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Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images I began travelling professionally soon after the end of the second world war, and I travelled mostly in Europe, where the hyperbole of victory was fading, and disillusion had set in. Seven or eight of Europe's eastern countries, so recently liberated from the Nazis, now found themselves under Soviet oppression, and the so-called iron curtain divided the continent, as Churchill put it, from Stettin to Trieste. Everywhere was shabby. Everything was threadbare. Famous old cities of history lay ravaged, still in ruins.
Travelling in this disordered region was not easy. Currencies were hard to come by, visas were necessary almost everywhere, food was often scarce, trains were grimy and unreliable and for the most part air travel was only for privileged officialdom. And always there loomed over the continent, if only in one's mind, the baleful presence of Soviet communism. The iron curtain was like a prison wall, and crossing it from east to west, from St Petersburg (then Leningrad) to Helsinki, say, or from one half of Berlin to the other, really was like a personal liberation.
I'm sorry to have to say it, because those times were cruel indeed for many Europeans, but I greatly enjoyed my travelling then. It was an excitement just being on the long-forbidden continent, as we called it then, and travel in Germany had a peculiar fascination for me. I used vividly to think as I sat at a cafe in Hamburg or strolled a Bavarian meadow that only the other day our own thudding bombers had been killing people in these very streets, and only the other day, if I had gone for a walk here, in no time I would have been bundled off to a prison camp. As it was, no single German seemed to bear a grudge against me, but even now, six decades on, I can still summon the sensation into my mind, if I try hard enough.
But it was the miserable iron curtain that enthralled me most, in those early wanderings of mine. I always loved allegory, and to come across it almost anywhere, from a stretch of barbed wire or a line of pillboxes to its ultimate obscenity, the Berlin Wall, seemed to me a tremendously allegorical moment of history. I enjoyed the impassive faces of the border guards, when I crossed the curtain by one frontier or another, and they with infinite slow suspicion turned the pages of my passport. I relished the feeling of disquiet that accompanied me everywhere, a western journalist meandering through hostile police states, and I welcomed the moments when murky strangers asked me to take messages home to Britain for them, or played the agent provocateur with black market inducements. It was all grist for my mill, after all, and when a diplomat of my acquaintance once asked me to deliver an unexplainable package to an unidentifiable recipient, I carried it across the Chain Bridge at Budapest feeling childishly like somebody in a spy novel.
And now, in another century, almost in another world? Now I can potter around a spanking new Europe as I will, crossing its frontiers almost without producing a passport, and I can even go to the United States without a visa. Of course I relish these new freedoms, which have vastly broadened my horizons and enlarged my opportunities. I am no longer travelling to report for newspapers, but only to gather material for books. As age has caught up with me, too, I no longer pine for those frissons of the cold war, and don't in the least want to be interrogated by armed guards with Kalashnikovs in the interior of Africa. It is a wonderful thing, of course it is, that any of us should be able to travel, wherever we like, whenever we want, pop down to St Pancras and take a train to Avignon, pop up to Manchester airport and be off to Valparaíso.
I have to admit that with the ease and general safety of travel, it has lost a little of its excitement for me. Partly, I am almost ashamed to admit, this is because now everybody else does it too! Everyone has thrilled to Manhattan now. Everyone seems to have been to the Great Barrier Reef. One of my neighbours lately went on a package tour to Lhasa. Even the most beautiful city in the world, Venice, undeniably loses some of its wow factor when you can hardly see San Marco for the massed multitudes of its visitors, and every few minutes the Campanile is dwarfed by the passing of another obese cruise ship. And every one of us, if we haven't actually been to the forests of Borneo or the Amazon jungles, have certainly experienced them via television.
And yet, and yet … during my 60-odd years of the wandering life I really have been to most of the places I want to go to, have been in most of the world's great cities and experienced the wild world from the Himalayas to the Empty Quarter. For much of the time I am perfectly content to stay in my own incomparable corner of Wales. Nevertheless, the moment those engines burst into life and I fasten my seat belt, the moment I glimpse the Andes through the clouds or watch the blue Adriatic tilting through our windows – the moment I step out into a revivified Berlin or a fabulous Dubai, or find myself once again upon the Honolulu beach with a mai tai in my hand – at every such moment I think once again, as I did when I was young, how marvellous the great world is, and how rich the rewards of travelling it.
Photograph: Geraint Lewis/Alamy The world is just as interesting – as unexpected, as unvisited, as diverse – as it ever was, even though the nature of its sights has sometimes changed. I am fascinated to see Thai tourists, for example, at a sleek new hotel in Jaipur, and to go to Mauritius to find Russian fat cats trying (in vain) to entertain their molls. I am interested in what "Indo-Pak" Chinese food in Toronto might taste like, and what a McVeggie with Cheese amid the ancestral swarm of Varanasi will offer. I once spent two weeks living in and around Los Angeles airport and, although it wasn't a peaceful holiday, it offered as curious and rich a glimpse into a new century of crossing cultures as I could imagine.
And when I walk around the Old City of Jerusalem after dark, as I did six weeks ago; or visit the beach in Thailand, as I did two weeks after that; or wander among the "gods' messengers" that are the 1,200 roaming deer which still more or less run the old Japanese capital of Nara, I find these classic beauties as rich as ever they were. Places are like people for me and, as with people, the wise, rich, deeply rooted places never seem to change too much, even though they might lose some hair or develop wrinkles. Damascus, Zurich, Lalibela are as pristine as they were generations ago. And even as the tides of history keep washing against a Havana or a Beirut, their natural spiritedness or resilience or sense of style never seems greatly diminished.
