Tim Leffel’s Cheapest Destinations

What Do You Learn When You Go Abroad?

Besides the fun, the thrills, and the experience of the new, is there a true high-brow reason to spend an extended time away from the home country? Do you really become intelligent, or more aware, or more well-rounded by traveling the world?

As I write this we are a week away from a US presidential election, so the timing is appropriate. Both candidates love to make pronouncements about times they did this in Israel or that in Russia, or this in Mexico, but of course you usually could have missed their visit while you took an afternoon nap. Politicians are always on a very fast, very orchestrated visit that is set up to ensure a safe and predictable jaunt.

Jim Rogers, author of Adventure Capitalist, wrote in a business magazine prior to the invasion of Iraq that going in there would be a catastrophe. He said then that if anyone in the administration had actually spent real time in the Middle East as he (and I) had, they would realize what incredible long-term damage it would do to world peace and America’s standing if we launched a pre-emptive war there. The outcome would probably be the exact opposite of what the ivory tower planners expected. It didn’t take a genius to see that–just someone who has actually walked the streets in the Middle East–but alas, here we are.

Anyone who has traveled the world for a few months or a few years–outside of the confines of the military–knows that you tend to see things differently after you have spent months in foreign countries. Once you get back home, people who see the world in terms of black and white suddenly seem like cartoon characters or inhabitants of a parallel universe. The aggressive and gleefull materialism around you now seems disconcerting and childish. Religious fanatics on all sides start looking like the same clan, but with different chants and costumes. And the life of slaving away at a job you don’t like until you retire exhausted and then start traveling around now seems like a lot of misdirected energy.

Are travelers smarter? Are they superior to the bad-TV-news-watching, McMansion-buying, strip-mall cruising homebodies? No, we can’t say that without a properly conducted study, but travelers do seem to have their eyes, ears, and minds open wider.

Once you’ve seen true poverty and a struggle to feed one’s family, people living on the government dole in the US, Canada, or Europe don’t seem to have it too bad. Once you’ve seen much of the world’s population using an outhouse, hauling water from a well, and cooking over wood coals, the struggle to buy a nicer BMW seems rather insignificant. The whining over outsourcing jobs to India or Indonesia seems a bit unfair when there’s a chance to raise a country’s living standards to a slightly larger fraction of ours because the workers can do an equally good job for ten dollars a day.

But most importantly, by traveling you gain that broad liberal arts education that most schools aim for but never achieve. When you are moving from city to city and country to country, geography is not some esoteric concept represented by dots and lines on a world map. Geography is suddenly something you experience every week. History is not some regugitated set of facts to be forgotten once the test is finished. Instead it is a living breathing past that affects most of what you see and experience. Architecture is not some study of styles and building materials and dead people. It’s something you see and feel and walk inside to experience for yourself. You learn about linguistics, economics, world literature, and political science, all without even furrowing your brow.

You don’t learn about the religions of the world from some dry textbook. You hear the call to prayer from a mosque, you see Buddhist monks with begging bowls streaming to the temple at dawn, you see the Hindus bathing in the Ganges and sprinkling flower petals into the water. You learn what makes these religions what they are and see how they affect the lives of everyday people. And suddenly you think–what would happen if the fundamentalist Hindus had been born on a farm in Alabama? Or if the right-wing Christians of America had been born in the deserts of Algeria? Or if the Zionist Jews had been born in southern India instead of Eastern Europe? Would they believe that culture’s overriding faith just as strongly? Or would they “find their way home” like a dog who has been dropped by the side of a road?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but by being a traveler I recognize the questions in the first place. I’ve learned a lot from circling the globe three times and taking other jaunts to places besides a package tour beach resort. Mostly I’ve learned that the world is far more complicated than most non-travelers think it is, and that no, we are not all alike on the inside. We all want to survive, be happy, and take care of our family, but that’s about as far as it goes. As the events in Russia have shown, we don’t even “all want freedom.” Some people just want some stability they can count on.

So I guess if you like for things to be simple and predictable, spend you life where you grew up, take a predictable job, and go somewhere all your friends have gone when you retire. If you want to fill your head with interesting ideas, knowledge, and experience, however, travel beats the hell out of college any day–not in an employers mind, unfortunately, but in what’s between your ears and what is in your heart.