When a pair of garden gnomes went missing from their home in Gosport, Hampshire, earlier this year, their owner was merely flummoxed. But when he started getting postcards from them from France, he was astonished. “Real gnome from gnome . . . c u soon”, read one.
Nobody ever found out who was behind the prank. But if you think peripatetic gnomes are weird, think again. Much wackier, more random happenings are shaking up the world of travel.
There’s the hitchhiker you may have spotted on the M1 with a sign saying Mongolia. Or the lovers who flew separately to Venice so they could spend the weekend trying to find one another without the aid of a telephone. In rural France there’s a man wandering about wearing a horse’s head, and up mountains and below oceans the world over there are men taking photographs of themselves ironing. We all love an eccentric, but what is going on? Is everybody going la-la?
It’s more Dada, actually. This is the brave new world of experimental travel, where every mundane journey becomes an event, every destination a challenge. For the been-there, done-that generation, the terrible prospect of boredom — travel ennui — has set in and this is their tonic.
These types may not deserve our pity, but they exist. There is a small but growing number of people for whom exploring polar ice caps, white-water rafting, and bungee-jumping hold no excitement at all. Why struggle again to the terraces of Machu Picchu, the jungles of Burma or the beaches of the Tongan archipelago only to think, “Where next?”, when you can redefine the art of travel on your own terms?
QUIRKY and absurd, experimental travel requires neither brawn nor bravery — nor even buckets of cash. An interest in philosophy and lateral thinking may help but the only must-have is a taste for the absurd.
At the heart of the movement is a 49-year-old Frenchman, Joel Henry, whose book, The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel, is published later this month. A scriptwriter living in Strasbourg, he runs the Laboratory of Experimental Tourism (Latourex), through which he has compiled a new lexicon of travel ideas.
Think you’ve seen everything worth visiting in Paris? Try it again with a Baedeker guide — providing it’s at least 100 years out of date. Want to make your holiday snaps more interesting? Then get into “counter-travel”, which requires that you take pictures with your back turned to landmarks such as the Taj Mahal or Big Ben.
“You increase your receptiveness”, says Henry. “It’s all about having fun, trying new things . . . You work out a set of constraints and you stick to it, and that is your sole purpose for the period. You are open to all the surprises that will pop up along the way.”
Citing Dadaism and surrealism as his influences, Henry dreamt up the idea in 1990 when he decided to spend a weekend in Zurich with a group of friends. They would not meet up but only compare notes on their return.
Another of his challenges is exploration by Monopoly. You arrive in a city, buy the local version of the game and visit the streets, stations and jail by throwing the dice and following the game’s rules.
Henry’s approach might seem weird, but it speaks to the big changes already sweeping the travel industry. Cheap flights and the internet are transforming the way we travel, unpackaging our holidays and leaving us with much more freedom to organise our time as we please.
Companies such as EasyJet already report many passengers booking flights simply because they are cheap rather than starting out with a fixed destination in mind. Building on this theme, another leading airline is said to be about to launch a programme of “random flights”, where you book in advance but only find out your destination when you land.
There is certainly something in the air. Henry has attracted devotees to experimental travel from around the world. About 500 people subscribe to his newsletter on the subject, while more than 1,000 have participated in experiments he has organised.
Oliver Wright is a convert. At 31, he is typical of many young Britons who have travelled extensively, backpacking around our shrinking world. A former advertising executive, he has visited Mongolia, China, India and Nepal.
He quit his job 14 months ago and now says: “Random travel is my life.” Last month he saw a Ryanair flight advertised to Haugesund, Norway, for 5p each way plus tax. Taking only a tent, he ended up sleeping on the edge of a cliff, watching four-hour sunsets over the North Sea and talking to curious locals. The purpose of his holiday, he emphasises, was not to save money but to see what fate — and the 5p outlay — would decide.
“I love the sense of utter freedom,” he says. “You can do anything on a whim. The feeling of being free becomes psychologically exciting.”
