Bitten By the Bug: Why I travel (And Why You Should Too)      by Dave Kim Twentyfive miles south of Seoul lies the Korean Folk Village, an enclave of reconstructed workshops and thatch-covered houses nestled in a woodsy mountain pass. Part cultural center, part amusement park, the site features some 270 attractions modeled on buildings from Korea’s Chosön period (1392 – 1910). An annexed kiddie park, with its campy and oddly Dutch architecture, is the exception. It’s June of last year, my first time in Korea, and I’m sitting with my uncle, cousin, and two of my aunts on the deck of one of the residences, the one captioned, “Big House of the Southern Part.” My aunts have just told me this was once our family estate, where my grandfather was born and raised before his socialite father squandered away their fortune. Historians in the 1970’s dismantled the ruins and rebuilt it 130 miles north in this tourist-trap “village,” and two generations later I’m sitting under its roof pondering the what-ifs. I know there’s nothing real about it. The piece of plaster I’ve slipped into my pocket is no more part of the original than a brownstone brick in Manhattan. Grandpa is 83 with a textbook case of Alzheimers, and is probably eating a Whopper with Cheese in his southern California apartment right now. I can’t imagine he’d know what it was really like either. The bedchambers of this old house are roped off and eerily clean, the latex-based paint screams anachronism, and the buckets of rain pouring into the courtyard echo its emptiness. It’s a phony, a Hollywood set, but I don’t care. Miraculously we’re the only ones at this attraction—the real, rightful heirs. There’s a wistfulness about my two aunts, who’ve ignored the “DO NOT TOUCHING” signs and are running their hands along the varnished wood rails, telling stories that all of us already know by heart. Charged with some phantom family bond, I forget all about the admission price, the retarded caption on the outside wall, and feel, for one warm and culturally connected moment, home. * A guy I met on a train from Venice to Nice joked that traveling is just a drug you need a passport for. It was one of those quips that sound better when you’re riding along the Mediterranean coast, passing a bottle of cheap grappa back and forth, but the man had a point. Traveling follows the pattern of a classic addiction cycle—prep, reward, and withdrawal. There’s the ritual of getting ready to go, which starts when you buy your ticket and continues until the moment you take off. Once you arrive, there’s the initial rush of culture shock followed by sporadic aftershocks throughout your trip. There’s even a second wallop when you come home, when the world you were so sick of takes on a crisp newness. Once you’ve readjusted to your work or school schedule and the computer-screen headaches come screaming back, there are the pangs of withdrawal, the same bored-with-work, itching-to-leave feelings that made you book a flight to Hong Kong or Senegal in the first place. It’s a thrilling and excruciating cycle. I’m addicted to it all, still a novice compared to some of the lifers I’ve met on the road, but the hunger is always there, screwing up my annual calendar, draining my bank account. The main reason why I do it is for what I call the oh-shit moment. I imagine Archimedes had one of these moments when he discovered the principle of buoyancy in his bathtub and ran naked into the streets. And I’m sure Lewis and Clark had one when they rounded a bend in the Columbia River and caught sight of the Pacific. They are moments of sudden, immobilizing epiphany. I got my first OS moment on an escalator coming out a London Tube station. It was my first day outside of the U.S., and I saw Big Ben, the Thames River, Parliament, London Bridge, red double-decker buses, and a bunch of English cops in goofy hats all in one glorious panoramic sweep. I think I may have actually said, “Oh shit, I’m in London,” out loud. Stupidly obvious statements abound during OS moments: “Oh shit, this is the Sistine Chapel,” “Oh shit, Machu Picchu is literally a city in the mountains,” “Oh shit, there are unexploded U.S. bombs everywhere in Laos.” They come from that strange feeling you get when a mental picture becomes realized, when you enter into an object’s or place’s meaning in history and space—what some would call “aura.” There’s looking at Guernica in a textbook, and there’s standing in Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum looking at Guernica, the real deal. I sometimes wonder about the biology of these moments, what neurotransmitters are firing, which parts of your brain would light up were someone to do an MRI scan. I’d assume the regions associated with reward would be buzzing. The feeling is one of recognition mixed with discovery, a mental pat-on-the-back for knowing where you are and how unique the experience is. You take out the ol’ Nikon to snap a picture, with the hopes of reliving a kind of mini-rush when you’re back in the States (which never works). And when the moment has passed, you know you’re going to have to get it again. Tough OS moments come up just as often. There will always be that missed train, picked pocket, full hostel, rural toilet, broken clavicle, racist threat, terrorist uprising, hijacked bus, political emergency, and other inconveniences. But I like the suffering. Not just because of my romantic obsessions with “authentic experience” but because suffering correlates directly to what the nerdy dad in Calvin and Hobbes would call “building character.” It sounds like a cop-out: I’m not a masochist, I build character. I’m all about it. A few years ago I visited Greece during their worst winter in four decades, and every kind of precipitation in