Years ago, long before TripAdvisor or GoogleMaps or Airbnb experiences, my ex and I checked into a seedy hotel near the Acropolis in Athens, on the second half of our Italy/Greece honeymoon. I don’t remember how we chose the accommodations. We’d recently finished college and didn’t have much money so I assume cost was a key factor. The hotel had looked fine from the outside but our room was so visibly dirty, including the sheets and the bathtub, that we fled! We grabbed our passports from the unattended front desk and ran off without paying.
After a few days in Athens, we boarded a ferry to Santorini. It was the high season and we hadn’t made reservations for a sleeping berth or even a seat in the main cabin on the fully booked boat. Relegated to the open deck, I slept fitfully atop a life preserver chest, shivering as the temperature dropped during the overnight crossing. When we disembarked the next morning, a swarm of Greek women descended on the weary passengers, brandishing plastic-covered pictures of rooms for rent in their modest homes. We selected one that looked nice enough and loaded our bags on a donkey and followed our hostess up the hill to our Greek island honeymoon suite.
Traveling around Costa Rica in late December 1999, everyone thought the internet would break and all electronic systems in the world would go haywire at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Meanwhile, we were following a well trodden path laid out by the Lonely Planet. Travelers sat in the same restaurants everywhere we went thumbing their own worn copies of the ubiquitous travel guide. In San José, we chose a hotel from Lonely Planet’s budget suggestions that they described as having showers with high water pressure and ample hot water. Turns out, it was also one of those hotels in which you could rent a room by the hour in a neighborhood where men openly carried guns and knives. From there, we ventured to a mountain town called San Isidro on a bus that sped along an unlit, narrow, curvy road made more treacherous by rain and fog that afternoon. Every time the driver successfully passed another vehicle on a blind curve, he made the sign of the cross and muttered thanks to the Lord.
To distract ourselves from the terror, we chatted with a Dutch woman who was in the middle of a five month solo journey through Central and South America. We saw her again the next morning sitting at an open air cafe on the main square and she called for us to join her for breakfast. The three of us rehashed the previous night’s perilous ascent, the retelling of which had already begun to take on mythic proportions, and she told us stories of other perils she’d encountered in her solitary journey. I was smitten. She wrote her name and address on a slip of paper and instructed us to contact her if we ever found ourselves in Holland. She said true travelers always welcomed each other into their homes, no matter how much time had passed. “See you around the world,” she said, as we waved goodbye. I have since lost that slip of paper, not having had a cloud in which to the store the info for eternity, and I wished I could have called her when I finally went to Amsterdam 18 years later.
We might have avoided some of those early debacles if we’d been using travel apps that were being updated with information and reviews in real time and that would have given us access to reservations portals. By telling us the best places to go and the quickest way to get there, travel apps have reduced the possibility of making time consuming and uncomfortable mistakes. An unfortunate side effect, however, is that the travel apps have also reduced the possibility of discovery. One of the best places I ever found was a tiny wine and cheese bar called Masto in an outer neighborhood of Rome called Testaccio. We’d been searching for a place to eat on a Sunday night when many restaurants suggested to us by apps and other internet searches were closed or looked a little too touristy when we walked by them. It would have been easy to miss the entrance to Masto, but something about the warm glow and scent of freshly baked bread emanating from within made me back up on the sidewalk and peer into the narrow glass front door where I saw an intimate interior with meats hanging from the ceiling, a large assortment of cheeses arrayed in a bright display case, a wall of wine bottles, and a handful of small wooden tables large enough for two, maybe three, people each. When we entered, the owner greeted us effusively like friends and explained everything on the menu in great detail. I understood about one-third of what he said and 100% of the welcoming and passionate vibe. Every time a new person walked in, they were greeted like neighbors. They probably were neighbors.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the many ways in which travel apps make world travel so much easier, especially when visiting not easily accessible places. The first time I went to Cuba in 2003, I had to figure out how to book rooms in a country where Americans were not allowed to spend money, effectively prohibiting travel. After days of research, I found an American ex-pat who arranged lodging for other Americans visiting the forbidden island. Then I had to figure out how to wire money to his Swiss bank account and hope for the best when we arrived. We stayed in a guest room that belonged to a couple who struggled to make ends meet despite having medical degrees and who had little contact with the world beyond short wave radio signals. Fourteen years later, I booked a small apartment in Old Havana with an Airbnb Superhost and we paid for our accommodations with a credit card saved in the app.
