The End of Tourism

On this episode, my guest is Nick Hunt, the author of three travel books about journeys by foot, including Outlandish: Walking Europe's Unlikely Landscapes. His articles have appeared in The Guardian, Emergence, The Irish Times, New Internationalist, Resurgence & Ecologist and other publications. He works as an editor and co-director for the Dark Mountain Project. His latest book is an alternate history novel, Red Smoking Mirror.

Show Notes

Awe and the Great Secret

On Focus, Sight and Subjectivity

The Almost Lost Art of Walking

Pilgrimage and the Half Way Point

What if Left of Old-School Hospitality in our Times?

When Borders Matter Less

Hospitality and Pain

The Costs of Interculturality

Asking Permission: On Not Being Welcome

Friendship, Hospitality, and Exchange

Homework

Nick Hunt’s Official Website

Red Smoking Mirror

Essay: Bulls and Scars

Transcript

[00:00:00] Chris Christou: Welcome Nick to the End of Tourism podcast. Thank you so very much for joining us today.

[00:00:05] Nick Hunt: Very nice to be here, Chris.

[00:00:07] Chris Christou: I have a feeling we're in for a very special conversation together. To begin, I'm wondering if you could offer us a glimpse into your world today, where you find yourself, and how the times seem to be rolling out in front of you, where you are.

[00:00:22] Nick Hunt: Wow, that's a good, that's a good question. Geographically, I'm in Bristol, in the southwest of England, which is the city I grew up in and then moved away from and have come back to in the last five or so years. The city that I sat out the pandemic, which was quite a tough one for various reasons here and sort of for me personally and my family.

But the last year really has just felt like everyone's opening out again and it feels... it's kind of good and bad. There was something about that time, I don't want to plunge straight into COVID because I'm sure everyone's sick of hearing about it, but the way it, it froze the world and froze people's personal lives and it froze all the good stuff, but it also froze a lot of the more difficult questions.

So, I think in terms of kind of my wider work, which is often, focused around climate change, extinction, the state of the planet in general, the pandemic was, was oddly, you didn't have to think about the other problems for a while, even though they were still there. It dominated the airspace so much that everything else just kind of stopped.

And now I find that in amongst all the joy of kind of friends emerging again and being able to travel, being able to meet people, being able to do stuff, there's also this looming feeling of like, the other problems are also waking up and we're looking at them again.

[00:01:56] Chris Christou: Yeah. We have come back time to time in the last year or two in certain interviews of the pod and, and reflected a little bit on those times and considered that there was, among other things, it was a time where there was the possibility of real change. And I speak more to the places that have become tourist destinations, especially over touristed and when those people could finally leave their homes and there was nobody there that there was this sense of Okay, things could really be different

[00:02:32] Nick Hunt: Yeah.

As well. Yeah. I know there, there was a kind of hope wasn't there that, "oh, we can change, we can, we can act in, in a huge, unprecedented way." Maybe that will transfer to the environmental problems that we face. But sadly that didn't happen. Or it didn't happen yet.

[00:02:53] Chris Christou: Well, time will tell. So Nick, I often ask my guests to begin with a bit of background on how their own travels have influenced their work, but since so much of your writing seems to revolve around your travels, I've decided to make that the major focus of our time together. And so I'd like to begin with your essay Bulls and Scars, which appears in issue number 14 of Dark Mountain entitled TERRA, and which was republished in The Best British Travel Writing of the 21st Century.

[00:03:24] Nick Hunt: A hyperbolic, a hyperbolic title, I have to say.

[00:03:29] Chris Christou: And in that exquisite essay on the theme of wanderlust, you write, and I quote,

"always this sense, when traveling, will I find it here? Will the great secret reveal itself? Is it around the next corner? There is never anything around the next corner except the next corner, but sometimes I catch fragments of it.

This fleeting thing I am looking for. That mountainside, that's a part of it there. The way the light falls on that wall. That old man sitting under a mulberry tree with his dog sleeping at his feet. That's a part of the secret too. If I could fit these pieces together, I would be completed. Waking on these sacks of rice, I nearly see the shape of it. The outlines of the secret loom, extraordinary and almost whole. I can almost touch it. I think. Yes, this is it. I am here. I have arrived, but I have not arrived. I am traveling too fast. The moment has already gone, the truck rolls onwards through the night, and the secret slides away.

This great secret, Nick, that spurs so much of our wanderlust. I'm curious, where do you imagine it comes from personally, historically, or otherwise?

[00:04:59] Nick Hunt: Wow. Wow. Thank you for reading that so beautifully. That was an attempt to express something that I think I've always, I've always felt, and I imagine everybody feels to some extent that sense of, I guess you could describe it as "awe," but this sense that I, I first experienced this when I was a kid.

I was about maybe six, five or six years old, maybe seven. I can't remember. Used to spend a lot of time in North Wales where my grandparents lived and my mum would take me up there and she loved walking. So we'd go for walks and we were coming back from a walk at the end of a day. So it was mountains. It was up in Snowdonia.

And I have a very vivid memory of a sunset and a sheep and a lamb and the sky being red and gold in sense that now I would describe it as awe, you know, the sublime or something like that. I had no, no words for it. I just knew it was very important that I, I stayed there for a bit and, and absorbed it.

So I refused to walk on. And my mom, I'll always be grateful for this. She didn't attempt to kind of pull my hand and drag me back to the car cuz she probably had things to do. But she walked on actually and out of sight and left me just to kind of be there because she knew that this was an important thing.

And for me, that's the start of, of the great secret. I think this sense of wanting to be inside the world. I've just been reading some Ursula LeGuin and there's a short story in her always coming home. I think it's called A Hole in the Air. And it's got this kind of conceit of a man stepping outside the world and he kind of goes to a parallel version of his world and it's the one in which some version of us lives.

And it's the kind of, you know, sort of fucked up war-like version where everything's kind of terrible and polluted, dangerous and violent and he can't understand it. But this idea of he's gone outside the world and he can't find his way back in. And I think this is a theme in a lot of indigenous people.