the book was taking its turn pissing on the ruddy Mediterranean country. This is a place where sunbathing in February isn’t uncommon; no one in the big cities knew what snow chains were, let alone how to put them on their tires. Cars were sliding into each other on the highways. I saw dozens of accidents from the buses I took across the country, the same buses that would break down every two hours from their engines freezing up. One puttered out on a highway going through the Taygetus Mountains and we were stranded for hours. I remember getting off with another traveler I’d met on the bus and walking a mile or so to a tiny restaurant on the side of the road. The mountains were pitch black and the sky was a beach of stars. We bought slabs of pork the length of my forearm that were slow-roasting over an open flame and three bottles each of Mythos beer. My friend picked out some good rocks to sit on by the road, spiked the beers into the snow, and with numb, greasy fingers we gorged under the stars. Chowing down on that crispy piece of pig and guzzling down those brews like they were tap water taught me a thing or two about basic bliss. I wasn’t so peeved when the “rescue” bus finally came an hour later, or when that bus broke down in an even more desolate mountain range, or when the driver made me get out and hold a burning paper torch while he made repairs. Even in hindsight, I’m glad my cheap ass took the bus. I have some regrets. I never visited the refugee caves at Muang Ngoi, Laos, because I got too drunk to hike the two-kilometer trail from town. I never found Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris (though I did wander Montmartre for an hour looking for it). I lived in England an entire year and never went to Stonehenge. I overslept and missed a day-trip to Ayutthaya, the famed ancient city north of Bangkok. I wished I’d spent more time in Ireland. There are only so many hours in a lifetime. I think that’s what gives travel an element of compulsion. It’s that tricky little banality: life is short. Plenty of essays I’ve read on travel discuss a sense of urgency, a neurosis even, that comes early on in travel addiction and never gets easier. It’s a hunger to see everything, though you know you can’t possibly see everything. I even get it while I’m traveling. Spot me at the top of Angkor Wat and I’ll be flipping through my guidebook trying to decide where to go next. It’s like I’m sitting at a table full of food I’ve never tried, and I have no idea what I’m eating because I keep staring at what’s on the other tables. Look at a world map for long enough and it’ll overwhelm you. Whoever came up with “It’s a Small World After All” was an idiot. My heart beats faster when I browse the travel sections in bookstores because there are just too many guidebooks. Every trip I go on has its few moments of panic, when I plan and plan but can’t fit everything in. There’s a pressure to see and file away as much as possible, like hoarding baseball cards with the hopes that they’ll gain value over time, so that, when I’m 83 and Laos is the world’s surprise superpower, I can say I knew it before it was famous. Maybe it’s a dumb way to see the world. Traveling is memory collecting: there’s a constant battle in the brain between living in the moment and filing away for future study. I know I’ll spend a large chunk of my life searching for a place to outdo what I’ve already seen. There is always that incredible must-see place that’s hidden or just outside my reach. It’s a drug habit, a pointless and delicious pursuit. The forgotten part of traveling is coming home. Researchers in the travel industry cite novelty as the key motivator for people to leave home; I say it goes both ways. Home takes on the novelty of a foreign country. It becomes a place to be explored and evaluated, a world like that of a favorite book from kindergarten, reread with perspective. After a long trip, I instantly regain an appreciation for my loud, gum-spotted block in Harlem. I walk past the kids in the street playing football (yes, American football) and buy a six-pack of Coors from my neighbor Sylvia’s bodega. It’s strange: I never seem to miss home until I’m back. I know fresh-baked Parisian baguettes, juicy rambutans from a Bangkok street stall, and pasta carbonara wolfed down on a cobblestone street in Florence are incredible—but so is the paper-thin and unmistakably New York slice of pizza. For a while, the city is more than just a pain in the ass. Travel addicts aren’t people who can’t stand to be at home. We just want to be reminded of how great home is. So I travel for what the very official-sounding consumer research report, Strategic Travel Action Resource, claims is the same reason everyone else does: to experience newness. It sounds clinical and meaningless, so most travel writers try to sell their pursuit as the greatest, most indescribably awesome lifestyle out there. The rushes are tough to put into words that don’t sound like overstatement. Famed travel essayist Pico Iyer took a stab at it in a Salon.com piece: “the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head.” We’re a schmaltzy bunch. But right on, Pico, traveling is like an extended roller-coaster ride, a physical and mental subversion. It’s contradiction: getting out of your comfort zone so you can happily come back to it. You enter into an alternate universe and suddenly the differences jump out at you, so that even a streetlamp or a tree takes on meaning. Your senses sharpen. Your perception of reality widens from what’s within the limits of work, home, and bar to where Anne Frank hid during the war or where your grandparents had their first kiss. And like any good roller coaster, when you’re done you’ll want to do it again.