We were slinking through the edge of the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest river swamp in the United States. It’s about an hour and a half west of New Orleans, Louisiana, where the French Quarter had been restless the night before, with partying tourists and jazz bands. I’d heard Pierre Part (population: 3,000) was about as Cajun as you could get; that it was the most French-speaking town in the US outside a village in Maine. And so that’s where I’d headed.

Out here on the water, the landscape reminded me a bit of the Florida Everglades: an overgrown, labyrinthine place for die-hards and outlaws. A last frontier feeling. This was a place for people who wanted to chart their own course in some downright hostile conditions. I’d come to Pierre Part to meet a couple who’d decided that their American dream was to live part-time in a one-room wooden houseboat on a swamp.

Keith motored us around town a bit, passing porches, docks, weathered houses set close to the water. Pierre Part was essentially an island — a long stretch of high ground surrounded by wetlands. Tara pointed out landmarks. Her grandparents’ house. The street where her stepmom grew up, and her parents before her, and their parents before them. It felt like moving through her family photo album. “This is the end of the road,” Tara said as I looked at the last house on the bank. Everything from here was by boat.

For a stretch it was nothing but open water, brown and opaque. A faint stagnant odor came off the surface. Along the shore, the cypress trees blurred into a solid brown-green wall until little dark cuts began to show. “We call ’em a bayou run,” Keith hollered. “There’s a maze of ’em, just like trails in a forest.” He steered left into a narrow channel. It felt a little mysterious, a separate ecosystem that could only be accessed through local Cajun knowledge. Here and there houseboats appeared along the bank. 

In the distance, I noticed a man sitting on the small porch of a grey cabin. “Who are you, and what are you doing on our houseboat?” Tara called out. She had this fantastic accent, a Southern drawl with a touch of French that carried a playful ease. 

“I’m the boogeyman!” The man smiled. 

Tara burst out laughing. “That’s my dad,” she said. “He’s 82.”

We floated closer. Tara climbed up to tie the rope around the porch post. Her father looked no older than 60 — lean and upright in a faded denim shirt and cap. 

“How are you doing, sir?” I asked.

“I’m doing,” he said, reaching out his hand for a shake. “Carlis Goday.” In his Cajun accent, the weight landed on the second syllables.

“The man without a car, Car-less. Last name’s Go-day. If you can’t go nights, you go days.”

Tara gave me a little tour of the house, which looked no bigger than 250 square feet. “This is the kitchen.” She pointed to the propane four-burner stove in one corner, a single counter opposite, and a roll-out grill wedged between. “Keith does all the outside cooking, I do the inside. We haul this grill out onto the porch just to give us more room in here.” The rest of the room was simple: a bunk bed, a futon folded into a couch, life jackets, tools. Fishing gear in organized piles. A flatscreen TV and an enclosed bathroom with a toilet were the only luxuries. A small sign nailed to the wall read BORN TO FISH, FORCED TO WORK.

Come summer, Keith told me, the bayou turned into a playground: waterskiing, hydrosliding, wake-boarding, swimming in clear pockets before the water thickened to pea green. “The snapping turtles you gotta be wary of, they can really bite,” Tara warned. 

“We’ve got a swimming spot we love, even with alligators everywhere.” She smiled at my wide eyes, as if living a few feet above alligators was the most natural thing in the world. “The bigger alligators are usually shy,” Keith added. “The smaller ones, you can get closer to, but they won’t mess with people. They like swimming up to our dock when we’re cleaning fish or frogs. But out here they don’t really bother us. I think they had maybe two deaths in Louisiana since, I don’t know… hundreds of years.”

***

The Cajun story didn’t start in Louisiana. It began along the coast of the rugged western edge of France, a Celtic stronghold of sailors and pirates who started crossing the Atlantic in the early 1600s, settling in what was then the young French colony of Acadia and is today Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, Canada. Here, the Acadians lived the way they always had: close to the water, close to family, close to the Catholic church. They turned salty tidal marshes into farmland, wove their own clothing from flax, and — stubbornly — made a living 3,000 miles from home. 

But it wasn’t to be. Acadia was in turbulent territory. The Acadians wanted to remain neutral between Britain and France, but when the British defeated the French, the Acadians were pushed to swear allegiance to the British Crown. They refused: their loyalty was to God, not to European empires. That defiance came at a cost, and in 1755, the British forced them out in what became known as the Great Expulsion. Villages were torched, families torn apart, thousands deported. Many died from disease and starvation. No documents written by Acadians during this period have ever been discovered, and so the expulsion remains as much myth as heritage to the people of Louisiana (who love both myth and heritage).

Some Acadians ended up back in France, some scattered through the British colonies, and others drifted to the Caribbean. Those who came to Louisiana — still a French colony in those days — found something familiar. The prairies and swamps reminded them of home, only warmer. Difficult enough to live on that few bothered them and fertile enough to survive, especially with the help of Native nations like the Chitimacha, Atakapa, and Houma living along the Gulf Coast.

Cajun French includes many Native-derived loanwords — even the term bayou, from the Choctaw word bayuk (“small stream”). In time, the groups began to intermarry, encouraged by proximity and shared hardships, and Cajun food developed from indigenous smoking methods, ways of preservation, and seasonings. The Cajun staple filé powder, made from ground sassafras leaves, comes from the cooking traditions of the Choctaw and related Gulf Coast tribes.

The story of black influence in the bayou runs just as deep. Many enslaved Africans sought refuge in the wilderness, forming Maroon communities hidden along the swamps. Some of them lived independently; others mingled with Native tribes and Cajun settlers. Gumbo’s okra-thickened broth has African roots, a stew of cultures that’s simmered for hundreds of years. As time passed, Acadian slurred into Cajun. But the backbone of the culture stayed the same: make your own way, stay close to your people, adapt to whatever the land throws at you.

***

Carlis Goday wasn’t born on the bayou. 

“I was raised in the French Quarter in my younger years,” he was telling me as we stood around on the deck.

“What do you think it’ll be like in 20 years out here?” I asked him. “You think it’ll stay the same?” 

“No, no.” Carlis said it with vehemence and without hesitation. “Things are changing too much. Too much erosion.”

Hurricanes were tearing up so much that there was nothing left to hold the land together but tree roots, while they pulled in salt water that killed off grasses, hastening the decline. 

“Everything’s going,” he said. “Everything’s washing away. But this” — he pointed down at the water beneath the porch — “This was built when they put in some oil rigs back here.”

“Oil rigs?”

“Most of the man-made canals were from the oil companies,” Tara explained, cut as inroads for drilling rigs and pipelines, as well as drainage. “That’s the big industry out here, oil and gas.”

Big enough to employ them both. Keith did maintenance for offshore platforms, Tara was a materials coordinator. It seemed like they had things figured out: one foot in the swamp, the other in capitalism, providing the financial security that let them live by the rhythms of the natural world. A yin and yang approach.

***

Keith trolled slowly, deeper in, scanning through tree trunks to the left of us. Things got quiet, and he looked serious for the first time, like he’d switched into survivor mode.

“Hoping to go find a big nutria rat to show you,” I heard him say.

“Nutria rat?”

“Very invasive around here. They tear up a lot of these marshlands. They’ll eat all the roots of the vegetation, dig holes in levee systems. A lot of people trap ’em for the tails. Certain times of the year you can trap the nutrias, and they’ll give you $6 a tail.”

“It’s a government program,” Tara added.

“We actually shot a few last weekend — and we ate ’em.”

“You eat ’em?” I said, probably failing to hide my shock.

“They’re actually a very clean meat. They’re vegetarian.”

“How many pounds are they?”

“Oh, they can get five pounds to probably up to 20.”

“They’re like midsize dogs?” The image in my head wasn’t getting any prettier.

Keith laughed. “I’m-a show you some in a few minutes — you’re gonna see. New York, they don’t have anything on us in rats.”

The boat slowed, the motor humming just enough to push us along. “They hear the motor and take off running,” Keith said, scanning the shallows. “But a lot of times if you just kind of creep up on ’em, they’ll sit in the lilies or in the marsh and eat grass.”

Suddenly Keith’s posture shifted. He cut the motor and reached for the rifle on the floor of the boat in one swift motion, chambered a round without taking his eyes off the forest, and raised the barrel. A click. Then the sharp crack of gunfire split the quiet, echoing through the trees.

“Oh, I heard it,” Tara said. “That was a good shot.”

The motor coughed back to life, the boat gliding towards the bank. Keith hopped out and slipped into the undergrowth. I followed. He must have been 100 feet away from shore when he finally crouched down to the ground. Then he straightened, pulling up a long, limp brown body by its slick 10-inch tail.

He was holding a wet, shaggy nutria, its long orange teeth jutting like chisels. Its webbed feet dangled in the air, black claws curled tight at the ends. Something between a beaver and a rat, and ugly as sin.

“That’s a small one,” Keith said, raising it high for Tara to see. “My friend calls ’em swamp bunnies.”

“And that’s part of the dinner menu tonight, right?”

“Would you like to try?”

“I mean, if you’re doing it… when in Rome.”

“We could try frying it,” Tara suggested.

“Ah…” Keith considered it for a moment. “I think a nutria stew would be awesome.”