This idea of kind of being inside something and other cultures being outside. I think a lot, all of my writing and traveling really has been about wanting to get inside and kind of understand something. I don't know. I mean, I dunno what the secret is because it's a secret and what I was writing about in that essay was, I think in my twenties particularly, I kind of imagined that I could find this if I kept moving.

The quicker the better because you're covering more ground and more chance of finding something that you're looking for, of knowing what's around the next corner, what's over the next hill. You know, even today I find it very difficult to kind of turn back on a walk before I've got to the top of a hill or some point where I can see what's coming next.

It feels like something uncompleted and then I'm sure, as I imagine you did, you know, you were describing to me earlier about traveling throughout your twenties and always kind of looking for this thing and then realizing, what am I actually, you know, what am I doing? What am I actually looking for?

Mm-hmm. So I still love traveling, obviously, but I don't feel this kind youthful urge just to keep moving, keep moving, keep moving, see more things, you know, experience more. And then I think you learn when you get a bit older that maybe that's not the way to find whatever it is that you are kind of restless for.

Maybe that's when you turn inside a little bit more. And certainly my travels now are kind of shorter and slower than they were before, but I find that there's a better quality of focus in the landscapes or places that before I would've kind of dismissed and rushed through are now endlessly fascinating.

And allowing more time to kind of stay in a place has its own value.

[00:09:19] Chris Christou: Well, blessings to your mother. What's her name if I can ask? Her name's Caroline. It's the same name as my wife. So it's a source of endless entertainment for my friends.

Well, thank you, Caroline, for, for that moment, for allowing it to happen.

I think for better or worse, so many of us are robbed of those opportunities as children. And thinking recently about I'll have certain flashbacks to childhood and that awe and that awe-inspiring imagination that seems limitless perhaps for a young child and is slowly waned or weaned as we get older.

So thank you to your mother for that. I'm sure part of the reason that we're having this conversation today. And you touched a little bit on this notion of expectation and you used the word focus as well, and I'm apt to consider more and more the the question of sight and how it dominates so much of our sense perception and our sense relationships as we move through our lives and as we move across the world.

And so I'd like to bring up another little excerpt from Bulls and Scars, which I just have to say I loved so much. And in the essay you write, quote,

"I know nothing about anything. It's a relief to admit this now and let myself be led. All I see is the surface of things. The elaborate hairstyle of a man, shaved to the crown and plastered down in a clay hardened bun, a woman's goat skin skirt, fringed with cowrie shelves and not the complex layers of meaning that lie beneath. I understand nothing of the ways in which these things fit together, how they collide or overlap. There are symbols I cannot read, lines I do not see."

End quote. And so this, this reminded me. I have walking through a few textile shops here in Oaxaca some years ago with a friend of mine and he noted how tourists tend towards these textile styles, colors and designs, but specifically the ones that tend to fit their own aesthetics and how this can eventually alter what the local weavers produce and often in service to foreign tastes.

And he said to me, he said, "most of the time we just don't know what we're looking at." And so it's not just our inability to see as a disciplined and locally formed skill that seems to betray us, but also our unwillingness to know just that that makes us tourists or foreigners in a place. My question to you is, how do you imagine we might subvert these culturally conjured ways of seeing, assuming that's even necessary?

[00:12:24] Nick Hunt: Well, that's a question that comes up an awful lot as a travel writer. And it's one I've become more aware of over these three books I've written, which form a very loose trilogy about, they're all about walking in different parts of Europe.

And I've only become more aware of that that challenge of the traveler. There's another line in that essay that something like " they say that traveling opens doors, but sometimes people take their doors with them." You know, it's not necessarily true, but any means that seeing the world kind of widens your perspective.

A lot of people just, you know, their eyes don't change no matter where they go. And so, I know that when I'm doing these journeys, I'm going completely subjectively with my own prejudices, my own mood of the day which completely determines how I see a place and how I meet people and what I bring away from it.

And also what I, what I give. And I think this is, this is kind of an unavoidable thing really. It's one of the paradoxes maybe at the heart of the kind of travel writing I do, and there's different types of travel writers. Some people are much more conscientious about when they talk to people, it's, you know, it's more like an interview.

They'll record it. They'll only kind of quote exactly what they were told. But even that, there's a kind of layer of storytelling, obviously, because they are telling a story, they're telling a narrative, they're cutting certain things out of the frame, and they're including others. They're exaggerating or amplifying certain details that fit the narrative that they're following.

I think an answer to your question, I, I'm not sure yet, but I'm hopefully becoming more, more aware. And I think one thing is not hiding it, is not pretending that a place as I see it, that I, by any means, can see the truth, you know, the kind of internal truth of this place. There's awareness that my view is my view and I think the best thing we can do is just not try and hide that to include it as part of the story we tell. Hmm. And I, I noticed for my first book, I did this long walk across Europe that took about seven and a half months. And there were many days when I didn't really want to be doing it.

I was tired, sick, didn't want to be this kind of traveling stranger, always looking like the weirdo walking down the street with a big bag and kind of unshaved sunburnt face. And so I noticed that some villages I walked into, I would come away thinking, my God, those people were awful.

They were really unfriendly. No one looked at me, no one smiled. I just felt this kind of hostility. And then I'd think, well, the common factor in this is always me. And I must have been walking into that village looking shifty, not really wanting to communicate with anyone, not making any contact, not explaining who I was.

And of course they were just reflecting back what I was giving them. So I think, just kind of centering your own mood and the baggage you take with you is very important.

[00:15:46] Chris Christou: Yeah. Well, I'd like to focus a little bit more deeply on that book and then those travels that you wrote about anyways, in Walking the Woods and the Water.

And just a little bit of a background for our listeners. The book's description is as follows. "In 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out in a pair of hobnail boots to chance and charm his way across Europe. Quote, like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar. From the hook of Holland to Istanbul. 78 years later, I (you) followed in his footsteps.

The book recounts a seven month walk through Holland, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey on a quest to discover what remains of hospitality, kindness to strangers, freedom, wildness, adventure, and the deeper occurrence of myth and story that still flow beneath Europe's surface.

Now before diving a little bit more deeply into these questions of hospitality and xenophobia or xenophilia, I'd like to ask about this pilgrimage and the others you've undertaken, especially, this possibility that seems to be so much an endangered species in our times, which is our willingness or capacity to proceed on foot as opposed to in vehicles.

