sallyhammond.com.au

May 9, 2006 - The Tourist and the Traveller

 Author Paul Theroux has been quoted as  saying: “A tourist doesn’t know where he has been; and a traveller doesn’t know where he is going.”

This is so true, isn’t it? Every famous site worldwide is filled by Tourists: people who march up to some ancient temple or a grand view, a famous building or a historical marker, only to glance briefly at it, then cross it off their mental list and hop back on the bus to resume their conversations with the people in the next seat. 

Others apparently only observe a place through that tiny peephole on their camera. Perhaps digital cameras have enlarged this a little, as now there is the opportunity to review the image immediately, or at the end of the day, but it is still only a fragment of what is available. 

Even as what you might call a ‘professional traveller’, I also find it so easy for a trip to become just a blur. The sensory overload of any new place is enormous, on Day One especially. Everything looks and smells and sounds so different. It is almost too much to take in. It is too much to absorb.

Down the track, after three weeks or so in a country, the reverse is true. Such is the accommodating nature of the human brain, that by then so much is familiar and we are at risk of letting it wash over us without noticing anything much at all. 

These two completely opposite dangers are the constant adversary of any traveller, and especially the travel writer. In order to paint a complete and accurate picture for the reader writers must absorb everything, neglect nothing – then, and here’s the tough bit – edit out all but the most telling pieces so that the story fits the length and style of the publication for which we are writing.

While it is impossible to extract our own personal opinions from the telling, we owe it to the place and the reader to report as accurately and as clearly as we can on what we have seen and experienced.

What’s more it has to be interesting, as it is essential that the reader becomes involved and receives enough to make a balanced informed decision as to whether this destination offers enough for them to spend their money and time to visit it in order to create their own observations and memories. 

My personal mandate as a writer is to inspire Travellers, those eager for an unexpected experience, not wholly sure of what surprise sight or experience awaits them at each turn of the road. I truly hope that my books and articles put some makeshift wheels under them and a rough map in their hands, equipping them just enough to go off and find their own adventures. 

More than this, if my words, and the wondrous pictures taken by Gordon, my husband, challenge someone to touch the heart or hand of a person in another place, I guess I would feel we have begun to succeed. For it is the human face of travel that will change us most.

So, please feel free to browse this website. I’d love it if you’d come back again in a few weeks to see what else I can share with you as Gordon and I travel and photograph, eat and drink and experience this magnificent world, rubbing shoulders with the people we meet.

Happy travels,

 

(top of page)