\"The great fantasy of travel is exile. Of course, most of the time, we leave knowing full well that we'll be coming back. But every time we travel, we still revive the fantasy of transplantation. \"Do I have enough psychological, moral and physical flexibility to put myself in the shoes of an American, an Indian or even a Chinese? When you're young, you do it very quickly. As you get older, it's a bit harder. So it's better to leave early, for example to do what the English used to call \"the grand tour\", between the end of university and the start of working life.<\/p>\n
For me, the first memories of travel are childhood memories. Spain, Portugal, with my parents. There was something magical about it: travel had not yet become commonplace. It was an expedition, you had to plan everything. There were fewer petrol pumps than there are today, and fewer hotels. This was the France of the 1960s, the \"thirty glorious years\", when holidays were first and foremost the reward for a year's hard work. Then came the time for long-distance travel: the United States, at the age of 27, and then India. I went there for the first time in 1979, with all the joy and innocence of discovering an entirely new world, where everything was unheard of, incomprehensible, shimmering, horrible too because India is a pretty tough country. The trip lasted four months, to Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. I did the same thing for about twenty years, going to Asia every winter. It became a habit.<\/p>\n
It's a fact: I love travelling. There was a time when I thought I wouldn't travel at all, but it's taken me back, even though flying is still a nightmare for me. Every month, I go somewhere, sometimes not far away and for 24 hours. I like short stays. I don't have the patience to put up with daily life far from home, with the risk of getting bored or saying to myself: \"What the hell am I doing here? There are two big traps in travel: tourism and displacement. Moving is changing places while keeping your habits - which we all do. It's a simple change of scenery, without the moral and even gastric change of scenery that should go with it. Tourism is a different matter. This is an example of false denunciation: the tourist is always the other. The one who takes clich\u00e9s and travels only by clich\u00e9s, around obligatory stages. There's nothing dishonourable about that. Nobody really escapes it. And that's exactly what we reproach the 'tourist' for, this devalued reflection of ourselves, this being in shorts parked in big hotels with his fellow human beings, skimming the surface of things.<\/p>\n
For me, the best way to avoid tourism is to work locally. Giving lectures and courses. It puts you in direct contact with the locals, and you get the feeling that you're doing something useful. I do make sure that I leave some space available for the side step. Wherever you are, you just need to get off the beaten track a bit to experience something completely new and different. And the luxury of being able to say to yourself that, fortunately, the game is never over.<\/p>\n
Playful and useful, travel as seen by the writer of a generation that has reinvented nomadism. And, despite repeated use of the world, refuses to believe in its total disenchantment.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55661,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1455],"tags":[1005],"type-darticle":[],"n_magazine":[],"class_list":["post-16593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-carnets-de-voyage","tag-carnet-de-voyages","vapo-free"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n