And so I'm curious how your choice to walk these paths affected your perception, how you experienced each new place, language, culture, and people emerging in front of you. Another way of asking the question would be, what is missed by our urge to travel in vehicles?

[00:17:36] Nick Hunt: Well, that first walk, which set off the other ones, I later did. It could only have been a walk because the whole idea was to follow the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who was a very celebrated travel writer who set out in 1933 with no ambition or kind of purpose other than he just wanted to walk to Istanbul.

And it was his own kind of obsessive thing that he wanted to do. And I was deeply influenced by his book. And I was quite young and always thought I wanted to kind of try. I I was just curious to see the Europe that he saw was, you know, the last of a world that disappeared very shortly afterwards because he saw Germany as this unknown guy called Adolf Hitler, who was just emerging on the scene.

He walked through these landscapes that were really feudal in character, you know, with counts living in castles and peasants working in the fields. And he, so he saw the last of this old Europe that was kind of wiped out by, well first the second World War, then communism in Eastern Europe and capitalism, in Western Europe and then everywhere.

So it's just had so many very traumatic changes and I just wanted to know if there was any of what he saw left, if there was any of that slightly fairytale magic that he glimpsed. So I had to walk because it, it just wouldn't have worked doing it by any other form of transport. And I mean, initially, even though I'd made up my mind, I was going to go by foot and I knew I wasn't in a hurry. It was amazing how frustrating walking was in the first couple of weeks. It felt almost like the whole culture is, you know, geared around getting away, got to go as quickly as possible.

In Holland actually I wasn't walking in remote mountains, I was walking

through southern industrial states and cities in which a walker feels, you feel like an outcast in places you shouldn't really be. So, it took a couple of weeks for my mind to really adjust and actually understand that slowness was the whole purpose. And then it became the pleasure.

And by halfway through Germany, I hadn't gone on any other form of transport for maybe six weeks, and I stayed with someone who, he said, "I'm going to a New Year's Eve party in the next town." It was New Year's Eve. The next town was on my route. He said, "you know, I'm driving so I might as well take you there."

So I said, "great," cuz it'd been a bit weird to kind of go to this town and then come back again. It was on my way. So, I got in a car and the journey took maybe half an hour and I completely panicked, moving at that speed, I was shocked by how much of the world was taken away from me, actually, because by then I'd learned to love spotting these places, you know, taking routes along, along rivers and through bits of woodland.

I was able to see them coming and all of these things were flashing past me. We crossed the Rhine, which was this great river that I'd been following for weeks. And it was like a stream, you know, it was a puddle. It was kind of gone under the bridge in two seconds. Wow. And it really felt like I had this, this kind of guilt, to be honest.

It was this feeling of what was in that day that I lost, you know, what didn't I see? Who didn't I meet? I've just been sitting in the passenger seat of a car, and I have no sense of direction. The thing about walking is you're completely located at all times. You walk into the center of a city and you've had to have walked through the suburbs.

You've seen the outskirts, and it helps, you know, well that's north. Like, you know, I came from that direction. That's south. That's where I'm going. If you take a train or get in a car, unless you're really paying attention, you are kind of catapulted into the middle of this city without any concept of what direction you're going in next.

And I didn't realize how disorienting that is because we're so used to it. We do it all the time. And this was only a kind of shadow of what was to come at the very end of my journey, cuz I got to Istanbul after seven and a half months. I was in a very weird place that I've only kind of realized since all that time walking.

And I stayed a couple of weeks in Turkey and then I flew home again, partly cuz I had a very patient and tolerant and forgiving girlfriend who I couldn't kind of stretch it out any, any longer. And initially I think I'd been planning to come back on like hitchhiking or buses and trains. But in the end I was like, "you know, whatever, I'll just spend a couple days more in Turkey, then I'll get on a plane."

And I think it was something like three hours flying from Istanbul and three hours crossing a continent that you spent seven and a half months walking. And I was looking down and seeing the Carpathian mountains and the Alps and these kind of shapes of these rivers, some of which I recognized as places I'd walked through.

And again, this sense of what am I missing, that would've been an extraordinary journey going through that landscape. Coming back. You mentioned pilgrimage earlier, and someone told me once, who was doing lots of work around pilgrimage that, you know, in the old days when people had to walk or take a horse, if you were rich, say you started in England, your destination was Constantinople or Jerusalem or Rome, that Jerusalem or Rome wasn't the end of your journey.

That was the exact halfway point, because when you got there, you had to walk back again. And on the way out, you'd go with your questions and your openness about whatever this journey meant to you. And then on the way back, you would be slowly at the pace of walking, trying to incorporate what you'd learnt and what you'd experienced into your everyday life of your village, your family, your community, you know, your land.

So by the time you got back, you'd had all of that time to process what happened. So I think with that walk, you know, I, I did half the pilgrimage thinking I'd done all of it, and then was plunged back into, actually went straight back to the life I'd been living before in, in London as if nothing had ever happened.

And I think for the year after that walk, my soul hadn't caught up with my body by any means. Mm-hmm. I was kind of living this strange sort of half life that felt very familiar because I recognized everything, but I felt like a very different person, to be honest and it took a long time to actually process that.

But I think if I'd, even if I'd come back by, you know, public transport of some sort it would've helped just soften the blow.

[00:25:04] Chris Christou: What a context to put it in, softening the blow. Hmm. It reminds me of the etymology of travel as far as I've read is that it used to mean an arduous journey.

And that the arduous was the key descriptor in that movement. It reminds me of, again, so many of my travels in my twenties that were just flash flashes of movement on flights and buses. And that I got back to Canada. And the first thing was, okay, well I'm outta money, so I need to get back to work and I need to make as much money as possible.

And there just wasn't enough time. And there wasn't perhaps time, period, in order to integrate what rolled out in front of me over those trips. And I'm reminded of a story that David Abram tells in his book Becoming Animal about jet lag. And perhaps a hypothesis that he has around jet lag and that we kind of flippantly use the excuse or context of time zones to explain this relative sense of being in two places at once.

