And This is a Photo of Me Burning a Local's Roof

People love to travel; at least this is the impression one gets from the television and print media. No periodical is so small that it doesn't have a travel section. That's before we get on to purpose written publications like Lonely Planet. The destinations are getting odder as well. In the paper the other day there was an advertisement for an African tour titled "Namibia and Beyond". Excuse me? Namibia is beyond. I venture to suggest that even people who live in Namibia (I think there are about four of them) consider Namibia to be beyond.

Nowadays it seems there are throngs of people just waiting for the shooting to die down so that they can visit ghastly third world hell holes like the Congo, Sudan and Los Angeles. Places where missionaries and UN peacekeepers once feared to tread are overrun with people wearing inappropriate t-shirts haggling (so traditional) for the one remaining intact cultural icon in the country and demanding local delicacies that the the inhabitants have been praying that McDonalds would eliminate from their diets. The locals are surprisingly good sports and very rarely kidnap, rape or murder these clowns and frequently take time out from their busy schedule of local genocide to conduct them around their homeland's points of interest.

This is perhaps the most surprising thing about the travel phenomenon. It wasn't so many centuries ago when the appearance of a group of strangers on the horizon would prompt a frantic ringing of the village bell, the seizing of available farm implements and a quick message to the local lord telling him to get his men at arms along and fulfill his feudal obligations. Today people tend to restrict such an extreme reaction to when relatives turn up unexpectedly.

Of course back in the day there were thoroughly good reasons for having a, shall we say, healthy distrust of strangers. Traditionally the two reasons for travel were trade and warfare. If you were Venetian you could usually manage a creative blend of both. The appearance of strangers generally meant that pretty soon your roof would be on fire or your trade would be in the hands of foreigners. More seriously strangers were distrusted because, having no ties to the local community, they couldn't be relied on to respect local laws and customs (such as not setting people's roofs on fire). In the old days such people tended to be Mongols or Gypsies, nowadays we call them backpackers.

Then sometime a few centuries ago things started to change. People began travelling for no particularly good reason and started boring the crap out of their friends and family when they got home. There was a transitional period of course. It was a poor British tourist of the nineteenth century who could travel to foreign parts without colonising a bit of it and people like explorers and missionaries managed to combine sightseeing with pestering the natives but still, the groundwork was laid. Even the military got into the act by touting their highly traditional travel reasons (bloodshed, mayhem, death) by appealing to the desire for tourism. "Join the Navy and See the World" the posters proclaimed. Although depending on the navy you might be lucky if you saw the shore and the navy never mentioned that the bit of the world they could show you wasn't something you could walk on.

In these enlightened times of course people roam all over the planet photographing, partying, exploring and generally behaving the way people do when they think there is little chance of the information getting back home to their parents. Personally I think we left fewer scars on the local population when all we did was burn their roof and steal their sheep.