My talisman as a traveller has always been that old chestnut from Proust, that "the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new sights, but in seeing with new eyes". A place is boring only if you bring uninterested eyes to it. Some people say that democratic travel has removed the magic of places, but to me that magic is just as strong as ever (in Petra, in La Paz, even in my hometown of Oxford) if it is real. Garbo never grows old, nor Dylan young. When we worry that a place we love has changed – "Bali isn't what it used to be," I sometimes hear myself saying, "It's usually because we have changed." Fascination is in the eye of the beholder.
Pico Iyer is the author of The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (Bloomsbury, £8.99)
Photograph: Murdo Macleod The last great journey on Earth was perhaps Wally Herbert's trek to the North Pole in 1969. Until the end of the last century, explorers were finishing up the scraps – Mike Fay trekked across the Congo, I walked the Namib, and so on.
And now, the world is open to us all. You don't need to read accounts by someone like me, the specialist; we're all doing it. Grab your camera or pen and hike! So these couldn't be better times for the average person – we may all share in the privilege.
Is it exploration? Well, if it's not advancing knowledge, no. Those who today flog to the Poles are not explorers, they are simply athletes. Inspiring – and, I'm afraid, irrelevant. Yet, man is not, in the end, a rational creature; exploration isn't entirely about assembling proven fact. Dr David Livingstone made many discoveries in Africa but his biggest role was actually as communicator, giving the Victorians a picture of the continent for his day. Take Ed Stafford's recent walk along the length of the Amazon. A pointless journey in itself, and 2,000 miles of it along what is in fact a shipping lane. Yet the journey was saved from irrelevance and self-indulgence because along the way he documented the Amazon for his time, which is our time. This task of accurately conveying our threatened world is more urgent than ever.
benedictallen.com
It's become easy – even fashionable – to be negative about social networking. Yet amid all the nostalgia and cynicism, it's also easy to lose sight of the positive aspects that have come along too, especially for travellers.
Personally, I love the fact that we can now make new contacts all around the world at the click of a button; that sometimes just sending an email can open a door to getting welcomed like an old friend; that we can stay in touch with the people we meet; that we can discover places we may not have found by chance, and yet still leave room for plenty of haphazard wandering too.
Does the internet take away all the spontaneity? I don't think so. It can still be exciting to follow a random tip you saw on an obscure blog or to wait for the arrival of an unknown, online contact in a cafe. Sure, it's a bit different to what came before, but one day these will be a generation's "good old days" too.
There's no need to be online 24/7 or constantly slaving to a smartphone to get the benefits. If you want to take a trip without logging in once, you can do so. That's the great thing about travelling in 2011, you can opt in or opt out. And if you have the time and the money to go off into the back of beyond without so much as a guidebook and without seeing (or rarely seeing) another tourist, those days aren't over either.
vickybaker.co.uk
Photograph: Fritz Liedtke The world is as interesting for travellers as it's always been – but as wanderers we need to balance the utility of new travel technologies with the quieter, more organic rewards previous generations of travellers discovered on the road.
Interestingly, this whole now-versus-then argument was a topic of debate when I first started vagabonding 15 years ago. Many of the older travellers I met back then – some of them veterans of the 1970s hippy trail across Asia – argued that my travel experiences were tainted by luxuries such as email and credit cards. These days I am myself tempted to look at a younger generation of travellers and suggest that smartphones and micro-blogging are compromising their road experiences. I have to remind myself that this isn't a new conversation – that technology has been altering the travel experience since at least the dawn of the steamship and the railroad engine. Any technology that makes travel easier is going to connect aspects of the travel experience to the comforts and habits one might seek back home – and can make travel feel less like travel.
George Orwell tackled this issue in his 1937 essay The Road to Wigan Pier. "Everyone who has travelled by primitive methods in an undeveloped country knows that the difference between that kind of travel and modern travel in trains … is the difference between life and death," he wrote. "The nomad who walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is travelling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an interregnum, a kind of temporary death."
Here Orwell seems to argue that technology is destroying the true experience of travel – but he goes on to assert that restoring the travel experience is not as simple as refusing the technology: "So long as the railways exist, one has got to travel by train … Here am I, 40 miles from London. When I want to go up to London why do I not pack my luggage on to a mule and set out on foot, making a two days of it? Because, with the Green Line buses whizzing past me every 10 minutes, such a journey would be intolerably irksome. In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available."
What in Orwell's day was a matter of rail transit is now an issue of constant connectedness – what I like to call the "electronic umbilical cord". At one level the ubiquity of smartphones and wireless internet makes travel more accessible: apps such as image recognition search Google Goggles can be more dynamic than guidebooks, and sites like couchsurfing.com help travellers connect with local hosts. On another level, part of travel's charm has always been its disorienting uncertainty – and it can be hard to stumble into serendipity when all your travel decisions are filtered through your iPhone.
Thus the importance of balance. Just as Orwell wasn't going to walk to London when there were Green Line buses available, most of us aren't going to discard our smartphones and internet access for aerograms and hand-drawn maps. That said, there are times when a far-flung post office encounter or directions scribbled on to the back of a grocery sack can lead a person into the kind of experiences that make travel so surprising and worthwhile.
That means 21st-century travellers must be aware of when their gadgets are enhancing new experiences, and when those gadgets are getting in the way of new experiences.
If in doubt, unplug the electronic umbilical cord and throw yourself at the mercy of your exotic new surroundings. This time-honoured travel strategy can be daunting if you're not used to it, but you'll soon come to discover that unplugged travel carries its own, often more rewarding, set of possibilities.
rolfpotts.com
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