To what extent he discussed this, I don't remember very well, but just this understanding of when we had moved over vast distances on foot in the past, that we would've inevitably been open and apt to the emerging geographies languages, foods even cultures as we arrive in new places, and that those things would've rolled out very slowly in front of us, perhaps in the context of language heavily.

But in terms of geography, I imagine very slowly, and that there would've been a kind of manner of integration, perhaps, for lack of a better word in which our bodies, our sensing bodies, would've had the ability to confront and contend with those things little by little as we moved.

And it also reminds me of this book Rebecca Solnit's R iver of Shadows, where she talks about Edward Muybridge and the invention of the steam engine and the train and train travel.

And how similarly to when people first got a glimpse of the big screen cinema that there was a lot of bodily issues. People sometimes would get very nauseous or pass out or have to leave the theater because their bodies weren't used to what was in front of them.

And in, on the train, there were similar instances where for the first time at least, you know, as we can imagine historically people could not see the foreground looking out the train window. They could only see the background because the foreground was just flashing by so quickly.

Wow, that's interesting. Interesting. And that we've become so used to this. And it's a really beautiful metaphor to, to wonder about what has it done to a people that can no longer see what's right there in front of them in terms of not just the politics, in their place, but the, their home itself, their neighbors, the geography, et cetera.

And so I'm yet to read that book in mention, but I'm really looking forward to it because it's given me a lot of inspiration to consider a kind of pilgrimage to the places where my old ones are from there in, in southeastern Europe and also in Southwestern England.

[00:28:44] Nick Hunt: Hmm.

Yeah. That is a, so I'm still thinking about that metaphor of the train. Yeah. You don't think of that People wouldn't have had that experience of seeing the foreground disappear. And just looking at the distance, that's deeply strange and inhuman experience, isn't it? Hmm.

[00:29:07] Chris Christou: Certainly. And, you know, speaking of these, these long pilgrimages and travels, my grandparents made their way from, as I mentioned, southwestern England later Eastern Africa and, and southeastern Europe to Canada in the fifties and sixties. And the peasant side of my family from what today is northern Greece, Southern Macedonia, brought a lot of their old time hospitality with them.

And it's something that has always been this beautiful clue and key to these investigations around travel and exile. And so, you know, In terms of this old time hospitality, in preparing for this interview, I was reminded of a story that Ivan Illich once spoke of, or at least once, wrote about of a Jesuit monk living in China who took up a pilgrimage from Peking to Rome just before World War II, perhaps not unlike Patrick Leigh Fermor. Mm-hmm. And Illich recalled the story in his book, Rivers North of the Future as follows. He wrote, quote, "at first it was quite easy, he said (the Jesuit said,) in China, he only had to identify himself as a pilgrim, someone whose walk was oriented to a sacred place and he was given food, a handout, and a place to sleep.

This changed a little bit when he entered the territory of Orthodox Christianity. There, they told him to go to the parish house where a place was free or to the priest's house. Then he got to Poland, the first Catholic country, and he found that the Polish Catholics generously gave him money to put himself up in a cheap hotel.

And so the Jesuit was recalling the types of local hospitality he received along his path, which we could say diminished the further he went. Now, I'd love it if you could speak perhaps about the kinds of hospitality or, or perhaps the lack there of you experienced on your pilgrimage from the northwest of Europe to the southeast of Europe.

And what, if anything, surprised you?

[00:31:26] Nick Hunt: Well, that was one of my main interests really, was to see if the extraordinary hospitality that my predecessor had experienced in the 1930s where he'd been accommodated everywhere from, peasants' barns to the castles of Hungarian aristocrats and everything in between.

I wanted to see if that generosity still existed. And talking about different ways of offering hospitality when he did his walk, one of the fairly reliable backstops he had was going to a police officer and saying "I'm a student. I'm a traveling student." That was the kind of equivalent to the pilgrim ticket in his day in a lot of parts of Europe. "I'm a student and I'm going from one place to the next," and he would be given a bed in the local police station. You know, they'd open up a cell, sleep there for the night, and then he'd leave in the morning. And I think it sometimes traditionally included like a mug of beer and some bread or soup or something, but even by his time in the thirties, it was a fairly well established thing to ask, I dunno how many people were doing it, but he certainly met in Germany, a student who was on the road going to university and the way he was going was walking for days or weeks.

That wasn't there when I did my work. I don't think I ever asked a policeman, but in a couple of German towns, I went to the town hall. You know, the sort of local authority in Germany. They have a lot of authority and power in the community. And I asked a sort of bemused receptionist if I could claim this kind of ancient tradition of hospitality and spend the night in a police station, and they had no idea what I was talking about.

Wow. And I think someone in a kind of large village said, "well, that's a nice idea, but I can't do that because we've got a tourist industry and all the guest house owners, you know, they wouldn't be happy if we started offering accommodation for free. It would put them out of business." Wow. And I didn't pay for accommodation much, but I did end up shelling out, you know, 30, 40 euros and sleeping in a, B&B.

But having said that, the hospitality has taken on different forms. I started this journey in winter, which was the, when Patrick Leigh Fermor started, in December. So, I kind of wanted to start on the same date to have a similar experience, but it did mean walking through the coldest part of Europe, you know, Germany and Austria in deep snow and arriving in Bulgaria and Turkey when it was mid-summer.

So I went from very cold to very hot. And partly for this reason, I was nervous about the beginning, not knowing what this experience was gonna be like. So, I used the couch surfing website, which I think Airbnb these days has probably kind of undercut a lot of it, but it was a free, very informal thing where people would provide a bed or a mattress or a place on the floor, a sofa for people passing through.

And I was in the south of Germany before I ran out of couch surfing stops. But I also supplemented that with sleeping out. I slept in some ruined castles on the way. Hmm. I slept in these wooden hunting towers that no hunters were in. It wasn't the season. But they were freezing, but they were dry, you know, and they gave shelter.

But I found that the language of hospitality shifted the further I went. In Holland, Germany, and Austria, people were perfectly, perfectly hospitable and perfectly nice and would put me up. But they'd say, when do you have to leave? You know, which is a perfectly reasonable question and normally it was first saying the next morning.

