Travel is an implicit search for difference

“We board our jumbo jets precisely to find a world where there are no jumbo jets. We pass through security to get to a land where there is no more need to do so. We look for Elysium in distant lands where there are no hamburger stands and satellite dishes and telephones — and yet all the while men have come before us and built and installed precisely those things that we were hoping to get away from, and have made where we are going just a little more like where we have just come from. So in eternally frustrated hope that somewhere, some God-given somewhere, there is a world without mini-bars and IDD and Visa and, most of all, CNN, we move onward, ever onward, like caribou, like lemmings.”

–Simon Winchester, intro to Martin Parr’s Small World (1995)