Has technology robbed travel of its riches? - Module 6

C2 Proficiency · Multiple Matching · Expert Proficiency, Pearson Education

You are going to read a text about technology and travel. For questions 1–10, choose the best answer from sections A-E. Some of the choices may be required more than once.

Jan Morris

I began travelling professionally just after the Second World War, and I travelled mostly in Europe, where famous old cities lay ravaged. 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 air travel was reserved largely for privileged officialdom. I'm sorry to have to say it, because those times were cruel indeed for many Europeans, but I greatly enjoyed my travelling then. The comfort and safety of modern transport means that while travel is a lot less fraught than it used to be, it has lost some of its allure for me. Partly, I am almost ashamed to admit, this is because everybody else does it too! Travelling abroad is nothing unusual, and even if we haven't actually been to the forests of Borneo or the Amazon jungle, most of us have experienced them via television or the internet.

Pico Iyer

The world is just as interesting – as unexpected, as unvisited, as diverse – as it ever was, even though the nature of its sights and our experience of them have sometimes changed. I once spent two weeks living in and around Los Angeles airport – that hub of modern travel – and, although it wasn't a peaceful holiday, it offered as curious and rich a glimpse into a new era of crossing cultures as I could imagine. 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... Though the tides of history keep washing against a Havana or a Beirut, for instance, their natural spiritedness or resilience or sense of style never seems greatly diminished. My motto as a traveller has always been that old chestnut from the writings of Marcel Proust: 'The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new sights, but in seeing with new eyes'.

Benedict Allen

Now, the world is open to us all. Grab your camera or smartphone 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. Yet, 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 nineteenth-century Europeans a picture of the continent. Take Ed Stafford's recent walk along the length of the Amazon. Not a greatly significant journey in itself, with two-thousand miles of it along what is essentially 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.

Vicky Baker

Personally, I relish the fact that we can forge new contacts all around the world at the click of a button and a quick email can result in the type of welcome usually reserved for a long lost friend. I also relish the fact that we're less likely to lose touch with those whose paths we cross on the road and that we get to explore places we wouldn't have stumbled across had we left it all to chance. Does all this detract from the experience? I hardly think so. There's nothing to stop you following a random tip you saw on an obscure blog and ending up who knows where. Sure, it's a far cry from what came before, but one day these will be the current generation's 'good old days'. And if you have the time and the money to go off into the back of beyond without so much as a guidebook let alone a smartphone, if haphazard wandering is your thing, those days aren't over either.

Rolf Potts

Many of the older travellers I met when I first started vagabonding fifteen years ago – 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 younger travellers and suggest that smartphones and micro-blogging are compromising their road experiences. 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. There are times when a far-flung post office encounter or directions scribbled onto a scrap of paper 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.

Has technology robbed travel of its riches?

We asked five experts.

suggests that places retain their essential identity despite the passage of time

refers to a tendency for each generation of travellers to look down on the next

expresses a personal feeling of nostalgia for some of the hardships in the past

feels that travel can still be spontaneous and unpredictable in the age of the internet

explains how even seemingly pointless journeys can have a worthwhile outcome

questions the use of a term in relation to one type of traveller

reveals a slight sense of guilt in an attitude towards the modern traveller

offers a word of caution for those who want to get the most out of a trip

mentions valuable insights gained from observing other travellers

insists that modern travellers can do without modern technology if they so desire

Which writer

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