And I noticed when I got to Eastern Europe, the question had shifted from when do you want to leave to how long can you stay? And that's when there was always in Hungary and then in Romania in particular and Bulgaria, people were kind of finding excuses to keep me longer. There would be, you know, it's my granddad's birthday, we're gonna bake him a cake and have a party, or we're going on a picnic, or we're going to the mountains, or we're going to our grandmother's house in the countryside. You should see that.

And so my stays did get longer, the further southeast I got, partly cuz it was summer and everybody's in a good mood and they're doing things outdoors and they're traveling a bit more. But yeah, I mean the hospitality did shift and I got passed along as Patrick Leigh Fermor had done. So someone would say, you're going this way.

They look at my map, you're going through this town. I've got a cousin, or I know a school teacher. Maybe you can sleep in the school and give a talk to the students the next day. So, all of these things happened and I kind of got accommodated in a greater variety of places, a nunnery where I was fed until I'd hardly move, by these nuns, just plain, homemade food and rakia and wine.

And I stayed at a short stay in a psychiatric hospital in France, Sylvania. Talking of the changes that have happened to Europe, when Patrick Leigh Fermor stayed there it was a country house owned by a Hungarian count. His assets had since been liquidated, you know, his family dispossessed in this huge building given to the Romanian State to use as a hospital, and it was still being run that way.

But the family had kind of made contact, again, having kept their heads down under communism, but realized they had no use for a huge mansion with extensive grounds. There was no way they could fill it or maintain it. And so it was continued to be used as a hospital, but they had a room where they were able to stay when they passed through.

So I spent a few nights there. So everything slowed down was my experience, the further southeast I got. And going back actually to one of your first questions about, why walk? And what do you notice from walking? One of the things you really notice is the incremental changes by which, culture changes as well as landscape.

You see the crossovers. You see that people in this part of Holland are a bit like this people in this part of Germany over the border. You know, borders kind of matter less because you see one culture merging into another. Languages and accents changing. And sometimes those changes are quite abrupt, but often they're all quite organic and the food changes, the beer changes, the wine changes, the local cheese or delicacies change.

And so that was one of the great pleasures of it was just kind of understanding these many different cultures in Europe as part of a continuum rather than these kind of separate entities that just happen to be next door to each other.

[00:38:50] Chris Christou: Right. That's so often constructed in the western imagination through borders, through state borders.

[00:38:58] Nick Hunt: Just talking of borders, they've only become harder, well for everyone in the places I walk through. And I do wonder what it would be like making this journey today after Brexit. I wouldn't be able to do it just quite simply. It's no longer possible for a British person to spend more than three months in the EU, as a visitor, as a tourist.

So I think I could have walked to possibly Salzburg or possibly Vienna, and then had to come back and wait three months before continuing the journey. So I was lucky, you know, I was lucky to do it in the time I did. Mm-hmm.

[00:39:38] Chris Christou: Mm-hmm. I'm very much reminded through these stories and your reflections of this essay that Ivan Illich wrote towards the end of his life called "Hospitality and Pain."

And you know, I highly, highly recommend it for anyone who's curious about how hospitality has changed, has been commodified and co-opted over the centuries, over the millennia. You know, he talks very briefly, but very in depth about how the church essentially took over that role for local people, that in the Abrahamic worldview that there was generally a rule that you could and should be offering three days and nights of sanctuary to the stranger for anyone who'd come passing by and in part because in the Christian world in another religious worldviews that the stranger could very well be a God in disguise, the divine coming to your doorstep. We're talking of course, about the fourth and fifth centuries.

About how the church ended up saying, no, no, no, don't worry, don't worry. We got this. You, you guys, the people in the village, you don't have to do this anymore. They can come to the church and we'll give them hospitality. And of course, you know, there's the hidden cost, which is the, the attempt at conversion, I'm sure.

Yeah. But that later on the church instituted hospitals, that word that comes directly from hospitality as these places where people could stay, hospitals and later hostels and hotels and in Spanish, hospedaje and that by Patrick Lee firm's time we're talking about police stations.

Right. and then, you know, in your time to some degree asylums. It also reminded me of that kind of rule, for lack of a better word of the willingness or duty of people to offer three days and nights to the stranger.

And that when the stranger came upon the doorstep of a local person, that the local person could not ask them what they were doing there until they had eaten and often until they had slept a full night. But it's interesting, I mean, I, I don't know how far deep we can go with this, but the rule of this notion, as you were kind of saying, how the relative degree of hospitality shifted from

[00:42:01] Nick Hunt: when do you have to leave to how long how long can you stay?

[00:42:05] Chris Christou: Right. Right. That Within that kind of three day structure or rule that there was also this, this notion that it wasn't just in instituted or implemented or suggested as a way of putting limits on allowing a sense of agency or autonomy for the people who are hosting, but also limiting their hospitality.

Kind of putting this, this notion on the table that you might want to offer a hundred days of hospitality, but you're not allowed. Right. And what and where that would come from and why that there would be this necessity within the culture or cultures to actually limit someone's want to serve the stranger.

[00:42:54] Nick Hunt: Yeah, that's very interesting. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I wonder where that came from. I mean, three is always a bit of a magic number, isn't it? Mm-hmm. But yeah, it sounds like that maybe comes from an impulse from both sides somehow.

[00:43:09] Chris Christou: Mm-hmm. Nick, I'd like to come back to this question of learning and learning with the other of, of interculturality and tourism.

And I'd like to return to your essay, Bulls and Scars, momentarily with this excerpt. And it absolutely deserves the title of being one of the best travel writing pieces of the 21st century. And so in that essay you write,

"if we stay within our horizons surrounded by people who are the same as us, it precludes all hope. We shut off any possibility of having our automatic beliefs, whether good or bad, right or wrong, smashed so their rubble can make new shapes. We will never be forced to understand that there are different ways to be human, different ways to be ourselves, and we desperately need that knowledge, even if we don't know it yet."

Hmm. And now I don't disagree at all. I think we are desperately in need of deeper understandings of what it means to be human and what it means to be human together. The argument will continue to arise, however, at what cost? How might we measure the extent of our presence in foreign places and among foreign people, assuming that such a thing is even possible.