***

I’ve often heard people say that America has no culture, and I think that claim couldn’t be more off. Sure, America doesn’t have one neat, homogeneous culture — it’s too mixed, too big, too complicated for that. What it does have is a whole host of cultures sprinkled across its vast and beautiful geography. That’s the true gift of this country: you can choose the life you want to live, in the culture that feels right to you.

And the beauty is that so much of America still stands with its arms open. If you show up somewhere as an outsider, and take the time to respect how people live there — not trying to change them, not trying to prove that where you’re from does things better — you’re usually met with real warmth. Come in curious, ask questions, listen more than you talk, and try to understand where people are coming from, and wow, it’s a beautiful thing.

For Keith and Tara, I was realizing that it was the unpredictability of life out here on the bayou that’d become the attraction. Keith had told me the biggest threat of living here was the storms — hurricanes blowing 160 miles an hour for hours on end, floods rising fast and rolling through without mercy. Looking out at the still water all around us — the soft wind rustling the moss in slow sways, chorus frogs peeping from the banks — it occurred to me that the risk of living here was that one moment, the place gives you peace, but the next it could strip everything away. 

I try my best to see things from the perspective of the people I’m meeting up with, because I’m always curious how others see the world. Out here, I could feel the comfort that comes from knowing your immediate survival doesn’t depend on supply chains or policies but on your own skills and relationships. Keith and Tara were as connected to their food source as you can get. Swamp-to-table cuisine. 

“So, say the grid goes down,” I said. “Everything stops — no cell coverage. You guys are fine out here?”

“Yeah,” Tara said, no hesitation.

“We’re gonna be fantastic,” Keith said, a wide smile spreading across his face.

“Fuel and clean water would be the tough ones to get, though?”

Keith glanced at Tara, as if checking that they were on the same page. “Yeah, but there’s ways to get clean water. We’d boil it all day long if we got to.”

“And how many rounds of ammo at the house?” Tara asked.

“Ooh . . .” he paused, trying not to look too pleased with himself. “Eighteen thousand rounds, maybe.”

“You’re getting ready for something, Keith?” I asked with a grin.

“Always,” Tara cut in, laughing.

Keith didn’t answer me on the fuel question since, of course, without fuel, all of this stopped: the motorboat, the cooking stove, the backup generator. It’s romantic to imagine making it in the wild on our own — and Keith and Tara could do better than most. But the truth is, we’re all dependent on civilization; it’s just a question of degree. 

“What do you guys feel about the rest of the country out here?” I asked.

“I watch no news. None,” Keith said. He sounded proud. Defiant. 

Tara leaned forward with a small laugh. “We haven’t watched the news in years.”

“I used to keep up a little bit,” Keith said, “and it would just upset me so much to see all the stuff going on. So I was like, ‘You know what? I’m a lot happier, honestly, not keeping up with it.’ ’Cause how much positive stuff do you see in the news?”

“Nothing,” Tara said quickly.

“So this is what we do” — he looked around — “and we enjoy our lives doing it. And if we’re not here, we’re doing stuff with our families. For Christmas, you’re probably looking at 60 to 70 of just my family. People like to get together here. You do a crawfish boil, and you just tell everybody, and they bring a dish, and everybody just has a great time.”

***

Soon the houses came back into view. I spotted Carlis sprawled on the dock napping. Afternoon sunlight warmed the wooden planks, the soft whistle of a cardinal carrying across the water.

“I got you a treat,” Keith said, dropping the nutria at his father-in-law’s feet. “You want some nutria stew?”

Tara set a heavy iron pot on the stove, rice and onion sizzling as Keith busied himself with the day’s catch. Carlis lifted a bottle: homemade wine, wild muscadine from the swamp, generations of craft bottled inside, stretching all the way back to his ancestors in France.

“Tara, can you bring me that gut bucket in the back?” Keith called out. “The white one we found earlier?”

Tara wrinkled her nose and looked at me. “I know, that sounds so gross, huh?”

Carlis cracked the bottle of muscadine open and tipped it forward, the deep red liquid glugging heavily into a white Styrofoam cup. He lifted it under his nose and breathed deep. “Aah. Tolé, ça c’est bon!”

A little Bordeaux in the bayou, I thought.

“Do you feel the Cajun culture’s under threat at all?” I asked as he took a slow sip of the wine.

“We’re losing it,” he said. His face tightened at the thought.

“Back when I was little, just this area here, I’d say 100% of the kids spoke French. Nowadays, you’re lucky if you get 25% to 30%. Just like my grandkids. They understand it, but they never wanted to talk it.”

“But you spoke it ’cause your parents made you speak it, right?”

“They didn’t make me — that’s all we had. French was my first language. In school, they made us quit talking French.”

“So the US school system didn’t want any French being spoken at all?”

He shook his head. “And then just lately, the last few years, they started with French immersion — teaching French.” 

“Language is like a tidal wave,” I said to Carlis. “It’s hard to go against.” 

That was how it went, the pendulum swinging from pushing out French influence to embracing it again. Starting in the late 1800s, you could see the pressure to make Louisiana less French in all kinds of small, telling ways — French street names anglicized, public institutions phasing out the language. Catholic parishes were reorganized, some priests replaced with English-speaking clergy. And yet, for all the pressure to “Americanize”, the culture held on. Children still spoke French at home, even if they were punished at school for it. Music carried the language when conversation couldn’t. Recipes traveled from grandmother to grandchild. What survived did so stubbornly, underground at times, until the Sixties, when the cultural revival movements — Cajun music festivals, immersion programs, the creation of a state agency for Francophone Affairs — began bringing the language and traditions back into the everyday. But the reality is that kids will speak the language that’s cool with their friends, the language of the TikTok videos that they’re watching.

Over in the kitchen corner, Tara lifted the black pot’s lid as the stew roared, a rush of steam and bubbling, rich and heavy. She leaned into the cloud, breathing deep, satisfied.

Plates in hand, we stepped outside to eat in the open air. I lifted a forkful. “All right,” I announced, almost ceremonially. “My first nutria.” 

I was on my toes. Food can be such a big part of identity that the rejection of a meal can seem like the rejection of a culture. I took a big bite and chewed on it for a moment. It wasn’t bad. Earthy, dense, close to rabbit or dark chicken meat.

“It’s like nothing I’ve had before, to be honest,” I said. “Texture’s like…” I hesitated. “Gummy. A lot of flavor. It’s got some kick to it, right?”

Keith leaned closer. “Big question is — would you eat it?”

I smiled, swallowing. “If I was out here, yeah.”

They both laughed.

***

This is an edited excerpt from Your Fellow Americans by Peter Santenello. Copyright 2026 © by Peter Santenello. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Yet even in Tournon, on a boring Wednesday afternoon, there was an active social scene, a communal sense of needing to be, if not directly with other people, then at least near them. At one local café, friends, colleagues, couples, families came and went. Those who arrived alone, mostly older regulars, came to sit, watch the world and chat with waiters and fellow patrons. They were alone in name only. Each had their place, as I later found out when I realised I’d taken the corner seat of one regular. I offered to switch, but they declined with a smile, muttering something I hoped translated as “I may be set in my ways, but I’m not THAT set”.

I stayed at that café for three hours, and though I was alone I never felt lonely. I didn’t order much, but I never felt rushed. The French understand the value of sitting for a long time around others, while seemingly doing nothing.

After this cafe, I went to four others, some packed, others close to empty. Despite the unloveliness of the town, it never felt depressing. And perhaps that’s because people being social is central to human happiness. Loneliness, isolation, having no community to be a part of — that’s depressing. That is the kind of despair that can quickly reach desperate, suicidal levels.

This cafe culture, which I saw every day in every community along the Rhône Valley, is just one example of France’s healthy sense of communalism. The socialising here isn’t “networking” — the point isn’t to make work connections or climb the social hierarchy, but rather to become part of a collective, with a shared understanding of who you are (in this case, French) and why it’s good to be that. This sense of self so ingrained, it’s not explicitly recognised. The water you swim in, but don’t notice.

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That feeling of knowing who you are, of recognising that you’re a valuable part of something bigger and better than yourself, is far less common in the United States. In my homeland, being you, the maximal you that you can possible be, one defined by your own flavour of uniqueness, is central. It’s one of the reasons I think Europe (or at least large parts of it) is far healthier than the US: you can see that borne out in the suicide and mortality statistics, but you can also see it with your own eyes, if you spend time shuttling between the two. It doesn’t take long to realise that we Americans are not a healthy bunch, neither physically nor mentally. We are a sick country and we’re getting sicker. We have an unnaturally high level of mental illness, both diagnosed, and not. We are addicted to medicines, both legal and illegal, to try and cope with it. We are killing ourselves in record numbers.

Americans claim that because we have more stuff, we are better than other nations. In my mind, contentment, happiness and fulfilment are the more important measures of achievement.

Yet Americans often miss the strength of Europe because they rarely stray beyond its touristy city centres. Big city Europe is in the process of being smoothed into a generic, boring singular entity. This soulless Americanisation has accelerated dramatically over the last few decades, driven by globalisation, tourism and secular capitalism. The result is McEurope — a chain of big cities where chunks of each are the same. The branding of the franchises might be a tad different, the scenery a little altered, but these chunks serve up the same drab experience.

