Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

by Adam Fletcher

Why aren’t we Germany, while you’re Argentina? Or Turkey? Or Azerbaijan? Or North Korea? Why do some countries work when the rest are just chaos?”

We don’t do minorities well. Anwar was a minority. Those of us born as majority people will never know how much of a fight it is to live as a minority, not protected by the cushioning of statistics. This is changing, but not everywhere, and not equally. I hoped that one day Anwar would get to live somewhere he could be both expressive and anonymous.

Visiting him reminded me of how incredibly lucky I was to be born a majority, part of the first-world-white-heterosexual-English-speaking-men-of-above-average-height-tribe. It’s hard to fail when you’ve been dealt a hand like that. Intellectually I’ve always known this, but emotionally I’d stopped feeling it. In my head and heart, I felt it again. For how long I wasn’t sure.

You romanticise new in a way that makes you neglect what you already have. If we suddenly pack up a suitcase and move to a farm in Ecuador, what do you think that’s going to be like? In the end, we’ll have the same problems—we’ll have to make friends, we’ll have to find work, we’ll have to eat and sleep. Same problems, different backdrop. You can’t outrun your problems. Or your boredom.”

I think you’re afraid to really try because as long as you never do, you can’t fail. You confuse freedom with having no responsibilities. But that’s not freedom. That’s just selfishness.”

I was challenging the establishment. Only the difference was that my establishment was, mostly, myself. And the responsibilities and expectations of the life I had built in Berlin.

It’s a weird thing to admit that you’ve become bored of yourself. But I knew now that I had been. That had ended in Istanbul. That is what travel is for. Being where you don’t belong frees you from any expectations about how things there are supposed to work, and, in turn, how you will react to them. A childlike naivety takes over.

“I don’t know. Everything just sort of functions there, you know? It’s boring.” We passed a Soviet tank that was now a memorial of their war of independence. Sergei’s dad had fought in it. “Boredom is a luxury good,” he said.

I’d lost sight of the extraordinary privilege inherent within boredom. Most people in the world don’t get to decide whether or not to engage in politics. Don’t feel so safe and secure and bored that they actively go out looking for danger, just to feel more alive.

I was the unusual one. The weirdo. The outlier. Boredom was not the enemy. My ingratitude of it was. I’d been looking at it wrong. Writing it off as a commodity, what was for most of the world impossibly luxurious. “I’d happily swap your boring normal life for mine.” Sergei smirked.

People who aren’t self-reflective in their everyday lives don’t magically uncover new modes of thought or hidden depths of understanding just because they swap Home for Rome or Gloucester for Gabon.

I’ve always been passionately pro-European. A world with fewer borders has to be a better world, right? A world where people are free to overcome the shortcomings of their birth and move, visa free, somewhere that might offer them greater prosperity. But then, I’d only ever lived in two prosperous European countries—the countries people went to, not the countries people left.

This sounded eerily familiar. I realised how much of it I did, too. I guess we all do—recast ourselves in the stories of our lives, giving ourselves starring roles in our successes and minimising the role we play in our failures, working back from our actions to justifications, not the other way round.

I hadn’t realised then that the only way you know that something has value is if you find yourself willing to make sacrifices for it.

Travel is wonderful. A near-perfect state of surprise, wonder, and excitement. A chance to challenge your assumptions, defeat your prejudices, and write a new story for yourself. As a traveller. An exile. An adventurer. An explorer. As someone with great stories of struggle, survival, curiosity, courage, and reinvention. But the pursuit of those narratives can be harmful, too.