Does travel still broaden the mind?

Travelling has never been easier, but are modern day travellers learning anything

After I finished school I opted to take a gap year so signed up to volunteer in a remote part of the world for 6 months. Having not been much further than France prior, the scheme placed me in  a very rural part of Tanzania, with not so much an electrical appliance in sight and gas lighting for the night. During the placement English volunteers worked with  students Tanzanians on educating the local population about health and environmental issues. For a shower we had soap and a bucket of water to tip over our heads, the same soap and and bucket we used to wash are clothes in.

To make more of the trip I learnt Swahili, the local language and the highlight of the trip was having a conversation with a Masai man.   My only contact with home was via letter, in which turn round was more than a month, or a phone call at £1 a minute.  The trip was an eye opener and a defining experience in my life. Having lived on not much more than £40 a week whilst in Africa, it took me a while to get used to spending £30 on a student night out 

Travellers getting pissed, but are they learning anything

After university, I took an extended holiday to South America. I went by myself and I joined a group of travellers half way through their “round the world” tour. This was a complete different experience from my volunteer trip to Africa, and rather more a challenge of the liver, than of the mind. Here, travellers often had little contact with local people, living with other foreigners in youth hostels their only contact with the locals were the carefully selected pretty receptionists, and even the youth hostel staff were often travellers. 

Youth hostel parties were organised where the majority of people going were other travellers, hardly “checking out” the local nightlife. Our hedonist lifestyle of drink and drugs was slightly interrupted by the one night a week we did not get totally out of our minds.  Tourist sites were ticked off like shopping list whilst clearing a hangover in the late afternoon. The travelling of broadening the mind had been replaced by a long tour of different youth hostels and bars, and just partying drunkenness with brief exposures to local culture. I came to the conclusion that whilst fun it was not much more than Ibiza played out at different locations round the world.

Meanwhile the internet and social networking had ended the other good thing about travelling, the sense that you are far away from home.  Rather than writing letters that took weeks to arrive, there was MSN and Facebook, so people were kept in contact with your latest movements on a daily basis.  There are even websites allowing you to book youth hostels in advance, taking away the sense of adventure when you had pitch up at the hostel hoping they had spare beds. Some hostels even do a transfer from the bus station to the hostel, taking away the excitement of negotiating yourself through the taxi  rank. Furthermore rather than washing clothes in a bucket there was the hostel's cleaning service.

There’s nothing wrong with having fun, but we can’t imagine that travelling like this broadens anything more than the waistline.  Nor does travelling pose the same challenges as it did 20 years ago or have the same cultural content or significance. Both gap yearers and employers ought to be aware of the greater challenge of volunteering abroad in local communities, with that of a year long round the world pub crawl.