2006:

Axum, Ethiopia: 

I am attracted to bright lights.  There’s something about the glow in the surrounding darkness that always pulls me in to see what they possess.  The same with corners.  Unfamiliar streets draw me down them in search of what lies beyond the next bend. 

I spent my early twenties satiating these two curiosities and it led me around the world.  So, it was no surprise that on my 23 birthday I found myself in a dark restaurant suffused with orange glowing table lights – a place I chanced upon by having turned down an unfamiliar street in a new city: Axum, Ethiopia.  

I’m bad with numbers.  Phone numbers, key codes, they don’t stick in my mind.  But there was one number that night which did.  23.  That night I celebrated turning 23, and Ethiopia was my 23^rd country. 

Back then I was a backpacker.  I travelled alone.  Three-month, six-month trips often spanning one or more continents.  I only returned home to replenish my bank account.  

I knew how to handle myself abroad, how to efficiently pack my bag, how to learn small phrases in local languages.  I had my adapters and towel, multiple Lonely Planet guidebooks, novels, a digital camera (with a whopping 5.3 megapixels).  

I’d developed a street sense, knew how to safely get lost within a new city, find my way through bus, train, and airport terminals and labyrinthine alleyways.  No matter where I was dropped, I knew I could land on my feet.   

Earlier that day I made a new friend from the hotel.  Sitting in the orange glow amongst chattering Ethiopians, we talked about travel as is so typical with fellow backpackers.

23 countries and 23 years old.  What an accomplishment.  I boasted these numbers and sat tall.  But instead of approval, my friend turned serious. 

“Be careful,” he said.

Suddenly, it felt as if all the orange table lights were directed at me.  My face reddened with embarrassment under their glow.  A stern look and two words knocked me onto the hard ground of an unspoken truth.  It was a truth that had been welling up inside me for some time, a silent voice now made audible.  Yet I still couldn’t make out its words. 

All I knew was that he was right.     

 

The Tank:

 

My Lonely Planet said Ethiopia was the only African country that staved off colonization. Italy wanted this region, but after bouts of armed conflict, Ethiopians ousted them.

A hallmark of Italy’s short-lived legacy here are the roads they carved and winded through the countryside’s verdant mountains. 

As I sat in a cramped bus zigzagging a hillside, I presumed to be on one of those roads, that legacy. 

I gained pleasure in making this connection.  Pressed up against the window, I peered out into a vast valley of farmland.  We wound down the hillside and swayed around its corners, skirting muddy, red banks; the engine squealed as the driver downshifted to slow our descent, we bounced along to the bottom – and at the bottom sat a rusted battle tank, slumped over in the ditch.

Italian? I had no idea.  How and why did this tank end up here?  Why does it remain?  What was its story? 

The driver grabbed a gear and picked up speed, then another gear, we swung a blind corner, and the tank was gone.

We began climbing again, but my mind remained behind at the bottom.  That tank has forever stuck with me.  In the depths of that valley, that momentary glimpse made me realize just how little I knew of Ethiopia, its people and their history. 

And then, that inner, silent voice that had been nagging me turned loud: And what of all the other places you’ve been to?  What do you really know about them? 

Like that I realized how most of my travels were laden with surface level experiences. 

Sure, I’d toured cities, read Lonely Planet histories, visited museums and heritage sights and temples – but how did that translate to truly grasping the nature of these places? 

The tank said I knew nothing.  It flaunted a depth and richness that I’d missed.  It humbled me, told me that two-three day stops in places, hopscotching a country in a couple of weeks, wasn’t enough to understand what I saw. 

Sharpest of all, the tank declared that my way of seeking such understandings was radically insufficient.   

My love of lights and corners was an addiction, one I satiated by going to more and more places.  The misplaced pride I’d taken in having travelled to so many places now felt more like pathetic notches in a belt.

As we rattled, shook, and grunted up the hill, I pledged to find a better way to travel, a way to better understand.  I began thinking of travelling slow.  

