Plunging into Naples’ Centro Storico after a 3:50am wake-up for an early flight was punishing, but I’m often unkind to myself without meaning to be. Mid-afternoon on a Friday in late September, the ancient, narrow streets were dense with tourists, walking slowly, very slowly, past shops selling identical made-in-China socks and fridge magnets decorated with lemons, olives, pizzas and Maradona. Hole-in-the-wall cafes offered pastries, paper cones of fried seafood, slices of pizza and fat bulbs of Aperol spritz. Motorbikes, cars and even small vans honked their way through this sluggish river of tourist flesh, barely avoiding contact.
Overwhelmed, I was forced into a retreat. Like the historical centres of so many other European cities, that of Naples had apparently become a blasted tourist wasteland, a monetised experience, a mere spectacle—Barcelona, Venice, Amsterdam—and I was part of the problem. I went back to my small, stuffy, inner-courtyard room in a three-star hotel near the central station, also a site of teeming chaos, and pondered my life choices.
(The hotel staff were faultlessly friendly, even at the far end of high season. The general population of central Naples, by contrast, were obviously fed up.)
I have never questioned travel as a life good. In late 1980s and early 1990s Australia, my university peers regularly took a year off their studies to travel, with a capital T. This was understood to be qualitatively superior to tourism, which was for people with no imagination or initiative, who required the protection of a guided tour to buffer them from misadventure, discomfort and the shock of difference. Travel was undertaken independently, with a backpack and a Lonely Planet guide. By definition, it was cheap: hostels not hotels, sleeping overnight in airports (is that still allowed?). The cheaper and grottier and more ‘authentic’ (=non-Western) the destination, the greater the kudos.
The great overland destinations of our parents’ generation, Afghanistan and Iran, were closed to us. India and Indonesia, especially Bali, were big. An ex-non-boyfriend of extreme cheapness had spent months in each en route to Europe, a feat of travel I admired but was too timid to emulate. He scoffed at the notion that a woman traveller might face particular challenges or that a serious traveller would spend more than a dollar a day.
(Imagine a world in which Westerners could backpack across Afghanistan and Iran! In which women could backpack across these countries!)
Young travellers sneered at Singapore for being an airconditioned shopping mall, of no interest whatsoever to an intrepid traveller, a mere layover on the way to more meaningful and authentic destinations. These days, I always stop in Singapore on the way to Australia. I love that it’s modern and clean and functional, and that as a solo woman I feel perfectly safe. Compared to Dubai, a destination that signifies a certain kind of worldly success, Singapore is colourful and organic.
‘Doing’ Europe was standard: one or two years, based in London. The proud possessor of a British and therefore a default European passport, I didn’t need a working holiday visa. Unfortunately, with a partly completed BA, I didn’t have many employable skills. I lasted one shift in a pub. I’d already realised my limitations as a waitress back in Australia: the hardnosed manager of the Hare Krishna restaurant on Swanston St had rejected me, after one ‘test shift’, for being ‘too slow’. Unlike other, older Commonwealth travellers in the UK, I couldn’t pick up well-paid casual work as a nurse or teacher, and I was too gormlessly honest to exploit my citizenship and simply sign on, as suggested by my one-day colleagues in that pub.
Fortunately, I had arrived with some travel funds, so the experience of working in a British pub was not essential to my plans. I consulted my Let’s Go Europe 1990 and tried to devise an itinerary. I had no fucking idea. There was a lot of Europe to be done, and every day in Rome or Paris or Barcelona cost money. Going by my guidebook’s estimates, simply eating, sleeping and moving from A to B, for the purpose of looking at stuff, would drain away my funds with startling speed.
Please note, I did not turn up in London that grey, impossibly chill January at the end of the Cold War as a happy kitten. I was depressed and lost, and I thought that taking a year off my studies to travel would provide answers or at least solace. Of course it didn’t, but everyone has to work this out for themselves.
Facing down the impossibility of devising a coherent itinerary—my European ‘experience’—from the Let’s Go guide, it did not occur to me, as it had to a friend, to simply delegate the task to professionals. This friend, arriving in London towards the end of the millennium, signed up for a Contiki tour ‘to get all the travel out of the way’. Such was the importance of travel to a late twentieth-century Australian that even though she had zero interest in art, history or culture, this friend felt obliged to Do Europe. By her account, the bus tour was a mobile party, which she spent mostly drunk and shagging an American doctor. The essential sights of Europe (Amsterdam, Paris, Venice, Rome—?) were necessary but incidental. Once they’d been ticked off, the friend could settle in London and start work in her very lucrative professional field.
In the end, I spent a summer in Birmingham, staying with an old nursing friend of my mother’s, who’d done the old overland trail from Australia to the UK, and then went to Japan to teach English for a year. Back then, nobody went to Japan because it was far, far too expensive and because rich, developed, ‘Westernised’ countries were of no interest to serious travellers (see: Singapore).