[00:44:32] Nick Hunt: Yeah, that's a question that's at the heart of that essay, which I don't think we've said is set in the South Omo Valley in Ethiopia. And part of it is about this phenomenon of tribal safaris, you know, which is as gross as it sounds, and it's rich western people driving in fleets of four by fours to indigenous tribal villages and, you know, taking pictures and watching a dance and then going to the next village.

And the examples of this that I saw when I was there, I said, when I said in the essay, you couldn't invent a better parody of tourists. It was almost unbelievable. It was all of the obnoxious stereotypes about the very worst kind of tourists behaving in the very worst possible way, seemingly just no self reflection whatsoever, which was disheartening.

And that's an extreme example and it's easy to parody because it was so extreme. But I guess what maybe you're asking more is what about the other people? What about those of us who do famously think of ourselves as as travelers rather than tourists? There's always that distinction I certainly made when I was doing it in my twenties.

So I'm not a tourist, I'm a traveler. It's like a rich westerner saying that they're an "expat" rather than an immigrant when they go and live in a foreign country that's normally cheaper than where they came from. Yeah, that's a question again, like the great secret, I don't think I answer in that essay.

What I did discover was that, it was much more nuanced than I thought it was originally. Certainly on a surface, looking at the scenes that I saw, what I saw as people who were completely out of their depth, out of their world, out of their landscape, looking like idiots and being mocked fairly openly by these tribal people who they were, in my view, exploiting. They didn't look like they were better off in a lot of ways, even though they had the, thousand dollars cameras and all the expensive clothes and the vehicles and the money and obviously had a certain amount of power cuz they were the ones shelling out money and kind of getting what they wanted.

But it wasn't as clear cut as I thought. And I know that's only a kind of anecdote. It's not anything like a study of how people going to remote communities, the damage they do and the impact they have. I've got another another example maybe, or something that I've been working on more recently, which comes from a journey that I haven't not written anything about it yet.

But in March of this year, I was in Columbia and Northern Columbia. The first time for a long time that I've, gone so far. All of my work has been sort of around Europe, been taking trains. I mean, I got on a plane and left my soul behind in lots of ways, got to Columbia and there were various reasons for my going, but one of the interests I had was I had a contact who'd worked with the Kogi people who live in the Sierra Nevada des Santa Marta Mountains on the Caribbean coast.

An extraordinary place, an extraordinary people who have really been isolated at their own instigation, since the Spanish came, and survived the conquest with a culture and religion and economy, really more or less intact, just by quietly retreating up the mountain and not really making a lot of fuss for hundreds of years, so effectively that until the 1960s, outsiders didn't really know they were there. And since then there has been contact made from what I learned really by the Kogi rather than the other way around. Or they realized that they couldn't remain up there isolated forever.

Maybe now because people were starting to encroach upon the land and settle and cut down forests. And there was obviously decades of warfare and conflict and drug trafficking and a very dangerous world they saw outside the mountains. And this journey was very paradoxical and strange and difficult because they do not want people to visit them.

You know, they're very clear about that. They made a couple of documentary films or collaborated in a couple of documentary films in the late nineties and sort of early two thousands where they sent this message to the world about telling the younger brothers as they call us, where they're going wrong, where we are going wrong, all the damage we're doing.

And then after that film, it was really, that's it. "We don't wanna communicate with you anymore. We've said what we have to say, leave us alone." You know, "we're fine. We'll get on with it." But they, the contact I had I arranged to meet a sort of spokesman for this community, for this tribe in Santa Marta.

Kind of like an, a sort of indigenous embassy in a way. And he was a real intermediary between these two worlds. He was dressed in traditional clothes, lived in the mountains but came down to work in this city and was as conversant with that tribal and spiritual life as he was with a smartphone and a laptop.

So he was really this kind of very interesting bridge character who was maintaining a balance, which really must have been very difficult between these two entirely different worldviews and systems. And in a series of conversations with him and with his brother, who also acts as a spokesman, I was able to talk to them about the culture and about the life that was up there, or the knowledge they wanted to share with me.

And when it came time for me to ask without really thinking that it would work, could I have permission to go into the Sierra any further because I know that, you know, academics and anthropologists have been welcomed there in the past. And it was, it was actually great. It was a wonderful relief to be told politely, but firmly, no.

Hmm. No. Mm. You know, it's been nice meeting you. If you wanted to go further into the mountains. You could write a, a detailed proposal, and I thought this was very interesting. They said you'd need to explain what knowledge you are seeking to gain, what you're going to do with that knowledge and who you will share that knowledge with.

Like, what do you want to know? And then we would consider that, the elders, the priests, the mammos would consider that up in the mountains. And you might get an answer, but it might take weeks. It could take months because everything's very, very slow, you know? and you probably wouldn't be their priority.

Right. And so I didn't get to the Sierra, and I'm writing a piece now about not getting to the place where you kind of dream of going, because, to be completely honest, and I know how, how kind of naive and possibly colonial, I sound by saying this, but I think it's important to recognize part of that idea of finding the great secret.

Of course, I wanted to go to this place where a few Westerners had been and meet people who are presented or present themselves as having deep, ecological, ancestral spiritual knowledge, that they know how to live in better harmony with the earth. You know, whether that's true or not, that in itself is a simplified, probably naive view, but that's the kind of main story of these people.

Why wouldn't I want to meet them? You know, just the thought that not 50 miles away from this bustling, polluted city, there's a mountain range. It's one of the most biodiverse places on the planet that has people who have kept knowledge against all odds, have kept knowledge for 500 years and have not been conquered and have not been wiped out, and have not given in.

You know, obviously I wanted to go there, but it was wonderful to know that I couldn't because I'm not welcome. Mm. And so I'm in the middle of writing a piece that's a, it's a kind of non-travel piece. It's an anti travel piece or a piece examining, critically examining that, that on edge within myself to know what's around the next corner.

To look over the horizon to get to the top of the mountain, you know, and, and, and explore and discover all of that stuff. But recognizing that, it is teasing out which parts of that are a genuine and healthy human curiosity. And a genuine love of experiencing new things and meeting new people and learning new things and what's more of a colonial, "I want to discover this place, record what I find and take knowledge out."

