I wrote about Otto Warmbier's trip to North Korea, his captivity, and the tragic circumstances of his return home to the United States last year, so I was particularly curious to...
| |  | | | | Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics | | | | | | Fireworks over Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, during New Year's celebrations on Jan. 1. (Musa Sadulayev/AP) | I wrote about Otto Warmbier’s trip to North Korea, his captivity, and the tragic circumstances of his return home to the United States last year, so I was particularly curious to read a new piece by Kent Russell about traveling to Russia, Chechnya and South Ossetia, using the same company that took Warmbier to North Korea. | | The story isn’t really about the recklessness of the company (though the boundary-pushing comes through), or even necessarily the specific impulse that leads people to collect passport stamps from inaccessible and potentially troublesome locations (though the brief portraits of Russell’s fellow travelers are definitely evocative). Rather, it’s ultimately a meditation on the nature of travel itself, and the way that traveling to destinations that are either ruled by dictators, recently decimated by war, or defined by lack of legal status and grinding poverty brings some of the ethical issues inherent in tourism to the fore. | | One of Russell’s sharpest observations, at least to me, was the idea that so-called extreme tourism often involves a lot of not-so-extreme compromise. In Chechnya, Russell and his tour group ended up meeting with an aide-de-camp to Ramzan Kadyrov, the country’s leader. Kadyrov has been accused of human rights abuses, implemented extremist policies and, in general, has espoused a range of highly extreme viewpoints. The aide ended up having the travelers pose for pictures with him, and the tour group ended up debating about posting them on social media. | | | Russell explains: "Especially now, when half of one’s Facebook or Insta feed is given over to the unspoken brinkmanship of friends trying to outdo friends with photos geotagged in Skopje (terrible, what tourism has done to the Old City there . . .), or Patagonia (pff, you got your copy of Bruce Chatwin in your back pocket, bro?), or Machu Picchu (oh, honey). The bar for the most audaciously enviable (yet also relatable!) shot — it keeps jumping higher. I mean, what’s a guy gotta do to get you, the person on the other side of the screen, to take a break from your unleavenably ordinary day in order to admire and begrudge my adventuresome existence?? Paramount to this discussion — yet somehow also lost in it — was the fact that we were snapping these photos in a land subjugated by an autocrat, and we were doing so more or less on that autocrat’s terms." | | I’ve never personally been attracted to this sort of extremism in travel, or really in any other aspect of my life. I am not hardcore, and so I’ve never felt any particular need to prove it. But I have tried to be aware of that tipping point, familiar to every experienced traveler, when you become part of the spectacle, or when — more than is absolutely inevitable — your presence somewhere changes the dynamic of that place irrevocably. The idea that you can use travel as an escape is always an incomplete dream. But how much you get out of your own head depends on where you go, how you behave when you get there, and what you really open your eyes to see. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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