I’d started studying Japanese at university with the idea that it would help me into my career of choice: diplomacy (another kind of travel). The choice of Japan as an experiential destination, at this point, was pragmatic. But what if, instead of Japan, I’d gone to Berlin? The previous year, I’d seen the Wall come down on the TV, history happening on the far side of the world. I was interested in Russia, in communism, and yet it did not occur to me to get in early, to see Berlin freshly liberated, before it became ‘Berlin’, a low-rent hipster haven for Western creatives and an expat hub. I went, for the first time, in June last year. I was dismayed by the queues outside trendy cafes serving vegan poke bowls and artisanal coffee in formerly down-at-heel Eastern neighbourhoods. Having absolutely no desire to sit in a crowded, trendy café, even in Berlin, I felt myself to be old. I was also aware of having missed the ‘peak time’ by three decades. Now Berlin was simply another ‘destination’, like Dubai, imprinted with particular meanings, offering a particular kind of experience, to be accreted to a person’s identity.
Sidenote: a former housemate backpacked through Vietnam in the early 1990s, when visa requirements were eased for international (Western) tourists. While intrigued, I lacked the gumption and my focus was elsewhere. Again, I failed to get in early, before the authenticity and novelty of the experience were eroded by other travellers. By 2017, when I finally made it, Vietnam was on the Southeast Asia backpacker super-highway: cheap booze and cheap hostels full of other Westerners off the leash and on the lash. Thailand, which still offers that experience, is now a digital nomad destination for creative freelancers, a different tribe to the high-end LinkedIn networkers, influencers and entrepreneurs of Dubai.
If modern life consists of a series of curated experiences, going to Berlin or Saigon and having certain experiences makes you one kind of person; taking selfies next to a helicopter on the rooftop of some Dubai skyscraper makes you another. On social media, people read these experiences, captured photographically, the way medieval and Renaissance people read paintings of the nativity or crucifixion or the divine torture of some saint. As a twenty-first-century atheist, I find these depictions tedious and often baffling, because I inhabit an entirely different world of meaning. How will future people ‘read’ social media archives, if indeed the monstrous servers that house them aren’t incinerated in some cataclysmic event? (Let me think about that.)
On my last day in Naples, I fast-forwarded through rooms and rooms of fat baby Jesuses in the Museo di Capodimonte, stopping short to admire Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, a depiction of female anger and violence readable across time and culture. (Impossible not to read this work through Gentileschi’s experience of rape and then judicial torture, when she was subjected to thumbscrews in court to verify her testimony.) The blank, beatific face of the Virgin Mary, endlessly reproduced, was as impersonal as that of a Barbie doll; she was a repository of devotion, not a person. By contrast, Judith and her maidservant were two women hard at work, matter of fact, not smiling for an audience.
I was also drawn to Colantonio’s tranquil depiction of St Jerome and the lion: the saint’s disorderly study depicted in warm shades of brown and in affectionate, realistic detail; the lion’s mournful, almost human fourth-wall gaze. Although the subject was alien, the painting still spoke to me.
Back in 1990, I didn’t entirely give up on travel. In the footsteps of the non-ex-boyfriend I backpacked around western Turkey, teaming up with a young Canadian man I met at the airport, an arrangement of mutual protection. I spent two weeks in France, discovering the cruel and humiliating limits of my HSC French. I also spent time in Israel, which used to be a standard destination for young travellers. Every generation has its own backpacker route.
Apart from exhausting my travel funds, this early experience on the road with my zip-up ‘travel pack’ (what happened to those?) taught me that my tolerance for travel was a week or two at best. I did not like wearing dirty clothes or paying for every single meal or wondering where I was going to sleep next. I marvelled that people could spent six months, even a year, ‘travelling’. In truth, this horrified me. For a dedicated traveller, or at least a believer in Travel, I’m actually a bit of a homebody.
(You will do me the favour of forgetting I said that.)
So, three decades ago, I realised, not inconsequentially, that I’d either go on short, intensive trips or that I’d live in a place and do something meaningful—work or study. And that, more or less, is how it’s worked out. And, also, how I ended up, in the mid-2025s, tackling Naples on my own and still questioning what exactly I was doing or seeking by such self-displacement.
I went back to the Centro Storico on my second-last day. In the morning, and with the benefit of a full night’s sleep, it wasn’t quite so horrendous. The crowds were thinner and I’d adjusted to the homicidal traffic, which is slightly less fearsome than that of Saigon. I cut down some side streets that were almost deserted. I bought some China-made souvenir socks (lemons, pizza) for family. After all, I was a tourist.
From the mid-20s, t-shirt weather of Naples, I landed back in Glasgow just before Storm Amy hit. As I emerged from the plane, my face was whipped by cold, wet air. Behind me, the woman from the next seat, who’d been hunched over with motion sickness for half the flight, sighed in relief. So did I. Oh, I was pleased to be home.
Surely there must be a word in some other language for the first night in your own bed after being away.
Will I travel again? Of course. But with the uncomfortable awareness that whatever ‘experience’ I pursue, I’m also part of a problem.
Endnote: Bali, beloved of the non-ex-boyfriend for its cheapness, smoothies and banana pancakes, is ‘over’. The internet tells me it’s been ‘ruined’. The drunken Australians of yore were mostly quarantined in Kuta Beach. These days, an international wave of post-COVID tourists has led to environmental degradation, gridlocked traffic and cultural erosion. I have no desire to touristically pollute ‘undiscovered corners’ by ‘discovering’ them. Bali used to be on my ‘list’, but I’ll leave it well alone.
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