Generation X and the Golden Age of World Travel 1985 – 2020

I should start off by saying that this post may be completely premature. But, the other day while slogging up the tall aspen and broad cow parsnip of the Snodgrass Trail, I was thinking that I’d like to see a Venn diagram of US passport holders and persons taking COVID-19 precautions seriously (versus not believing or caring). My hypothesis being that citizens of the world understand how people are all connected. And citizens of the world become so only by traveling.

Travel has always been expensive in either time or money. Generations behind modern travel had neither time nor money. People emigrated, expanded territory, retreated from war or famine, but travel for travel’s sake must have been rare. While there is an innate human drive to explore, exploration has presented real hardship for most of humanity. My grandparents, children of immigrants or immigrants themselves, didn’t travel to speak of. The world was at war for most of the first half of the last century. My parents made it to a few countries in the 1970s, but until the mid 1970s, southeast Asia was a land of war. Around 1990, the time I was entering high school, plane travel, once expensive and reserved for the wealthy, had long since opened up to the masses. There were notable exceptions, but in general there was a downward trend in war, the fall of the Soviet Block, and the reemergence of a number of countries.

I selected 1985 to start the global travel window, but it could be earlier. During this global travel period of 1985 – 2020, all manner of (mostly white) people could travel the world at will, cruise the Danube, safari in Africa or the Amazon jungle, dive in Palau. Hell, you could do that all in a few weeks, with infrastructure and eager businesses to greet you. Americans, Canadians, Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, the countries of the Commonwealth took advantage of this openness with the buying power of their currency. In addition, I’d posit that those of us who came of age during this time got the glory of the whole window of easy and cheap travel the world had not before known. I am talking about Generation X, the best generation ever it may turn out, for the chance to travel the world.

Generation X’s refers to those born between 1965 – 1980, famously between the hype of the Baby Boomers and the Millennials. The travel window began as early as 1971, when the Eurrail program that had began in the 1960s offered the “student pass”. Study abroad programs at colleges had fallen in popularity in the 1970s and 1980’s, but were back up to speed in the 1990s. Ryan Air debuted as a Southwest-type low cost carrier starting around 1990, and expanded in the 2000s. Starting in the early 2000s, airline and hotel rewards credit cards fueled many of my trips. The first editions of “Let’s Go” Europe -published in 1980, and Lonely Planet – 1974, were but pamphlets that blossomed by the 1990s into user-friendly bibles that offered confident access. In the 1990s, these books that seemed to be institutions to me were actually just getting their groove on.

I studied abroad in London and traveled the continent on rails in 1996, right on the upward trend. In 1996, the Eurrail 10-punch pass was filled in by the rider, with a check written, yes written, in pen. So, with the top secret technology of an erasable pen, our 10-punch Eurrail pass became – unlimited! We still wrote down phone numbers and exchanged letters, though we now had our first email addresses.

Back from my Europe experience and throughout my 20’s and 30’s living in Colorado, the world was open. I traveled across the Pacific to New Zealand, with a free two week layover in Fiji, to Guatemala, and the Far East. With guidebooks in tow, places like Thailand, then Laos, had become traveler havens. Even people from countries with lower currency values could find affordability in places like Thailand, where you’d also find people whose countries include a “gap year” making their way across beach towns in the South Pacific.

In the mid-oughts the internet expanded the map. As every last place was posted, every last place was discovered. When my wife and I traveled South America in 2008-2009, guidebooks had already become less relevant. No longer were hostels booked once you arrived in town. Reservations were online, cell phones were nearly but not yet ubiquitous. Everyone was everywhere. Places that were once expeditions now had daily bus and air service, like Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. By the time we got to Costa Rica, our most recent travels, it felt like the 51st state. Every hotel and restaurant worth its salt knows about its TripAdvisor rating. Ex-pats now live comfortably throughout Central America, tied to the US by the web. Jetting around Europe, which I have admittedly not done since 1996, apparently became easier by cheap flight than traveling by rail.

My experience has been that traveling has gotten ever more crowded and widespread, and that was before the advent of “influencers”. I’ve always felt like I’m riding the wave trying to stay somewhere between “found” and “overrun”. The best experiences are usually where you base out of somewhere found and find someplace less overrun. The gems today are those that are not the gems everyone now goes to see.

COVID-19 brought a screeching halt to global travel. As I write this blog, Americans are banned from 90% of the world, the ultimate comment on our narcissism. Study abroad is cancelled. Airplanes are empty and low cost carriers are going belly up. The people living in the tourist towns of the world are staring down poverty. The question is whether that window of openness of the world has narrowed, if not closed.

If the downside to traveling before COVID-19 had become overrun areas that were once the gems of the world, the upside to that movement of people to the gems elevated their beauty to an economic boon to areas that, without tourism, would be prey to the extractive industries. Now that the tourist dollars are not coming in, won’t the foxes realize they have a window to exploit? How many more forests would be razed without tourists feeding the border towns to national parks in the Philippines, Indonesia, Peru?

While I was thinking about how for the first time in my life the world had closed its doors to America, an Economist article I read asked what if COVID-19 is not a blip? What if aviation can not come back? The world, Americans in particular, are experiencing a prolonged lapse in travel. This makes me wonder, what if this brief period in history from 1985 – 2020 will have been an anomaly? A period between major wars and disease, of relative economic prosperity, where large carbon footprints allowed unprecedented access to the world. A time when travel made any part of the globe a matter of booking reservations online, when air travel was not just allowed, it was cheap and plentiful? A time when protection of ecosystems was paid for with the promise of traveler dollars.

What if 2020 is the high water mark for the freedom to roam? It’s a mixed bag. Traveling is not environmentally friendly in its own right by any stretch. Grounded planes and arrested transportation cleared the air over much of the world. But it did provide an answer to many communities that needed an alternative to extraction. I suspect travel will return, but by degree and not without making the airport an even worse place to be. If there are less people traveling will there be less citizens of the world? This thought could be paranoia in hindsight when the world learns how to deal with COVID-19, but there is a plausible concept that we are now on a different path. Either way, it was a good run.