Caribbean ports and tourists would literally throw money onto the docks to see local kids running for it. That's a super gross image! But it's also kind of speaking to a larger picture - not the cruelty of the passengers so much as what they were paying for: physical separation from the culture, a ship to keep them from the people on the docks.

Ultimately, all travel is an exercise in placing yourself and all you carry in the trust of strangers. You trust that your accommodations will be as you expected, that you'll get where you want to get, that nobody will fleece you, that you'll be safe, that you'll be given access to unique and enjoyable experiences. And money, it seems to me, often serves as a tool to make that trust invisible, to allow you to convince yourself it isn't the case.

If you stay in Hilton or Marriott branded properties or generic mass-market hotels wherever you go, you're buying a certain kind of predictability, a confidence that things will be as you remember them. It's actually not especially different from renting a $15 apartment from AirBnB, depending on the amenities,  but your money has bought you the mental space to believe that the manager won't breach your privacy. Perhaps it's bought you trust that you won't have to have any extended conversations with weirdo hosts; as the major hotels move into apps that let you unlock your room with your phone and avoid all human contact, this perceived distance increases. The reality (with rare, obviously notable exceptions) is that you're equally safe in both scenarios, but in the Hilton branded scenario, you aren't as mindfully aware of the trust you're endowing your host with, because you're paying to put it out of mind.

In the same sense, paying the premium you'll pay in Europe (especially off-the-beaten-path Europe) for "American style breakfasts" or restaurants with English language menus is all about familiarity: I know what a cheese omelet will look and taste like. (If they get it wrong, it's a funny anecdote and I didn't accidentally order an eel.) Going the route of the locals makes you aware of trust again: trust that there's a reason they eat burek for breakfast in Serbia, trust in the mystery filling ingredients, trust that nobody will make fun of you for struggling with the language while you order, trust that the food you're not familiar with will be tasty and safe. The most extreme example of this is one of my favorite ways to find food in an unfamiliar city: finding a street-food stall away from any major sights that has a long line in front of it, joining the line, and ordering whatever everybody seems to be ordering. Sometimes that means not knowing what it is until eating it (or even after!), but it almost always means low cost, and again, a high level of conscious trust.

It's the same down the line. Taxis or booking a driver let you (to some extent) replace the anxiety of "will I get there/what if I can't find the bus stop/what if I don't know when I've reached my destination" with a sometimes-exorbitant fee. But if you do book a taxi or a driver, you'll never get to see what the Mostar bus station looks like at 6:30 AM and take in the comings and goings for the next five hours while you wonder what happened to your bus that never showed up. And that, too, is a kind of connection to the culture! Or so I will continue to tell myself!

To some extent guidebooks are where I make an exception to this general "less money = more connection and awareness" rule, but this depends on how you're using them. You're paying for hopefully-recent information on where to deposit your trust, but you run the risk of plodding along the Lonely Planet or Rick Steves trail alongside tens of thousands of fellow tourists dutifully checking off recommendations and sites that have grown accustomed to Anglophone tourists. Good guidebooks will still keep pushing you toward the unfamiliar and unique - situations where you are still conscious of the trust you're paying out. To me, the ideal guidebook gives you enough information to explore on your own - the things to keep in mind as you look for the off-road connections that won't deliver a predictable experience.

I think this is rad, frankly. Exercising the muscle of trust, of saying "let's see what happens," is good for me - I'm miles from the stressed out dude I was a couple of years ago, but I'm still a researcher, still a guy who likes to know what's going on, and it does me good to find and take joy from all the moments when I can breathe a bit, and give the unknown a shot. It's lovely to get a known quantity, of course, and there are always days that you want to find the comfort of that routine, of knowing the experience you're going to get. But when on the road, it's great to stretch a bit, save some coin, and be mindful of the trust you lay out to others every day of your life.