There isn’t much dignity left in these “historic downtowns”, most of it lost in the rush to monetise the mobs. The Hen and Stag parties flown in on Ryanair. The pub crawls. The cobbled streets lined with the same stores selling trainers, sex toys, raw paninis under glow lamps, absurdly calorific sweets and whatever else tourists splurge on to feel special. Even the cathedrals have been reduced to a check mark on tourist lists to justify a day of binge drinking.

What McEurope is lacking the most is the communalism that’s central to European culture. Thankfully though, McEurope is confined to a few neighbourhoods, and it’s very easy to get away from them. I would always recommend visiting some random mid-sized town in Europe, rather than a capital city. Some place like Valence in France, which like Paris has a long history and an ancient and sublime cathedral, yet hasn’t entirely succumbed to the global forces trying to flatten the world.

In places like this, you can see the care Europeans still give to living: to eating, to relaxing, to being part of a group, to working with a purpose beyond making mint. Here, we find the antidote to the very American ideology of individual liberation. The idea that everyone needs to be emancipated from everything. Everyone needs to find their true self and be it — even if that means severing ties with family, friends, church, nation, anything and everything that came before. Those are provincial, backwards and holding you back.

The purpose of life in America, then, is to be free. Yet freedom is a perverse goal, a broken Telos, that can only be seen as positive if you have an abnormal sense of what it means to be human. To be human is to be social; the ancient Greeks knew it, the medieval Christians knew it and even the early Liberals knew it, but we moderns have somehow forgotten it. Once you understand that, then you understand that the American definition of freedom ends in despair.

True freedom isn’t being so emancipated that you are isolated, it’s the opposite — being part of a group and knowing where you fit in and are valued, whether that’s in a café, a club or a nation. In that sense, Europe is freer and healthier than the US. Most of the rest of the world is. But in the US, and in McEurope, we view community as something to move beyond. This is especially true of the intellectual class, who have an outsized role in policy and business decisions.

Yet even in America, you can see a glimmer of resistance. Americans are social animals too, as all humans are; we need community so much that we will seek to build relationships in the most hostile environments. Just look at the McDonald’s franchise, conceived as a ruthlessly efficient and transactional way to sell food. You go in, you buy calories, you leave, in as short a time as possible. Yet, many McDonald’s branches around America have evolved into community centres, where some people even meet to pray. (To their credit, the corporation has recognised this and changed their approach, although the higher driving goal is still efficiency.)

During my years focusing on poverty, addiction and despair in America, I saw communities emerge in the most desperate places: from trap houses in the Bronx, to homeless camps under bridges or dive bars in Los Angeles. Without functional communities to become part of, many Americans end up gravitating to dysfunctional ones out of desperation. Without churches or cafes, they go to the drug traps; without families, extreme politics; without sports clubs, gangs; without friends, angry online forums.

Sadly, a growing minority fail completely to find anything to be part of and end up in a state of completely antisocial perversion. A state of depression, confusion, emptiness and then violence, against others and themselves. A state that for too many ends in suicide, either quickly, or slowly, one needle at a time. That is a freedom turned into a tyranny of emptiness.

A version of this essay was first published on Substack.

What distinguishes us from other animals is the diversity in how we live. There is a greater difference between a resident of Hanoi and a resident of Istanbul than there is between a rat in Hanoi and one in Istanbul. While so much modern discourse is about the universality of humanity, it is in fact the variation within our species that defines us as a big-brained species. Rats live rather similar lives, regardless of where they are born, because they are driven by their inborn instincts. But rather than being led by genetically programmed impulses, we use constructed tools, whether literal or figurative, to survive and thrive. And those tools are what comprise a place’s culture.

Your definition of culture might be different from an anthropologist’s. In his book of essays, The Interpretations of Culture, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes that a human being is imbued at birth with “the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life” but generally ends up “having lived only one”. That one life we end up living is largely determined by what culture, and place in it, we are born into. “As culture shaped us as a single species so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This,” writes Geertz, “is what we have in common.” Oddly enough, many of our subjects express this more clearly than we anthropologists. In Java, Geertz points out, the people quite flatly say: “To be human is to be Javanese.”

What anthropologists seek is not that different from what most people say they want to get out of travel: an understanding of a place. But most travellers’ grasp of culture is what Geertz calls a “thin description”. A listing of the foods, faiths, clothes, and customs that make it unique. For tourists, understanding a place is about figuring out what you need to do to “pass for a native”. That is, to know enough of the language, styles of dress and etiquette to be able to spend time in Lima without causing offence out of ignorance.

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While culture, to Geertz, does encompass the surface-level rules that “guide behaviour”, to him they aren’t nearly as interesting or meaningful as what lies beneath. Culture, he writes, is “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life”. In other words, culture is about why we think we are here, and why we think it’s worth being here. Where the “thin description” asks “how do you live?”, the “thick description” asks: “Why do you live?”

That different cultures, and different places, have different answers to that question shows the depth of human adaptability. It is those differences that fascinate me as a traveller. For me, to travel is to learn how to be human, by observing the variety of ways you can be human.

Most of what passes as travel these days, though, is “thin travel”. It’s about selling an experience of a place, staging a version of its culture. The travel industry proffers package dinners, where you can drink traditional liquors, eat traditional food, watch traditional dances. If there is any meaning there, it’s buried so far beneath the glitz that it’s dead. Meaning isn’t staged. It is so interwoven into one’s sense of self that it’s often unacknowledged, like the water a fish swims in, or the air you breathe.

Every city has a tourist district, which bundles up a culture and puts it in one, easy-to-find, safe area full of quaint shops. These places are the hallmarks of “thin travel”. Sure, you are in Hanoi. Sure, the people here are Vietnamese. But they are not living their true life. They are performing, mostly as a job. Their intention might well be to educate people about their culture. But thick travel is about getting away from performances, and into neighbourhoods where people are going about their lives. People who aren’t trying to teach or sell you something.

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So, how do you travel in a way that allows you to understand a place’s meaning, as best you can, rather than travelling just to see its surface? Thick travel isn’t about intensity, or danger, or going to extremes; it is about seeking the normal, and often the banal. In ordinary places, people are in their default mode, and it is their default mode that people are most “genuine” to their culture. That is why, when I’m in a new place, I try to become a regular in a few average places. Not to blend in, but to let others blend out, by being themselves.

Taking risks, entering sacred or profane spaces against the wishes of residents, or going to the place with the most X or the least Y, isn’t necessarily thick travel. It’s not about trying to play-act as a native, or putting another check on a list of crazy things you’ve done for clout. It’s not about eating the weirdest dish served in that one restaurant highlighted by that guy on the travel channel, but about eating what’s most commonly eaten. It’s about going to 7-11s in the middle-class neighbourhoods of Taipei for breakfast.

Thick travel might not require hours of YouTube research, but it does require time. On my travel blog, I have a bad habit of posting my first thoughts on a place, after three or four days of walking it. I did that in Taipei, writing: “Taipei in many ways is like Seoul. Both have grown quickly, become relatively wealthy, and in the process jumped headlong into materialism while shedding a lot of their traditional culture.”

While that’s partly true, it’s also a “thin description”, because as I learned, after spending two more weeks in the city, religious traditions are central to Taiwanese culture, to people young and old. My epiphany came in a midtown temple. I was only there grudgingly, because I couldn’t book an earlier flight back home (something I had tried to do based on my first impressions).

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I entered the temple at the same time as a young man, a guy who on the surface seemed pretty secular. He was dressed like a kid from a western MTV video, with baggy clothes and a bucket hat. He had three tattoos on his forearms — a pile of US dollars, brass knuckles, and the Mercedes Benz logo. I watched him, figuring cynically that he was there for something other than the rituals. But no, he quickly took off his hat, then slowly worked his way around the circuit of altars and statues, performing all the ritual steps with the upmost reverence. The only scepticism was mine, and it quickly faded.

Faith plays a different role in Taiwan than in Western cultures. That’s not a value judgement, or even an “othering”. “Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity,” writes Geertz. The clearer your picture of another culture, the more rational it seems, while also remaining unique. That is, the teenager in a bucket hat going to the temple to do his daily rituals is, at both at a thick and thin level, very different from a young man in Lima going to the cathedral, but both are being very human. They are both seeking meaning, not through their animal impulses, but through their traditions.

Once you see how a thick description of culture provides people with meaning, you also see how lost we would be without it. “The extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability of man’s innate response capacity means that without the assistance of cultural patterns he would be functionally incomplete,” wrote Geertz. It is “a kind of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of self control, a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague emotions”. Or, to quote the philosopher Suzanne Langer: “[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos.”

Thick travel has made me realise how much chaos we have here in the US, at a spiritual level, compared with the rest of the world. We are becoming a thin culture, obsessed with the surface, more and more in denial about the importance of what is beneath. We have forgotten that we need webs of meaning, eroding so many of them. People are left trying to cope with what we humans are not equipped to cope with — the isolation and chaos that follows from meaninglessness.

