The End

It wasn’t the photos.

This post was originally written by us in another language [here]. This English version was translated with Google Translate and lightly reviewed.

It wasn’t the photos. Nor was it sharing the journey with others. For most, it never involved “personal social capital.” The narrative owed itself to the experience. And as the connecting thread, we found that deep impulse to explore. To discover the world that is different from your own.

The data, the images, the stories, and, in general, the idea of a place were limited. Sometimes very limited. That’s the kind of combination that nourishes the spirit. I like to think that everyone who enjoys travel possesses that ancient desire to come face to face with the new. To imagine themselves on a road or path where they’ve never been before and surrender to the idea that if they had to pinpoint their location on a map, they couldn’t.

Almost all of the above no longer exists.

The sequences of photos and videos that document the entire planet seem limitless, and any of us have been in a position to feel lost in that sea that now lives in data centers. And sometimes I imagine how all that color and light, that power, has been reduced to the glow of a screen in the darkness of a room, with its observer slumped in bed.

I try not to think about it too much, but the world seems to be enveloped in a material that diminishes its intensity. Often it dulls and reduces it in an endless repetition of the same scene. And like a memory, little by little it transforms into what it was the last time we remembered it and ceases to be what it once was.

Perhaps we are witnessing the final moments of travel as an adventure. At least a real one. Far removed from the experience of consumption, of course, but also born of a profound lack of knowledge about what we will find in that place we want to go. A place, moreover, that represents a different view of the world. Where variety comes alive and difference is a powerful voice that silences what you knew and transforms your understanding of the whole.

I don’t know if all this is the end or just a dip in the road, but if it’s the former, I want to cling to the few cracks we still find here and there. Those places where the harshness of the climate hasn’t yielded its form to a commodity, or where the power of its way of life hasn’t been replaced by an echo chamber, and also, above all, those corners the world has forgotten. They could be the last bastion of the experience of traveling for yourself.