And that was one thing that I found very interestingly. They spoke very explicitly about seeking knowledge as a form of extraction. For hundreds of years they've had westerners extracting the obvious stuff, the coal, the gold, the oil, the timber, all the material goods. While indigenous knowledge was discounted as completely useless.

And now people are going there looking for this knowledge. And so for very understandable reasons, these people are highly suspicious of these people turning up, wanting to know things. What will you do with the knowledge? Why do you want this knowledge? And they spoke about knowledge being removed in the past, unscrupulously taken from its proper owners, which is a form of theft.

So, yeah, talking about is appropriate to be talking about this on the end of tourism podcast. Cause yeah, it's very much a journey that wasn't a journey not hacking away through the jungle with the machete, not getting the top of the mountain, you know, not seeing the things that no one else has seen.

Wow. And that being a good thing.

[00:54:59] Chris Christou: Yeah. It brings me back to that question of why would either within a culture or from some kind of authoritative part of it, why would a people place limits to protect themselves in regards to those three days of allowing people to stay?

Right. And not for longer. Yes.

[00:55:20] Nick Hunt: Yeah, that's very true. Mm-hmm. Because people change, the people that come do change things. They change your world in ways big and small, good and bad.

[00:55:31] Chris Christou: You know, I had a maybe not a similar experience, but I was actually in the Sierra Nevadas maybe 12 years ago now, and doing a backpacking trip with an ex-girlfriend there.

And the Columbian government had opened a certain part of the Sierra Nevadas for ecotourism just a few years earlier. And I'm sure it's still very much open and available in those terms. And it was more or less a a six day hike. And because this is an area as well where there were previous civilizations living there, so ruins as well.

And so that that trip is a guided trek. So you would go with a local guide who is not just certified as a tour guide, but also a part of the government program. And you would hike three days and hike back three days.

And there was one lunch where there was a Kogi man and his son also dressed in traditional clothing. And for our listeners, from what I understand anyways, there are certain degrees of inclusion in Kogi society. So the higher up the mountain you go, the more exclusive it is in terms of foreigners are not allowed in, in certain places.

And then the lower down the mountain and you go, there are some places where there are Kogi settlements, but they are now intermingling with for example, these tourists groups. And so that lunch was an opportunity for this Kogi man to explain a little bit about his culture, the history there and of course the geography.

And as we were arriving to that little lunch outpost his son was there maybe 10, 15 feet away, a few meters away. And we kind of locked eyes and I had these, very western plastic sunglasses on my head. And the Kogi boy, again, dressed in traditional clothing, he couldn't speak any English and couldn't speak any Spanish from what I could tell.

And so his manner of communicating was with his hands. And he subtly but somewhat relentlessly was pointing at my sunglasses. And I didn't know what to do, of course. And he wanted my sunglasses. And there's this, this moment, and in that moment so much can come to pass.

But of course afterwards there was so much reflection to be taken in regards to, if I gave him my sunglasses, what would be the consequence of that, that simple action rolling out over the course of time in that place. And does it even matter that I didn't give him my sunglasses, that I just showed up there and had this shiny object that, that perhaps also had its consequence rolling out over the course of this young man's life because, I was one of 10 or 12 people that day in that moment to pass by.

But there were countless other groups. I mean, the outposts that we slept in held like a hundred people at a time. Oh, wow. And so we would, we would pass people who were coming down from the mountain and that same trek or trip and you know, so there was probably, I would say close to a hundred people per day passing there.

Right. And what that consequence would look like rolling out over the course of, of his life.

[00:59:11] Nick Hunt: Yeah. You could almost follow the story of a pair of plastic sunglasses as they drop into a community and have sort of unknown consequences or, or not. But you don't know, do you? Yeah.

Yeah. I'm, it was fascinating knowing that you've been to the same, that same area as well. Appreciated that. What's, what's your, what's your last question? Hmm.

[00:59:34] Chris Christou: Well, it has to do with with the end of tourism, surprisingly.

And so one last time, coming back to your essay, Bulls and Scars, you write,

" a friend of mine refuses to travel to countries poor than his own. Not because he is scared of robbery or disease, but because the inequality implicit in every human exchange induces a squirming, awkwardness and corrosive sense of guilt.

For him, the power disparity overshadows everything. Every conversation, every handshake, every smile and gesture. He would rather not travel than be in that situation." And you say, "I have always argued against this view because the see all human interactions as a function of economics means accepting capitalism in its totality, denying that people are driven by forces other than power and greed, excluding the possibility of there being anything else.

The grotesque display of these photographic trophy hunters makes me think of him now."

Now I've received a good amount of writing and messages from people speaking of their consternation and guilt in terms of "do I travel, do I not travel? What are the consequences?" Et cetera. In one of the first episodes of the podcast with Stephen Jenkinson, he declared that we have to find a way of being in the world that isn't guilt delivered or escapist, which I think bears an affinity to what you've written.

Hmm. Finally, you wrote that your friend's perspective excludes "the possibility of there being anything else." Now I relentlessly return on the pod to the understanding that we live in a time in which our imaginations, our capacity to dream the world anew, is constantly under attack, if not ignored altogether.

My question, this last question for you, Nick, is what does the possibility of anything else look like for you?

[01:01:44] Nick Hunt: I think in a way I come back to that idea of being told we can't give you free accommodation here because, what about the tourist industry? And I think that it's become, you know, everything has become monetized and I get the, you know, the fact that that money does rule the world in lots of ways.

And I'd be a huge hypocrite if I'd said that money wasn't deeply important to me. As much as I like to think it, much as I want to wish it away, it's obviously something that dictates a very large amount of what I do with my life, what I do with my time. But that everything else, well, it's some, it's friendship and hospitality and openness I think.

It's learning and it's genuine exchange, not exchange, not of money and goods and services, but an actual human interaction for the pleasure and the curiosity of it. Those sound like very simple answers and I guess they are, but that is what I feel gets excluded when everything is just seen as a byproduct of economics.

And that friend who, you know, I talked about then, I understand. I've had the experience as I'm sure you have of the kind of meeting someone often in a culture or community that is a lot poorer, who is kind, friendly, hospitable, helpful, and this nagging feeling of like, When does the money question come?