I spent over 10 years documenting poverty, homelessness, and addiction in the US. Now, I am walking around the world, writing dispatches. But my current project is not that different from my last one. My three years of thick travel, of trying to understand other cultures, has given me a much clearer picture of the problems here in the US. It’s made me aware just how deep they are. Our culture is harsh and transactional; it doesn’t respect the very human need for a deeper sense of meaning. The result is our epidemic of suicides, overdoses, and other early deaths.

Worse still is that culture, while easy to erode, is very hard to rebuild once gone. You can’t legislate back meaning. If thick travel teaches you anything, it’s that people don’t work that way.

A version of this essay first appeared on Chris Arnade Walks The World.

The reality behind the view, however, is somewhat different. The peaks are there, all right; the meadow is indeed beautiful, the lake is crystalline. But a visitor to Alpe di Siuse or Lago di Braies will have to contend with some of the largest crowds of tourists in Europe; a staggering 34 million people a year. If you yearn for a solitary communing with nature, you will find many, many others have had the same idea.

Now the local population of the region of Trentino Alto Adige, which amounts to only a million people, have had enough. This summer, the local tourist board has instigated a cap on visitor numbers, and between July and September, anyone wanting to come in by car will need an online permit. Entry to the meadow will be restricted to the hours between 9am and 5pm, and to the lake between 9am and 4pm. It will put paid to getting your own Insta-breaking shot of the sunset over the mountains. Bureaucracy has stepped in to keep the romantic touristic ideal alive.

“Over-tourism” is killing — in some cases, has long since killed — what tourists think they seek: the sightseeing industry has become a snake compelled to eat its own tail. Venice, now simply a palimpsest of a real, living city, charges an entrance fee to day-trippers, because they add to the stifling crush of people but less to the economy that overnighters.

Sooner or later, any place advertised as “unspoilt” must buckle under the weight of visitors looking for unspoiltness. On the once-mysterious island of Santorini, the coast road is crammed, nose to tail, with coaches full of cruise passengers who’ve disembarked for a couple of hours. The clifftop over the caldera is blocked three-deep with tourists taking selfies at sunset. Wedding parties queue to get photographs with the view behind them. It feels less like a place than a backdrop.

In France, which attracts 90 million tourists a year (the highest number of any country in Europe), regional tourist boards have now resorted to begging visitors to stay away from the obvious and over-stuffed destinations, such as Mont-Saint-Michel, and spread the load of numbers to lesser-known routes. Pressures of infrastructure, of water, health services and traffic make once-lovely places often disappointing for the holidaymaker (so very unlike the promise of those Insta images) and both impossible and expensive for the people who must actually make a home there.

Barcelona — at 15,800 inhabitants per square kilometre, already one of the most crowded cities in Europe — attracts 32 million visitors every year. (In 1990, there were 1.8 million.) Half this number are day-trippers who spend their money only in the main tourist areas and souvenir stalls, while the proliferation of Airbnb apartments drives up local rents and forces locals out of the centre.

Few people seek out crowds when travelling. The tourist experience is almost always characterised by those selling it in terms of exclusivity, serendipity and particularity. The beach is “tucked away”, the restaurant is “local”, and in the guidebook the cathedral appears to be empty but for a discerning few. The reality, however, is that the beach is generally crammed, as is the restaurant, which is also vastly expensive — and for the cathedral, you must queue round the block for entry.

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Modern tourism has long been a battlefield between the competing desires of individual and collective experience. In 1861, a Times leader denounced what it viewed as the modern craze for “rushing about in crowds”, which it found was represented by the tours of Thomas Cook. Cook’s answer was that tourism had for too long been the preserve of a “flirting, listless” aristocratic elite; he was opening up the world for the education of the middle classes, for the “thoughtful tourist”. Where people of leisure merely “wandered” about, Cook’s clients were working people wishing to use their short periods of time off in a guided, directed manner. They wanted to be pointed to what was “good” and what was “beautiful” and to learn about it. They wanted to have experiences.

But with everyone looking for a view or an experience, before long, the view and the experience were inevitably made less attractive by other people. Those who thought they had a majestic landscape to themselves were outraged. In 1867, Minnie Thackeray, daughter of the novelist, deplored the sight of the “trippers and excursionists” flocking to Mont Blanc (which now gets 6 million visitors a year). Ruskin, whose dislike of “fast travel” was intense, thought that the inhabitants of the mountain village of Chamonix were degraded by turning their woodworking skills to making ornamental alpenstocks to sell to tourists.

A century later, in the Sixties — the period that saw cheap air travel bring unprecedented numbers to the Mediterranean and transform small fishing villages into vast resorts — anthropologists first used the phrase the “tourist gaze”. This gaze had had a profound effect on communities whose craft traditions and religious ceremonies were now simply part of a package of attractions served up to seasonal visitors. Had these traditions become mere husks, empty of meaning? Were they now understood in terms not of their own deep roots within landscape and history, but only in relation to an audience fleetingly interested in a bit of local colour?

The first tourists were medieval pilgrims for whom the outer journey had an inner, spiritual purpose. But modern tourists who encounter religious festivals abroad often don’t share or understand the deeper significance of what they are witnessing. Smartphone images constitute the 21st-century equivalent of an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities. It is a pic-n-mix assortment of cultural bits and pieces to be stored and (perhaps) looked at long after the moment in which the original was experienced.

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Ruskin was a snob about travel. He saw no reason why he shouldn’t himself travel slowly in his own coach about Europe (he deplored trains, which he saw as inculcating the peculiarly modern vice of endless distraction), as long as he didn’t have to suffer the presence of crowds of his less-cultured countrymen. But his warning of tourism’s endless and inevitable roll-out of blandness and standardisation seems prophetic and pertinent today. For Ruskin, always to be moving somewhere else, always planning a destination far away, was to risk missing the details of where we actually are. In the search for difference or novelty (that view over the mountains; that bluer sea; that Instagrammable seafood feast), we bypass the deeper pleasure of looking more intimately at what is close and familiar.

In his 2002 book The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton points out that to sketch a tree would take at least “10 minutes of acute concentration”, a length of time that would rarely be given to any examination of a tree in the age of the smartphone. Like Ruskin an advocate of slow travel, de Botton also glosses over the fact that attending to the details of your own locality is a lot easier if you live somewhere even just a bit lovely — and it may be that the more we rely on going somewhere else for loveliness, we risk neglecting to respect the places that we live in.

But as the high spots of popular destinations become more crowded with people and more emptied of atmosphere, perhaps it’s time to re-think what it means to be a tourist — to try and pin down what it is the tourist really hungers for. The tourism industry is a product of 19th-century Romanticism, perhaps its most visible living legacy. It is ever on the lookout for new ways either to re-package the sites of the past or to sell the sensation of a wonder that has often long since been jaded by exposure.

Among its commodities are “heritage” and “experience” — both of which have to be carefully curated to maintain the appearance most likely to evoke feelings of the sublime. But the localism, the crafts, customs, and food, which is also central to the tourists’ sensation package is meaningless if there are no real locals to embody it. Keeping tourists out may give communities space to recover themselves. In the spirit of Ruskin in making travel a little more challenging, a little slower, it may encourage a resurgence in the art of really looking. More importantly, it should encourage an examination of what tourism means for places so buckling under the strain of numbers that, for their inhabitants, they are no longer places for living, working and being, but simply for propping up an unsustainable artifice.

The column is hardly a significant contribution to the literature of travel writing. Nor is it the most offensive account of an American in a foreign country ever written. But that it was met with such deep hostility speaks to a profound contemporary anxiety with what Datskovska did: dare to write unselfconsciously about a foreign country.

If Stacia Datskovska is too much for us, what would we do today with Martha Gellhorn? The travel writer and war correspondent, who died 25 years ago, looked upon many of the places she visited with a greater degree of scorn and disdain, disillusionment and despair, than any American undergraduate student in Florence could muster.

Gellhorn was like the protagonist of one of William Boyd’s cradle-to-grave novels. Born in 1908 and dead by 1998, she bore witness to an outstanding chunk of the period the historian Eric Hobsbawm described as the Age of Extremes. In the Madrid of 1937, she saw the republican government under the siege of General Franco’s fascist army. She followed Russia’s brutal invasion of Finland in 1939, and was there when Dachau was liberated by the American Army in April 1945. In Sixties Saigon, she documented the savage brutality of America’s military might. At an age when most people are comfortably retired, she was covering the war in El Salvador.

Gellhorn was always a witness, never a saint. Unlike many contemporary authors, she does not go out of her way to show she is a good person. Her moral probity is never foregrounded. Quite the opposite. She complains about the shit weather. She is annoyed by the unfamiliar customs of the people she encounters in foreign lands. This degree of honesty makes her an anachronism in today’s literary climate.

It is understandable that her reporting was full of bleak description; war is meant to be horrible. But her travel writing had none of the extravagant sweetness of, say, Jan Morris. Gellhorn’s collection Travels with Myself and Another describes five “horror stories”: thoroughly unsentimental accounts of human absurdity, rendered in brisk and unflashy prose. She never idealised a place once she had seen it, even if she had in anticipation. Before she visited Africa, for instance, it was “a vast lion-coloured plain, ringed by blue mountains. Beautiful wild animals roamed across the land and the sky went up forever. There were no people in this picture, no Africans or anyone else.” She kept trying to get editors to send her there, but eventually gave up and paid her own way. What she found was not the virgin territory of her imagination but a place full of human muck.

