In defense of travel journalism
Because the world is finite and is just a click away from Google Earth, but the human being is capable of reinvent your spaces and your pleasures practically every year to combat the barrage of one-way stimuli from an iPad screen. And the journalist has to be there to tell it, to break it down and filter it . To know when a speech is true or is only plausible in an information brochure or in an easy ad on YouTube. Because paradise is not a trademark nor the seal of quality of anything, rather a cheap and recurring compliment that he only gets naked with the field work , staining up to the ears because that's where the real truth is.
But there is also a future for that urge to seek adventure , for finding new places or giving him the real value to neighborhoods and valleys They didn't know they were handsome. Places unfairly forgotten by tourist maps that little by little become the greatest attraction of a region. And that is not decided by three technocrats over the tablecloth of a copious meal. If it were up to them, Williamsburg, Tibet or Kreuzberg would continue to be forbidden territory for the common traveler.
This is decided by the goals of restless photographers and brave annotations of journalists who know how to cross the border and not make an event out of it. rather a heroic act of normality with which to give all the credit to these sites and not to the prose that describes them or the anecdote that precedes them.
And then there's the time transform everything to continue exciting . In taking the ingredients of lived reality and shaping them so that not everything is the umpteenth description of the Eiffel Tower. Yes, lists and rankings may be abused or that the blunt statements end up hyperbolizing everything. But, Would it be a lie to say that that piece of stone was the saddest in the world? It was during those seconds in which a discovery penetrates to the bone and is immortalized in more than three dimensions. And that moment that made your skin crawl is also the heritage of a place, don't forget it, and poetic prose is sometimes the only vehicle to tell these explosions.
That's why the journalist staggers between literature and the necessary data, between the wikipedic and the Kapuscinski and in those juggling moves the profession continues to evolve. Namely, selection and explanation, experience and judgment ; That is why the best journalist will always be the one who can compare a mattress with a thousand other mattresses or a street with a thousand other neon lights.
Of course there is loneliness along this path, but the one posed by a blank sheet of paper is harder than the one that prevails in a dehumanized foreign hotel. Then aesthetics becomes almost a religion , in the best companion to continue inspiring and, above all, remembering that far from home the world -also- continues to be a wonderful place.
The return and the cold shower for the emotions is part of the job. Travel journalism is not about culture in other places, that's what correspondents are for. It is about dressing with the eyes of the society for which it is written and look with those pupils at other distant realities . For this, the first and most important trip is always the city where you live : know their tastes, trends and aspirations. Know what your compatriot can look for outside and find it for him. Understand what can motivate a vacation decision and show it to them without exceptions . After all, helping to complete your eternal search for happiness with places without promising results, only emotions.
And in this very human process, so empathetic and stimulating that the trip is, journalism and the journalist –in one way or another- will always be the best travel companion . Or at least, the first inspiration, the one that gives the little push, the one that reveals an oasis and feeds the worm to go outside to submit to new winds.
That is why we still have a lot of work to do. That's why we'll keep reading.
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