Mm-hmm. And sometimes it doesn't, but often it does. And sometimes it's fine that it does. But it's difficult to kind of place yourself in this, I think, because it does instantly bring up all this kind of very useless western guilt that, you know, Steven Jenkinson talked about. It's not good to go through the world feeling guilty and suspicious of people, you know. 'When am I gonna be asked for money?' Is a terrible way of interacting with anyone to have that at the back of your, your mind.

And I've been in situations where I've said can I give you some money? And people have been quite offended or thought it was ridiculous or laughed at me. So, it's very hard to get right. But like I say, it's a bad way of being in the world, thinking that the worst of people in that they're always, there's always some economic motive for exchange.

And it does seem to be a kind of victory of capitalism in that we do think that all the time, you know, but what does this cost? What's the price? What's the price of this friendliness that I'm receiving? The interesting thing about it, I think, it is quite corrosive on both sites because things are neither offered nor received freely.

If there's always this question of what's this worth economically. But I like that framing. What was it that Steven Jenkinson said? It was guilt on one side and what was the other side of the pole?

[01:05:07] Chris Christou: Yeah. Neither guilt delivered or escapist.

[01:05:11] Nick Hunt: Yeah. That's really interesting. Guilt and escapism. Because that is the other side, isn't it?

Is that often traveling is this escape? And I think we can both relate to it. We both experience that as a very simple, it can be a very simple form of therapy or it seems simple that you just keep going and keep traveling and you run away from things. And also that isn't a helpful way of being in the world either, although it feels great, at the time for parts of your life when you do that.

But what is the space between guilt and escapism? I think it really, the main thing for me, and again, this is a kind of, it sounds like a, just a terrible cliche, but I guess there's a often things do is I do think if you go and if you travel. And also if you stay at home with as open a mind as you can it does seem to kind of shape the way the world works.

It shapes the way people interact with you, the way you interact with people. And just always keeping in mind the possibility that that things encounters, exchanges, will turn out for the best rather than the worst. Mm-hmm. You develop a slight sixth sense I think when traveling where you often have to make very quick decisions about people.

You know, do I trust this person? Do I not trust this person? And you're not aware you're doing it, but obviously you can get it wrong. But not allowing that to always become this kind of suspicion of "what does this person want from me?" Hmm. I feel like I've just delivered a lot of sort of platitudes and cliches at the end of this talk.

Just be nice, be, be open. Try to be respectful. Do no harm, also don't be wracked with guilt every exchange, because who wants to meet you if you are walking around, ringing your hands and kind of punching yourself in the face. Another important part of being a traveler is being a good traveler.

Being somebody who people want coming to their community, village, town, city and benefit from that exchange as well. It's not just about you bringing something back. There's the art of being a good guest, which Patrick Leigh Fermor, to come back to him, was a master at. He would speak three or four different languages, know classical Greek poetry, be able to talk about any subject.

Dance on the table, you know, drink all night. He was that kind of guest. He was the guest that people wanted to have around and have fun with mostly, or that's the way he presented himself, certainly. In the same way, you can be a good, same way, you can be a good host, you can be a good guest, and you can be a good traveler in terms of what you, what you bring, what you give.

[01:08:20] Chris Christou: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think what it comes down to is that relationship and that hospitality that has for, at least for people in Europe and, and the UK and and Western people, descendants, culturally, is that when we look at, for example, what Illich kind of whispered towards, how these traditions have been robbed of us.

And when you talk about other cliches and platitudes and this and that, that, we feel the need to not let them fall by the wayside, in part because we're so impoverished by the lack of them in our times. And so, I think, that's where we might be able to find something of an answer, is in that relationship of hospitality that, still exists in the world, thankfully in little corners.

And, and those corners can also be found in the places that we live in.

[01:09:21] Nick Hunt: I think it exists that desire for hospitality because it's a very deep human need. When I was a kid, I, I was always, for some reason I would hate receiving presents.

There was something about the weight of expectation and I would always find it very difficult to receive presents and would rather not be given a lot of stuff to do with various complex family dynamics. But it really helped when someone said, you know, when someone gives you a present, it's not just for you, it's also for them. You know, they're doing it cuz they want to and to have a present refused is not a nice thing to do.

It, it, that doesn't feel good for the person doing it. Their need is kind of being thrown back at them. And I think it's like that with hospitality as well. We kind of often frame it as the person receiving the hospitality has all the good stuff and the host is just kind of giving, giving, giving, but actually the host is, is getting a lot back. And that's often why they do it. It's like those people wanting, people to stay for three days is not just an act of kindness and selflessness. It's also, it feeds them and benefits them and improves their life. I think that's a really important thing to remember with the concept of hospitality and hosting.

[01:10:49] Chris Christou: May we all be able to be fed in that way. Thank you so much, Nick, on behalf of our listeners for joining us today and I feel like we've started to unpack so much and there's so much more to consider and to wrestle with. But perhaps there'll be another opportunity someday.

[01:11:06] Nick Hunt: Yeah, I hope so. Thank you, Chris. It was great speaking to you.

[01:11:12] Chris Christou: Likewise, Nick. Before we finish off, I'd just like to ask, you know, on behalf of our listeners as well how might people be able to read and, and purchase your writing and your books? How might they be able to find you and follow you online?

[01:11:26] Nick Hunt: So if you just look up my, my name Nick Hunt. My book should, should come up. I have a website. Nick hunt scrutiny.com. I have a, a book, a novel actually out in July next month, 6th of July called "Red Smoking Mirror."

So that's the thing that I will be kind of focusing on for the next bit of time. You can also find me as Chris and I met each other through the Dark Mountain Project, which is a loose network of writers and artists and thinkers who are concerned with the times we're in and how to be human in times of crisis and collapse and change.

So you can find me through any of those routes. Hmm.

[01:12:17] Chris Christou: Beautiful. Well, I'll make sure that all those links are on the homework section on the end of tourism podcast when it launches. And this episode will be released after the release of your new, your book, your first novel. So, listeners will be able to find it then as well.

[01:12:34] Nick Hunt: It will be in local shops. Independent bookshops are the best.

[01:12:40] Chris Christou: Once again, thank you, Nick, for your time.

[01:12:42] Nick Hunt: Thank you.

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