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She describes the local population in a way that would make many modern readers wince. “The natives look like Caribbean Negroes,” she writes of Douala, “and are dressed in odd scraps which are apparently the lot of poor blacks who live anywhere near whites.” Her descriptions of the places she visited flit between revulsion and fascination — at certain times dehumanising the people she meets, and at other times endowing them with human dignity. “They are also very pleasant,” she continues, “unlike US Negroes who have plenty of reason to be surly and usually are. These Africans are after all at home, and bosses in their house… no one can push them around just because they have a white skin.”

These are candid testaments from the journal she kept, rather than polished thoughts. But even when she is writing in hindsight, there is an unvarnished quality to her prose that can be challenging to read. In another chapter of Travels, about a visit to China in 1941, she describes Hong Kong as a city which was “nailed together hurriedly from odd lots of old wood and sounded like a chronic Chinese New Year”. There is no attempt to spare feelings; you could get cut by a spike here or a broken chip there.

She was the same, apparently, in real life. At a dinner party, Gellhorn was once asked by the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien where she got her clothes from. She briskly replied: “Oxfam — I don’t give a fuck about clothes.” Being liked did not interest her. She once told a woman interviewing her: “This conversation is so boring I think I’m going to faint.” This quality makes her bracing to read, and read about. She wrote it as she saw it, warts and all. She never shied away from looking at the Other, even when her conclusions on it were not nice.  This abrasive attitude to everyone and everything would be interpreted, today, as a form of reactionary politics; it is better to not write about foreign people than to sometimes write negatively about them, some say.

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The alternatives are to write uncritically, or write about yourself, and Gellhorn would do neither. Like Datskovska, Gellhorn doesn’t look inward. As her biographer, Caroline Moorehead, writes, she “had no gift for introspection. Not just no gift: no taste for it either. Autobiography, the long journey through the past, for her spelt if not excessive self-love then at the very least self-absorption.” She wished to present — and allow the reader to make up her own mind — rather than oppressively impose her own self on whatever she wrote. If she did write about what she felt, she never dwelled on these feelings; to her, they were a distraction from what was in front of her.

Travel, for Gellhorn, was not about self-discovery. Paradoxically, it is this self-effacing aspect that makes her writing more honest than the very subjective stories — of the Eat, Pray, Love variety — that dominate the travel genre today. These modern accounts tell us more about the writer than the place that is meant to be described.

She had a great nostalgia for travel before the genre transformed, before mass tourism. This was the time when the “Mediterranean was clean”, and “when you were a person not a sheep, herded in airports, railway stations, ski-lifts, movies, museums among your fellow sheep”. In this instance, Gellhorn is asserting her self against what she sees as the homogenising tendency of the ski-lifts, the museum, the railway station. She looked back fondly at a time when it was uncomfortable to travel; she looked down on her sanitised present. “If attendance at airports was compelled by law,” she wrote, “we would protest in marches, demonstrations, picket the White House and Parliament, take the case to the World Court, write to The Times, raise the roof.”

But she couldn’t stop travelling. The bliss of getting out of oneself was so immeasurably rich to her. Once we are finally “inside the plane, our faces change, we toss jokes about, laugh, chat to strangers.” One doesn’t need to approve of all her observations, or sympathise with her fondness for an older age of foreign travel, to find some inspiration in her approach to writing. She could be grumpy and intolerant, parochial and savage, but she always strove to look outwards. Gellhorn’s was a life that testified to the importance of writing about foreign lands uninhibitedly and vigorously; without such travellers, our view of the world is diluted.

That was Wodehouse in 1941, from one of his Berlin broadcasts. But pretty much the same has applied 80 years later in Hong Kong, just with fewer Germans. If your goal has ever been to get locked in a room for weeks on end, then Hong Kong has become the place to be. The authorities would lock you up if you had Covid. They’d lock you up if you’d been close to someone who had Covid. At one point, they’d even lock you up if you’d been close to someone who’d been close to someone who had Covid.

You also got locked up just for getting into the country. You paid for the flight and the Hong Kong authorities would do the rest. Actually, that last bit wasn’t quite true: you had to book and pay for your room as well. But you get the point.

Brutal as it was — caring little for minor things like family separation or childcare — this system worked relatively well by its own standards until earlier this year. For extended periods there were no Covid cases at all and overall deaths remained low. But then Omicron broke through, as almost everyone knew it would: ironically, as the result of a cross-infection in a quarantine hotel, something the government had been warned about repeatedly.

There soon became too many cases to make asymptomatic people spend weeks in hospital and there were not enough isolation units to lock up close contacts. By the start of March, the death rate went through the roof, becoming the highest in the world at any point in the pandemic. They couldn’t process the dead quickly enough, with bodies stacked next to the living, in overrun, under-staffed, public hospitals. Hong Kong ran out of coffins as well as smugness. It became the premier place to be if you wanted to die from Covid.

The tragedy was how avoidable all this was. Having broadly succeeded in the initial stages of the pandemic, cutting down local case numbers down zero for months, Hong Kong had an opportunity — almost unique in the world — to transition, with as few deaths as possible, to a sustainable mitigation strategy.

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Its failure not to take that opportunity has now been widely noted — as has its recent announcement that it would begin to relax some of its stricter restrictions. From outside, this has been presented as a pragmatic shift away from its policy of “dynamic zero Covid” to something akin to co-existence. The idea of “living with Covid” was previously verboten here, a sign of Western decadence and a failure to care about the value of human life, so any such shift would be profound.

Yet from within Hong Kong the shift seems less significant and reaction to the policy changes here have been more muted than some of the overseas coverage might suggest.

This is partly because the details are less dramatic than the headlines. Schools were told they could go back to face-to-face teaching, only for the government to then announce that they need to have achieved a 90% vaccination rate among staff and students before they could return to full days, something many will find next to impossible to achieve in what remains of the school year. Some of the more extreme rules remain: mask wearing is compulsory outside, even if exercising, even in remote country parks. There are still stories of the police lurking behind bushes to catch out knackered joggers who have pulled down their masks to catch their breath.

While the outright country flight bans that previously existed are to be dropped from April, and quarantine has been reduced to seven days (until recently it was 21), it’s still seven days more than most of the world insists on and it is also open only to vaccinated residents — no visitors at all. At any point, if an airline is found to have brought too many positive cases into Hong Kong, they are banned from that route for seven days. Travellers then have to rearrange everything, including the quarantine hotel, which is often simply not possible given the demand, and means not getting into Hong Kong for months. All of this remains a serious problem for Asia’s self-proclaimed “world city”.

But my suspicion is that the real reason people here are less impressed goes beyond the details of the changes; it is now a broader issue about lack of faith in the government, and the absence of any strategy.

For some, this is inextricably linked to the protests in 2019 and the government’s heavy-handed response — something for which a fair few people have been locked up, and for longer than three weeks. A significant proportion of Hongkongers wouldn’t trust the government whatever they did. But even if you are one of those who thinks that the Hong Kong government was right in its approach, it is difficult to say that it has recently demonstrated competence. It is not just the failures to prepare properly for the current outbreak — although that alone should have been enough to have ended multiple political careers. There have also been constant U-turns on policy.

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Perhaps the worst recently was the announcement that all the school term dates were to change, bringing forward the summer holiday to Easter — I am not making this up — to allow school buildings to be used for a city-wide testing programme. Then it was floated that this might also simultaneously involve a lockdown, which triggered panic-shopping; only for the government to then decide that maybe they didn’t want to do any of it after all.

Given the U-turns so far it would be a brave person who would bet against another massive reversal of policy months down the line. What happens when case numbers start to rise again? Or there are the inevitable outbreaks in schools?

One common response to this is to say something like: “Of course, they can’t say they are going to live with the virus. That would involve too much loss of face. But that’s obviously what they are doing”.

But there are two problems with this argument. The first is that there is plenty of evidence that this is not what they are doing: at the same time as there is talk of reopening the schools and the borders, the government has also been building multiple new isolation centres. Mass testing may have been put on hold, but compulsory testing of people who have been in places with Covid cases has restarted. As case numbers have fallen to more manageable levels, so people have begun to get put back into isolation. None of this looks like living with the virus.

Second, even if this were true, it is never a good sign for any government to say it is doing one thing while doing another. Even if the people at the top of government think they are following a plan, it makes it less likely for there to be a proper alignment of strategy and implementation. Chief Executive Carrie Lam has said that Hong Kong’s struggle with Covid is akin to a war, so it’s worth considering what Clausewitz said about military strategy. It was “to identify the decisive point and to concentrate everything on it, removing forces from secondary fronts and ignoring lesser objectives”. We shouldn’t necessarily have expected the Hong Kong authorities to have read Clausewitz — but at times they act as if they have read him only so they can work out how to do the exact opposite. There is no identification of the decisive point, no concentration of resources, and there’s always a host of lesser objectives.