 

2019:

Bangkok, Thailand:  

The quiet chill of the art gallery hummed around us and masked our low, but energized voices.  We isolated ourselves in a vacant corner and paused our conversation each time someone walked by. 

Each time we resumed our conversation I glanced down at my recorder, making sure it was continuing to capture this monumental interview.

I’d lived in Bangkok for over two years now.  And this interview was part of my ethnographic research, for my Ph.D. dissertation. 

In the years shortly after that rusted tank, I went to university.  My major: anthropology.  

Anthropology made perfect sense.  If I wanted to improve my travels, learn how to see and understand other cultures – to travel slow – this was the discipline. 

After years of learning, and multiple degrees, I was finally putting it all into practice.

Our conversation flowed in and out of Thai and English as each of us tried to articulate ourselves in excited but hushed tones.  Our subject was highly sensitive.  And this interview was the first of many that truly delved into it. 

This interview put me on a pathway that, through subsequent interviews with other Thais, blew past textbook understandings and histories of Thailand.  

It led me to develop a complex understanding of Thailand, which ultimately made me an authority on Thai culture in my own right as an anthropologist.    

Anthropologists focus and theorize on the nature of cultures.  We produce valuable insights into how they’re constructed, how they operate.  And this ability stems from how we are trained to identify dynamics and patterns which inform everyday experiences. 

Such elements are often taken for granted and go largely unnoticed, but once drawn out reveal profound implications.

Each time I walked away from an interview my mind buzzed with new connections which then helped me augment an ever-expanding view on Thai culture. 

Even my regular conversations with Thais became more and more insightful.  I became hooked on this feeling of developing my own understanding, and like that I discovered a new ‘corner’, a new ‘glowing light’, to pursue.

This is how I fell in love with ethnographic research.  Such an intensive and sustained engagement with other cultures.  It became my chief occupation and the art of travelling slow faded from my mind.  

 

2023:

Vancouver, Canada:  

Jess and I glided past the hotel minibar and the walnut panelled closet, and peered out the floor to ceiling windows, out past the velvet drapes, into the wet, January darkness that shortens Vancouver days to mere blips of cold light. 

I stood numb, transfixed by the green glowing offices of the neighbouring skyscrapers. 

I hadn’t slept in two days.          

Jess skipped over the plush carpet into the bathroom, across the marble floor, and turned on the standalone, soaker tub. 

We laughed at the two rubber duckies sitting on the edge of the tub. 

They were vampire duckies and they reminded us of one of my doctoral examiners, who taught about vampires and witches, and who earlier that day brought prosecco in a glittering bag to my doctoral defence.        

Tonight, I would slide into that swanky tub with another bottle of prosecco and cleanse myself of being a graduate student. 

A warm wave of happiness lapped my torso as I slipped down past the bubbles.  For the first time in years, I felt like I could finally rest.  There was nothing for me to do tomorrow.  I was done. 

 

Southeast Asia:

Jess and I flew to Thailand, shortly after my doctoral defence, to travel Southeast Asia for three months.  She’d never been before, and I wanted to share with her a place so instrumental in shaping my life. 

Having travelled Southeast Asia for years, much of what we saw was old hat for me.  In this Jess and I were on two different trips. 

Hers was of wonderment.  That magical feeling that comes with peering around new corners and seeing things you never imagined could have existed. 

For me, most of the corners were old.  As we moved from one destination to the next, we turned down familiar streets.  I became our de facto tour guide.   

It was pointless to get up at 6AM.  Most of the guesthouses we stayed at had no coffee machine, and since I was neither writing nor drinking coffee, I found no reason to crawl out of bed that early - like I normally did at home when I wrote my dissertation. 

Jess would snuggle into her pillow under the hum and chill of our AC.  Meanwhile, I laid there wide eyed, staring up into mosquito nets.  The same question always woke me: now what?  

The brief moment of celebrating my Ph.D. - that dip in the tub - was over.  Those feelings of joy and accomplishment now yielded to concerns over the future.  

Academia – a professorship – is the traditional route for newly minted doctorates. 

Though it could be a rewarding future, I found myself shrinking away from such a fraught, highly precarious, and in today’s climate, seemingly impossible challenge. 