Sometimes you find things with the travel apps that you might not have found with a traditional guidebook. Like the Swimming Pool Art Project space we discovered last summer in Sofia, Bulgaria, when the name popped up on GoogleMaps along the route to dinner one night. We sent an email to its founder Viktoria Draganova inquiring how to visit this art space with a mysterious name. No evidence of its existence was visible from the street. The empty swimming pool turned art space was on the rooftop of a 1930's apartment building that once belonged to the Draganova family and had been seized by the communists during World War Two. Viktoria had repurchased her grandparent’s unit on the top floor nearly 80 years later and created a delightful space to showcase Bulgarian contemporary artists.
The travel apps make it easier to get from here to there, usually without getting lost in an unfamiliar landscape and usually without having to ask questions or read signs in an unknown language. I enjoy unexpected opportunities to exercise my analog travel skills, though. When we arrived at the Nara train station in Japan last month, GoogleMaps did not display any modes of public transportation, on which we had come to rely. Instead of asking the friendly looking guy at the info desk for a bus map, we decided to walk to our hotel despite mid morning temperatures hovering in the mid 90's. I suppose we could have taken one of the cabs waiting outside the station, but Google said it was only an 18 minute walk and I liked seeing a new town by foot. We’d splurged on a ritzy hotel whose receptionists had not expected guests drenched with sweat to arrive on foot. After confirming that we had indeed made a reservation with a viable credit card, they whisked away our luggage and led us to a stately, European-style lounge off to the side of the lobby, discreetly offered us fluffy white hand towels to mop up the moisture pooling at our feet, and handed us cold, sparkling pink drinks from a silver tray.
Nara was a small town so we could have easily walked to all the main tourist sights, but the 106 degree heat index convinced us to finally ask for a bus map and make use of air-conditioned and efficiently Japanese public transport. We nearly missed the last bus back to the train station from the temple at Horuyi outside of Nara, though. We hadn’t checked the timetable posted on a pole at the bus stop when we arrived at the temple and were lucky to have caught the final bus of the day by accident. It was the kind of blunder I might have made pre GoogleMaps. I wouldn’t have taken the bus most of the time back then, though. Subways seemed more straightforward. Bus routes confused me and I was always scared I’d miss my stop because I couldn’t read the signs. Now GoogleMaps tells you the exact bus number to take and the number of stops the bus makes before you arrive at your destination. I enjoy taking the bus these days because I like seeing the street life along the way.
Following the blue dots has diminished my previously excellent sense of direction, honed by having read actual maps that helped me understand the geographical relationship between places. When I was staying in Italy for several months a few summers ago, I tried to revive my directional skills by navigating with a spiral-bound map book whenever possible. I’d study the map before driving anywhere, plot a byways-not-highways route whenever possible, and envision it in my head. If I thought I might be veering off in the wrong direction at some point, I’d pull over to verify on the map. Once I arrived near the small towns that were usually my destinations, I’d follow signs that said Centro and eventually end up where I intended to be. If I was entering a large city, I’d switch over to the British man’s disembodied voice calling out directions with atrocious pronunciation over the car’s speaker system.
I worry that we miss seeing things sometimes when we are too focused on following the blue dots to check off a list of tourist sights, via the most direct and fastest route, instead of strolling and meandering and observing the tiny and wondrous details that enliven a place and a people. Back in 2001, I attended a lecture given by Edmund White, author of “The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris.” Inspired, I printed calling cards that described myself as Flâneur (though they probably should have said Flâneuse) on one side and defined the word for those who inquired on the flip side: A person who appears to be wandering aimlessly but is secretly in search of adventure. Le Robert, the definitive French dictionary, defines the flâneur as “an artist of impressions, circumnavigating the city as whim dictates, giving himself (or herself) over to the spectacle of the moment.’’ I’d like to live my whole life as a flâneur, and not only while traveling. Sometimes I complain that modern technology has ruined flâneuring. In reality, I know travel apps can impede or facilitate this way of life depending on how and when we use them.