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In the same way that the massive focus on locking people up and keeping out those from overseas distracted what should have been the main priority of vaccinating people in care homes, only last week Lam argued that Hong Kong needed both to reopen the mainland border and to open up to international travel. Yet these are in direct tension. As long as the policy on the mainland is for Zero Covid, the mainland border won’t open up while there are outbreaks in Hong Kong — but if you allow international travel without quarantine, you will get outbreaks. “To govern,” as Pierre Mendès-France put it, “is to choose.”  Hong Kong’s administration cannot choose, and thus it cannot govern.

One of the curiosities about Hong Kong — at least to a polling junkie like me — is the almost complete lack of decent opinion polling here. When asking awkward questions can get you threatened with the National Security Law, it is difficult to ask tricky questions or expect honest answers, and to know what people really think.

But for many the tipping point has been reached and people are voting with their feet. A full 1% of the population left last month. Some may be coming back, but lots are not. And sure, in time, when all this is a distant memory, others will come in to replace them, but the immediate consequences are significant. Talent drains, organisations relocate, businesses fold. The infrastructure won’t return, the diversity is lost. It is said that the recent promised policy shifts came in response to pleas from the city’s great and good, worried that irreversible damage was being done to Hong Kong’s status as a financial centre. These pleas were too quiet, and, for many, too late.

Hollywood has long understood this. Hitchcock’s classic, North By Northwest, for instance, finds Cary Grant seducing Eva Marie Saint — or is it the other way round? — aboard The Twentieth Century Limited, a luxurious overnight service that ran between New York and Chicago for more than sixty years. And James Bond, of course, has found himself speeding through the dark with a lady companion on more than one occasion.

The golden age of sleepers is behind us, of course — in Europe, anyway. They arose in the open and cosmopolitan atmosphere before the First World War. Then, there was a service that ran all the way from St Petersburg to Paris, a distance of some 1700 miles. It was known as the Nord Express. Because of the difference in track gauge between the Russian and German Empires, you had to change at their border, in an East Prussian town called Eydtkuhnen. But once you were past that obstacle, it was plain sailing across the North European Plain, via Berlin and Cologne, to the City of Light.

Like so many good things that thrived before 1914, the inspiringly international sleeper fell victim to the twin cataclysms of war and totalitarianism. The Nord Express, for instance, never fully resumed after the Great War, because the Bolshevik revolution had closed off Russia. Between the wars its eastern terminus was Warsaw, by then the capital of a newly independent Poland.

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But at the same time the Nord Express was in its pomp, Tsarist Russia was completing the infrastructure for what remains the longest sleeper service in the world, the Trans-Siberian Express, which travels more than 5000 miles from Moscow to Vladivostok in Russia’s Far East.

And then there was the Sud Express, a service which connected Lisbon, Madrid, Paris and London until the late 1930s. Before the arrival of Covid-19, the Sud Express still existed as an overnight service — albeit in curtailed form, between Lisbon and the extreme west of the Franco-Spanish border. But at that time, it seemed as though the era of the night train was drawing to a close. In March 2017, The Guardian published “A requiem for the overnight sleeper”. Back then Deutsche Bahn, the German national operator, was said to be discontinuing all overnight services, while in France — home of the famous Blue Train, which ran from Paris to the Riviera for more than a century — the SNCF was suspending sleepers from the French capital. No more thrilling nights in sleeping cars with mysterious, scantily clad mademoiselles!

The future of the sleeper was threatened not only by cheap air travel but also by the development of high-speed rail, which was radically reducing journey times. Even the Orient Express, most celebrated of long-distance trains, which celebrates its birthday today, vanished from European timetables in 2009, having gradually reduced its range over the years. Once upon a time it had taken passengers between Paris and Istanbul, but by the end it was plying the Strasbourg to Vienna route — a sorry diminishment from the service’s heyday.

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Happily, it now seems like the requiem to the European sleeper may have been premature. A couple of weeks ago, Train Twitter was alight with excitement at the German Green Party’s plans to create a whole new generation of trans-European sleeper services — from Oslo, Stockholm and Tallinn in the North to Barcelona, Naples, Athens and Istanbul in the South. It is unclear whether all these planned routes are entirely realistic. One of the suggestions is for trains to run direct from London to Berlin, Warsaw, Rome and Madrid, using the Channel Tunnel — but some have pointed out that the logistical difficulties of running further services through the tunnel, on top of the existing Eurostar and freight traffic, are considerable.

Whatever the practical difficulties, the ambition is striking, and it follows other promising developments. January 2020 saw the debut of a Brussels-Vienna sleeper run by Nightjet, meaning that you can have lunch in London and be at the Wien Hauptbahnhof by breakfast-time the following day, with a single change in the EU capital. With a bit of luck you might catch a glorious sunrise along the Danube. This spring the same company launched a Brussels-Prague service, via Berlin and Dresden.

There’s also talk of night trains between Hamburg and Stockholm, making use of the magnificent Oresund crossing between Denmark and Sweden, a remarkable piece of civil engineering that combines both tunnel and bridge. Meanwhile, a company called Midnight Trains has proposed overnight services from Paris to all points of the compass, including Edinburgh and Venice.

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These signs of resurgence may be linked to the growing recognition by governments that short-haul flying is a serious environmental problem. But the pandemic’s evisceration of the airline industry — proving how vulnerable it is — may also be a catalyst.

Perhaps, though, travellers find the adventure of the sleeper train irresistible after all. Unlike flying, taking a long-distance sleeper allows you to really feel the distance you are traversing. At stations en route you will hear new accents and languages, and see different architectural styles. Depending on the time of year and what time you decide to turn in, you can watch the landscape change around you. Getting a solid night’s sleep and still not being at your destination is a semi-conscious reminder that the world is actually a big place. Whereas flying compresses distance and flattens diversity, the sleeper, with its gradual change and human scale, tends to emphasise variety. It makes the traveller more curious.

And as often as not, when it is finally time to leave, you walk straight out into the heart of a new city, with all its unusual rhythms and sights — rather than into a sterile airport terminal, all of which look the same. Even in an age when Big Steel and Big Glass are trying to make all cities look identical, many places retain a distinct character in their historic centres — which is where you tend to find railway terminuses.

Without doubt, reports of the death of the night train was greatly exaggerated. Indeed, we are potentially looking not at a mere stay of execution, but a fully-fledged revival. What may not survive, of course, is the “city break”, developed at the turn of the millennium thanks to super-cheap flights. But that may be no bad thing. Flying deprives us of much of the adventure — the glamour — of travel. Surely anyone with even the slightest glimmer of romance in their soul will feel a frisson of excitement on the day when the likes of Copenhagen, Barcelona and Stockholm join Paris and Amsterdam on the departures board at St Pancras.

For those of us who find the recycled air of the airplane cabin already disturbingly artificial, this will feel like a suffocation. And no, my kids won’t keep theirs on. And yes, the people sitting next to us will have a go at them for this. Also, there will be no queuing allowed for the toilets — maybe we will have to take a numbered ticket — so it’s probably best if you just hold it in. And if, on the morning of travel, you wake up with a temperature, they are going to send you home.

What was already a pretty hellish experience is about to become doubly so. Presumably, with demand collapsing, we are all going to have to pay more for the pleasure. And who knows what you are going to catch cooped-up in some metal petri dish for hours on end. Social distancing? In economy class? I don’t think so.

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Flying was supposed to be freedom. Our access to a few days of sunshine. An escape to other worlds, a chance to broaden the mind. Well, if this is freedom you can stick it where the sun don’t shine. I will shed no tears for the demise of cheap flying. You don’t have to be a member of Extinction Rebellion to care about the effect that mass air travel has had on our planet. There will be much to celebrate when these polluting monstrosities are grounded.

But what of that cliched assumption that travel, and air travel in particular, is a mind-expanding experience — that travel is inherently educational, a chance to experience new cultures, different food and languages, a way of coming to appreciate that the way you think about things is not the only way to think about things? Before air travel, such experiences were the preserve of the rich, going on their grand tours. With cheap air travel all this was democratised. And so, for many people, the world has become a bigger place. This mind expanding aspect of travel is fundamentally moral. As Mark Twain put it in The Innocents Abroad:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

The problem here is that Twain died in 1910 and the world’s first commercial flight didn’t take place until four years later. And air travel has not fulfilled much of the moral mission he ascribes to travel in general. If anything, it’s done the opposite.

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Is this what a Green world would look like?

By Stephen Pollard

There is a paradox here. People often travel to experience difference. But by travelling, they create sameness. From the ‘Fish’n’ Chip’ shops of southern Spain, to Disneyland Shanghai, to the increasingly ubiquitous culture of the international hotel, with their near identical menus and styling, the more we travel, the more that genuine difference is eradicated.

Furthermore, locals know that the tourist dollar flows to those who present themselves as the tourist expects them to be, not as they really are. Far from broadening the mind, quick in-out air travel often just serves to cement the preconceived ideas of the tourist. As GK Chesterton avidly observed “travel narrows the mind”.