Tenured professorships are veritable unicorns.  Wonderful, but fabled.  Perhaps even foolish to pursue.    

I needed to find something else, but what?  Before me, beyond the mosquito net, up in the ceiling rafters loomed a darkness which I couldn’t peer through.   

 

 

Tokyo, Japan:

We ended our trip in Japan, a place I’d never been to but always wanted to visit.  It was here where I noticed that each corner once again was wrapped in curiosity.  

Jess and I toured museums, visited temples and Onsen (spas heated by hot springs).  We read our Lonely Planet’s history of Japan and its sections on cultural etiquette.  We took long walks through cities, drank saki, hiked the countryside, and marvelled at the speed and efficiency of the bullet trains. 

We fell in love with Japan.

When we entered Shinto temples, I was no longer in guide mode, telling Jess about the structures and religious practices we encountered. 

Nor could I explain to her Japan’s history.  She knew as much as I did, and it was there in the cool, misty streets of Tokyo that I finally joined Jess on the same trip.   

It was also there on those streets that an old feeling began to well up inside me.  Jess felt it too. 

Despite our enchantment with Japan, our experiences felt surface level.  Gone was the depth of understanding that I was used to having in an Asian country.  Gone was my ability to speak the language to better connect with locals. 

We were walled off from most Japanese, their culture and history, their home.  It felt like a glass wall buffered us, as they passed by on the street, carrying on with life in a separate realm.         

By the end of our time in Japan I finally recognized that old feeling.  It was the same one that gnawed at me all those years ago as I descended that Ethiopian valley and chanced upon that rusted tank. 

Somewhere between that tank and my doctorate, I’d lost sight of that original impetus for entering university.  Graduate school had narrowed my focus towards becoming a professor – not a world class traveller.

Then I realized that I knew how I could travel better.  I’d spent years developing those skills, had actually applied them in Thailand.  I knew I could create deeper experiences. 

Like that, I’d finally returned to the art of slow travel.  And through my skillset and knowledge base as an anthropologist, I began thinking of how I could flesh out this art form for myself and for others.    

And as I began to think more and more about slow travel I saw how I could stray from the conventional route most doctorates attempt – tenure at a university. Aka: the pursuit of a unicorn. 

And like that, I left this pursuit behind and went rogue.     

 

The Path Forward:

In many respects I’m creating this website for my 23-year-old self.  That self that wanted to know how to better understand the places he naively skipped through. 

I also write this for anyone else who wishes to use anthropology to travel better.  That is, for those who wish to master the art of slow travel. 

The methods discussed in future posts are not rocket science.  They can be adopted to amplify your ability to explore and understand the places you visit (and even the places you call home).  

However, many of these methods need to be altered to fit within a traveller’s skillset.  To this end, this website explores how this might be done. 

One thing I learnt studying Thai culture is that top-down dispersals of power seldom work well, especially for those below on the receiving end.  It is not my wish to magnanimously bestow ‘wisdom’ upon you. 

Rather, I hope we can work together and figure out how to best alter anthropological methods and understandings to fit our travelling needs. 

To that end, this website is also about experimentation. 

If you apply discussed methods while travelling, let the rest of us know how they worked! 

Did you find value in the method?  What might you alter to improve it or to make it easier to use?  What other methods might you suggest? 

Lets talk!  

I believe that a community of like-minded travellers/experimenters is the true value of this website.

Thank you for reading and welcome to AGR.   

 

Fraser

  

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P.P.S. Leave a comment below about what you want to know about travelling.

 

 

Photography Credits:

1. Featured Image:  Map and Notebook: Dariusz Sankowski

2. Axum, Ethiopia: Fraser GermAnn

3. Ethiopian Mountains: Clay Knight

4. Bangkok, Thailand: Stephen Cook

5. Vancouver, Canada: Birk Enwald 

6. Tegallalang Rice Fields, Indonesia: Niklas Weiss

7. Tokyo, Japan: Yu Kato

8. Kyoto, Japan: Chris Lu