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The Changing Face Of Travel

18.12.2014 12:25

Sinan who works in a hotel near to me has just gone on holiday to China. “I've never been abroad before,” he tells me before leaving. “In fact, I've never even been on a plane before.”He's very excited about the chance to see the Great Wall although by the time he leaves he hasn't quite worked out how he'll be able to get there. Regardless, within days of his departure word reaches us via Facebook that he has accomplished his goal. At the same time pictures flash up of the hotelier from across the street floating along a Venetian canal in a gondola on her Italian holiday. “Italian hot chocolate is fantastic,” she reports back, again via Facebook.“I'm thinking of going to Cuba,” reports another hotelier. Two others have just jetted off to winter in Australia. They've used Airbnb to book a long-stay apartment near the beach in Melbourne's trendy St Kilda.

Sinan who works in a hotel near to me has just gone on holiday to China. “I've never been abroad before,” he tells me before leaving. “In fact, I've never even been on a plane before.”

He's very excited about the chance to see the Great Wall although by the time he leaves he hasn't quite worked out how he'll be able to get there. Regardless, within days of his departure word reaches us via Facebook that he has accomplished his goal. At the same time pictures flash up of the hotelier from across the street floating along a Venetian canal in a gondola on her Italian holiday. “Italian hot chocolate is fantastic,” she reports back, again via Facebook.

“I'm thinking of going to Cuba,” reports another hotelier. Two others have just jetted off to winter in Australia. They've used Airbnb to book a long-stay apartment near the beach in Melbourne's trendy St Kilda. It's hard to imagine anything further from their day-to-day existence in Cappadocia.

Twenty years ago few people in Göreme would have gone on holiday at all. A few might have travelled to Northern Europe to stay with friends and family who had moved there for work. None of them would have been flying out to exotic and costly destinations all around the globe.

My neighbors' exciting choice of holiday destinations is one relatively new development. The other is the technology that they are using to achieve their dreams. As far as I can see almost everyone is booking their flights online, then using the website Tripadvisor to find out what to see and do on arrival. That was as true last year as this year but what is interesting is the way in which Airbnb has shot to the top of their consciousness even though, as hoteliers, they might be expected to see it as an upstart competitor in the business of providing beds for holidaymakers.

That we can all stay abreast of each other's moves anywhere in the world on Facebook is a given these days, and I doubt if any of my friends has left the country without a Smartphone in their back pocket so that they can post images of their trips to their timelines immediately.

Hi-tech is here, of course, and there can be no turning back from it. But in October I still embarked on my own trans-European holiday sans not just Smartphone but also sans maps, sans guidebooks, sans phrasebook.

The days when I could have traveled all the way from Alexandria to Great Zimbabwe, making just one phone call back to my family in the entire eight months that I was away, and when I relied on the vagaries of poste restantes along the way to bring me occasional updates about what was going on back in the UK may seem as much a part of ancient history now as the days when the Hittites inscribed their life stories on clay tablets. Still, I relished my own relatively low-tech take on modern travel. Sure, I missed out on the great deals that come with booking ahead. Sure, I had to do plenty of thinking on my feet. On the other hand I felt immersed in what I was doing in a way that would be impossible while constantly checking for one's status on Facebook.

It might only have been Europe but, boy, did it feel like an adventure.

Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.

PAT YALE (Cihan/Today's Zaman)



 
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