Of course, part of my agenda here is a hostility to globalisation, of which the commercial aircraft has long been at the vanguard. In 2005, that would-be prophet of globalisation Thomas Friedman wrote a book called The World is Flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. The flatness he sought was a level playing field created by free trade. In this flat world of global trade, differences and divisions between people become increasingly meaningless. The power of the nation state recedes as the needs of global commerce break down all barriers to its final hegemony. The price paid by this flat world of global commerce is the homogenisation of culture. Everything becomes the same.

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Farewell free trade, and good riddance

By David Goodhart

But there is a deeper, almost spiritual problem with the ‘globe-trotting as freedom’ philosophy that is embedded in the lure of commercial air travel. “Sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything” was the advice of one of the most famous of the fourth century desert fathers, Abba Moses. The idea is that staying put is a way to face your demons and deal with them.

In this tradition, those who are constantly restless for new experiences are suspected of trying to run away from the things they should be facing. If you are dissatisfied with life, you will probably be dissatisfied wherever you are; if you find relationships difficult, you will do so in China or Scotland; if you are cynical, a new view from your window won’t change that. The thing about travel is that you have to take yourself with you.

In the monastic tradition, ‘stay put’ is not about confinement. It is a liberating invitation to explore where you are and who you are. In an age where ‘somewhere else’ always seems to be the answer, this desire to settle needs to be recovered and rehabilitated.

Perhaps this is just a little too abstract. There are many — including my family — who are divided by considerable distances. Only air travel will allow my children to see their grandparents. Nothing is ever quite as clear cut as we want it to be. But the need to address our global restlessness is another matter.

I have on my shelf a wonderful little book by Madeline Bunting called The Plot. It’s the story an acre of Yorkshire land on which her father built a chapel. It’s a beautiful account of the importance of place, and staying loyal to place: staying put. It begins with a quote from the Western Apache that has long stayed with me: “Wisdom sits in places”.

As soon as it safe I will be boarding a train to North East England where I will rush to my mum and dad and wrap my arms around them both. We would have been going on holiday next month and spending precious days together.

I moved away from home when I was just 16 years old, looking for jobs and opportunities to get involved in feminism. It meant sacrificing time with my beautiful mother and missing out on so much that we could have done together as I approached adulthood. But Maureen, my mum, encouraged me to live life to the full, partly because so many opportunities, as a working-class woman, had been denied to her.

Over the years I haven’t seen my family as much as I have wanted. We are all very close, and everybody but me and my niece still live in the North East. Not only did my mum encourage me, despite the sacrifice to her, to fly the nest, she also started to bring my niece Jo to London to visit every year from the age of seven. Maureen knew it would mean eventually saying goodbye to Jo, but she wanted her to have better opportunities than the North East can offer.

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The Yorkshire Ripper fired up my feminism

By Julie Bindel

The last two years we have spent Christmas together in London, but my dad is disabled and travel is difficult for him. I have long been wanting to spend more time with them, but something always got in the way. Whether it’s a long-haul trip to investigate violence against women, or another book that takes up my time and energy, that time was often on hold. It won’t ever be again.

I don’t mean this to be sentimental, but if I have any regrets it is not spending as much time with my mum in particular. We have had some wonderful times though: I took her to Paris for lunch for her 79th birthday. It was her first ever trip to the city. For another birthday I treated her to a trolley dash around TK Maxx and afterwards a tapas lunch where we examined her swag.

I already knew how much I love my family well before the pandemic, but it has made me realise how precious time is. In the future, my work trips and book deadlines will come second to my family.

Go to a restaurant
Sam Leith

“When this lousy plague is over,” to adapt the First World War song of complaint, “No more lockdown food for me./ When the restaurants re-open, oh, how happy I shall be!/ For bland, thrice weekly pesto pasta, coronavirus thanks a bunch./ As soon as real life makes a comeback, friends, I’m going out to lunch.”

Already, only three weeks into lockdown, the diet is grinding me down. We’re eating hearty whole-family stews of panic-bought pulses and bland, thrifty, carb-heavy meals made of easily available ingredients and designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, aka my culinary fusspot of a six-year-old.

The house is a miasma of sloth and fart gas, table manners are chimp-style and the conversation — mostly centering around the weekly appearance of the Beano — makes up in volume for what it lacks in interest. And the cooking, the wiping, the clingfilming, the drying, the hoovering…

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The joyful anachronism of kid lit

By Sam Leith

I shall never again take for granted the utter pleasure of choosing your own meal, in an environment where someone else does all the work: a meal where deep frying is expertly done and won’t burn down your house, interesting spices and unusual flavour combinations abound, and where you can linger past three o’clock, if you’re on the skive, in good company and with a glass of something in your hand.

Imagine a sushi splurge at Nobu! A plate of mince on dripping toast from the Quality Chop House, garnished with peppery watercress! A battery of crispy duck or salty chilli rice in a Chinese joint! A bellyful of K-Pop burger and Sichuan aubergine at Chick n’ Sours! Hell, at this stage I’d gratefully settle for a ginger chicken udon from Wagamama or an American Hot from Pizza Express.

With the likely and probably irrecoverable collapse of much of the restaurant industry, I realise with a pang that many of those places simply won’t be there when we emerge. To extend the analogy, it’ll be like coming home from war to find that your wife has run off with the postman while you were at the front, and that your mistress got bombed to bits in the Blitz. How I regret, now, every Pret sandwich drearily munched al desko: a never-to-return opportunity missed.

But as a matter of morale maintenance and selfless service to the recovery of the economy, I intend to lunch like mad. Friends — sorry, important business contacts…. — who’s up for it?

Return to Venice
Tanya Gold

When it is over, I want to go to Venice, to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, near San Toma vaporetto stop. I would like to go the whole way by water, from Penzance to Venice. I have been going to Venice since I was 17, at least once every two years, and I am enthralled by it, probably because it is preposterous, as people are preposterous. It’s a stupid place to build a city, especially a city filled with great art, and I find that touching. We make wars and genocides and plagues, but we also make this. We are strange.

Venice is a mistake: the people who became the Venetians ran away from the tribes pouring into Italy when the Empire collapsed, hid on sandbanks and, due to luck and situation, grew rich.

And, in this city of wonder — this paradigm, this error — the Scuola is the loveliest thing I have found. It is an early sixteenth century building of two stories in the classical style. It was a meeting place for wealthy Venetians, built in gratitude for surviving plague, and dedicated to Saint Roch, who offered protection from plague.  It is small for a Venetian public building and quite remote. Most tourists, stuck on the track from St Mark’s to the Rialto Bridge, do not find it.

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Woody Allen's brilliant betrayal

By Tanya Gold

They should: it is filled with paintings by Jacopo Tintoretto. If you have not heard of him — for me, the painter of the Italian Renaissance — it is because his masterpiece is a room in an idle corner of Venice and cannot be moved to Paris or New York for exhibition. Most people call Titian the master — Charles V once knelt to pick up his paintbrush — and Tintoretto was apprenticed to him for a few days, then left to teach himself. Titian’s Assumption is in the Basilica dei Frari next door, and it is perfect. It is too perfect. Tintoretto is more grandiose and thrilling. His nickname was The Furious.

You walk up the stairs, and they are here, on every wall and ceiling. The room is shuttered and dim; the floor is polished. They seem to glow and throb, as if the bright paint is still wet: Jacob’s Ladder; God Appears to Moses; The Pillar of Fire.

There cannot be a more astounding room anywhere. If art is consolation — and this is consolation specifically from plague — there cannot be more of it than this.

Stay at home
Justin Webb

Well I’m not going near the Maldives, I can tell you that for free. The world — When This Thing Is Over — is going to be doing, with knobs on, all the things we currently read are gone forever. My kids are already fretting about the purchase of new phone cases from Wuhan so all that piffle about No More World Trade will probably amount to not much, and of course for all the talk of hearth and home travel to exotic places will spike.

Not for me. I may go to Bath for the day and watch a rugby match under the floodlights at the Recreation Ground, with the Abbey for backdrop and the smell of wood-smoke and beery breath on the air. But otherwise actually I quite like this life.

Not, of course, the sadness, the fear about relatives and the knowledge that so many are suffering so much. But as a (lapsed) Quaker I am completely at home with silence and the simple life in which online groceries provide the only clue that we progressed beyond the Neolithic. Well, that and Netflix I suppose.

Anyway: travel is what I do not miss and do not want to do. I shall go nowhere when it is over, and thoroughly enjoy it.

Introduce my children to Old England
Niall Gooch

I can’t wait to get back to dragging my children round old stones in fields.

One chilly afternoon in January, in those far-off days when a disease outbreak in provincial China was the third-listed story in the foreign news section, I was sitting amid the ruins of St Augustine’s Priory in Canterbury with my two small children, trying to explain the Dissolution of the Monasteries. My account must have made some impact: on the train home my three-year-old daughter announced that on Monday she would tell her nursery teacher that Henry VIII was bad because he wouldn’t let people go to Mass.

I don’t know how much they took in at St Augustine’s. They liked the clever animation showing its centuries-long development from simple Romanesque chapel c.600 to vast medieval monastic complex with huge Gothic priory church and one of the finest scriptoriums in Europe. However, they did not seem to share my excitement about the graves of the early archbishops of Canterbury. Perhaps that will come.

Before coronavirus, I had intended the Priory to be the first instalment of a busy year of historical visiting. Having fulfilled the middle-class stereotype and left London for rural Kent in my mid-30s, last autumn I leaned into early middle age and bought an English Heritage membership.

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It's time to reverse the Beeching Axe

By Niall Gooch

We are now within striking range of several important sites, including a Roman fort, and my children are of an age where they can begin to understand Our Island Story. One of the gifts I‘ve always wanted to give them is to know that they are, so to speak, from Somewhere.

I’d like to help them to understand that this is an old country; to know that to be born in England is to be born into a magnificent, sprawling, globally important saga, and a rich heritage of art, architecture, language and landscape. I want them to be able to look at Dover Castle or HMS Victory or a Jacobean manor house and to know that it is in some sense theirs, a part of who they are.

When I tweeted pictures of the children at St Augustine’s, a Twitter friend commented “What a privilege to grow up and play in the midst of such deep history”. That captures my feelings exactly, and I’m looking forward to showing them Old England up close when the current unpleasantness has passed.

Play cricket
Tom Holland

To love cricket is to be as alert to the rhythms of the season as any ancient pagan. The year is divided into two halves: the months of darkness, of grey rain, when leaves lie thick on the outfield, and satellite television, with its sun-baked images of Australia or India, serves the cricket lover as a bonfire once did the celebrants of the winter solstice.

Then, of course, there is summer: six months when the patterning provided by a good fixture list can make life itself seem rich, and vivid, and dappled. To anticipate a match that has been played at the same ground, against the same opposition, on the same date, over many years, is to embrace the joys both of familiarity and the unknown: the reassurance that an English summer will always be an English summer; the promise that this year, rather than getting out for a duck or being hit humiliatingly out of the attack, everything will come together, and all shall be well.

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Plague and the comforts of history

By Tom Holland

Except that this year, of course, things are not going to be well. This year, everything that normally serves to herald the coming season — the warmth of spring sunshine, the song of returning birds, the back pages of a newspaper — serves as a kind of mockery. Authors CC, the team I play for, will not be heading to Wiltshire to play what for years now has been our season’s curtain raiser. Fixtures lovingly inscribed in diaries back in January will slip by unplayed. Our cricket bags will lie untouched in attics. Bats will remain unsheathed, whites unworn, scorebooks unfilled.

Of course, there are palliatives. Authors CC are currently in the midst of a virtual tournament, the Rathbones Cup, organised by the distinguished sportswriter David Owen, which has seen our various teams pitted against each other on WhatsApp.

The matches — which are determined by complex rules that nobody aside from David quite understands, but seem to feature a Gallimard edition of Proust, and can generally be done and dusted in 20 minutes — have us all properly gripped.

Yesterday, I am proud to report, my team of Anglo-Saxons triumphed over a 1990s Hollywood XI. Hengist took five wickets, and Alfred the Great, after catching Winona Ryder in the deep, then sealed victory with a quickfire 87.

It is not cricket — but it gives us a flavour of cricket. This, as clear blue skies look down on empty pitches, is the best we can hope for. A reminder of what has been — and a promise of what, when this hellish time is over, will be all the more precious for having been so very desperately missed.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
Louise Perry 

When lockdown finally ends, we will presumably be returned to normal life in dribs and drabs, with the most essential activities prioritised over the least. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) classes will, quite rightly, be at the very bottom of the list. This is a form of martial arts that demands intimate physical contact with your opponent — more than once, I’ve had another person’s sweat drip directly into my eyes or mouth — and right now it’s hard to imagine even shaking a stranger’s hand. Nevertheless I’m desperate to get back to a sport that is entirely incompatible with social distancing.

Full disclosure: I am terrible at BJJ. Six months in, I’ve learnt the hard way that strength and fitness will only get you so far. This is less a sport and more a mechanical engineering problem. The task is to work out how to use your strong muscles against your opponent’s weak muscles, and to do so both quickly and surreptitiously, with the goal of making them submit via a chokehold or a joint lock. Every session I get slightly better, but every session I’m humbled by how inept I am.

While I’ve been able to cobble together home gym sessions by taking HIIT classes on Zoom and squatting my grudging 36kg German Shepherd, there really is no way of replicating a BJJ class at home. Other people on my BJJ WhatsApp group (yes, there is such a thing) are desperate enough that they’ve been making ‘grappling dummies’ by stuffing an old gi with rolled up towels and jumpers. But thrashing around with a mannequin is a poor substitute for the real thing, in all its exhausting, joyful, disgusting glory.

Have some time to myself
Polly MacKenzie

I want to be alone. It seems churlish of me, when I know millions of people are struggling with loneliness right now. But loneliness is the one thing I know I’m safe from. There are six people in my household, three of whom are children and therefore have no concept of personal boundaries. The closest I get to isolation is the two metre separation in the queue at the supermarket.

So when this is over I want to go away for a whole weekend and climb in the hills, all by myself. Nothing challenging; I’ll be content wandering through the Malvern Hills I roamed as a child. Even the Worcestershire Beacon, the highest point, stretches to only 425m above sea level. But it’s not the climb that I crave. It’s the silence. The bracken and the trees and the gentle slopes.

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A Covid death is not a good death

By Polly Mackenzie

I will be staying away from popular places and well-trodden paths. I shall get up early to avoid even the hint of a crowd. I shall climb, and rest, and climb and rest, never fearful for a moment that a police officer will complain that I am not exercising hard enough and should stop relaxing. I shall roam the iron age earthworks at British Camp and feel the eternal presence of history. Totally alone and therefore able to hear the echo of thousands of years of humanity and our neverending battle to protect ourselves and survive.

I shall run down the steep slope of Happy Valley into the wooded pathways below, hurtling as I did thirty years ago at a pace just a tiny bit too fast to be confident of stopping safely. I shall remember the way my father used to catch us, arms open, at the bottom. And I shall remember that other people are not, really, a pain to be tolerated, but a blessing. One that I shall be ready to return to, after just one more night of solitary peace.

Go to my local second-hand book shop
Daniel Kalder

Here in Texas there is a large chain of second-hand bookshops called Half Price Books, and I am fortunate enough to live within a short drive of not one, not two, but three of these stores. I visit them all regularly, too regularly in fact, and often swing by one of the stores in the evenings after work. But the typical half-price discount is not enough for me; I like to trawl their book clearance shelves, $1 CD racks, junk vinyl and “quarter bin” comic boxes.

Many are the strange and wonderful books I have found going for a song, such as James Ballou’s Arming for the Apocalypse, Sukarno’s autobiography, a super-rare album of photographs by a Stalin-era Uzbek photographer, and George Chapman’s translation of The Odyssey. The $1 CD racks contain lots of pop/rock dross — U2, Coldplay, Sting, Garth Brooks etc. — but I can usually find some exceptional recordings of classical music on prestigious labels; I discovered Mahler, Bartok and a great deal of other amazing music through HPB’s clearance shelves.

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Nineties Russia prepared me for coronageddon

By Daniel Kalder

As for comics, I once found a complete run of Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! for 25 cents a pop in the quarter bins, not to mention a 3-D Steve Ditko comic, and some rare Richard Corben undergrounds that were worth a lot more than what I paid for them. Those are probably not names that mean a lot to many UnHerd readers, but if they do, you will understand the excitement I felt.

HPB tried to stay open when the shutdowns were getting into gear, but eventually had to close the doors of its physical stores. Currently they bombard me with discount vouchers for their online shop, but it’s not the same.

Successful browsing in a second-hand bookstore first requires the bookstore to be physical, and in addition is a skill that takes time to acquire and which must be practised often. It requires time, and patience, and knowledge of which types of things turn up in different neighborhoods. And I would like to get back to it, please.

Have a pint
Ed West

I had a dream I was in the pub the other night. It was like an old gin palace and crowded with people, drinking, laughing and way within the government-approved distance of 2metres away from each other. It was so beautiful, when I woke up I wanted to cry. It was like that episode of Black Mirror where people suffering from dementia are allowed to head into a virtual reality world where they’re young and healthy again.

I imagine when I first head back into a pub I’ll feel the need to get down on my knees and kiss the ground, tears in my eyes.

I’ve spent a lot of time this past week wondering about where I’d like to go when this is all over, assuming anywhere is open and we haven’t resorted to barter or descended into a Mad Max-like dystopia. I fear I’m not very well-adapted to the 21st century digital economy but I imagine I’d be even less useful in a 5th century skull-based economy.

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Coronavirus coverage is making me feel ill

By Ed West

In a parallel universe somewhere, one in which mother nature didn’t strike us down with this disease, I was supposed to be in west Cork this week, close to the heavenly Gougane Barra national park.

It is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever set eyes on, and the most spiritual; it’s associated with early Christian holy men and women. I’ve also promised myself I’ll take the kids to Italy again, but strangely the lockdown has also given me a real desire to explore England more.

I was tempted to join a friend in an insane-sounding bike ride from the Cumbria coast over to Whitby this month, and although I might not do the cycle, there is so much of my own country I haven’t seen. The thought of a walk around some Pennine villages followed by a pint, without having to steer into the road to avoid people or obsessively wipe down every surface like I’m Howard Hughes, sounds like heaven right now.