Another of his games took place in Goa. He bought an Indian photography magazine and visited each of the sites it featured. With no guidebook, he relied on locals to help him find his way around. He met people on trains and buses and total strangers joined in his adventure. The result was 5Å blissful weeks. “The thrill is heading into the unexpected and knowing that something extraordinary will take place. It always does.”
Wright is now thinking about flying to India and returning by rickshaw. Joel Henry would be proud.
ANOTHER serendipitous traveller is 32-year-old Tom Barber, who runs his own business, Original Travel. He travelled around eastern Europe in a quest for the “O” — the “land mass” that went missing when Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
“We travelled throughout Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Austria before eventually reaching Slovenia on the last day of our trip, still not having discovered the O,” he remembers.
“We took a boat out to a beautiful island on Lake Bled. There we saw an aerial shot of the island on a postcard and realised it was totally spherical. We had found our O.”
The introduction of new perspectives and playfulness into life is perhaps long overdue. That is the view of the writer Alain de Botton, whose book The Art of Travel was published in 2002. In it he argues that a downside to visiting new places is that we take our preconceptions of that place with us, skewing our experience of it when we arrive.
Imagine, he says, a plane descending on a capital city where half the people are going home and aren’t looking out of the window. “But the other half are visitors seeing the view for the first time and are thinking, ‘That’s so exciting’. So you could learn to look at the place you live in as if you have never seen it before.
“Where you go is less important than your perception of where you go.”
The surrealists who inspired Henry would agree. Salvador Dali regularly wandered around dressed in bizarre costumes with friends including Luis Buñuel and the poet Federico Garcia Lorca to alter his experience of Toledo in the 1920s.
“They liked to set up situations and see what happened,” says Dali’s biographer Meredith Etherington-Smith.
In a precursor of performance art, they organised their own society for such forays. “They would go roaming around Toledo at night. They would dress in bizarre costumes, get drunk and wander through its narrow streets to see what adventures they might stumble upon.”
Once, Buñuel ended up in a house with no light that was inhabited entirely by blind people. Dali, meanwhile, was wandering around dressed as a priest.
BUT will modern-day experimental travel ever be more than a wheeze for young people with no children underfoot? It would be easy to dismiss it as mere fashion. Yet fads have a way of becoming mainstream. When the first hippies took the trail to Kathmandu or Morocco, those destinations were considered exotic. Now they are pedestrian, visited by every middle-class teenager on their gap year.
The same is true of adventure sports such as whitewater rafting, climbing and off-piste skiing, which were once seen as a minority interest. Now they are one of the fastest-growing sectors in the travel market.
Even here, participants are looking for new ways to liven things up. Adventure Travel magazine, for example, urges readers to take up the “Spam Challenge”. With a budget of only £70 and a tin of processed meat they must fly somewhere interesting, do something adventurous and somehow get home again. Participants may beg and borrow but not steal.
Experimental travel, which owes much to the hippie “happenings” of the 1960s, might well prove a cerebral alternative to adventure sports trips for those who want to spice up their holidays without putting their lives on the line.
Paul Goodyer, who runs Nomad, a chain of expedition outfitters, believes quirky travel is here to stay.
“Young people always want to be different,” he says. “When I first travelled in the 1970s, I hitchhiked from London to Nairobi, never staying in hotels. At the time that was wacky. Now it has all been done and you have to create your own wackiness.”
If the future of travel is indeed absurd, your own holiday snaps may never look the same again. Oh, and haven’t the gnomes come out well?
HOLIDAYS IN THE ZANY ZONE
A-Z travel
Choose a town and buy an A-Z. Take the first road beginning with A and the last beginning with Z and draw a line between them. Now walk the line
Anachronistic travel
Use only old-fashioned or obsolete forms of transport. Sedan-chairs, airships and palanquins are good. But why stop there? Use only an antique guide book
Chance travel
Look up the name of your hometown in an atlas. Throw a dice then count that number of lines down from your town. That’s your destination — go to it
Double travel
Visit places whose names repeat themselves in the title, such as Sing-Sing, Bora-Bora, Baden-Baden
Ero-travel
Arrange a weekend away with your partner. Travel to your chosen destination by different means and don’t arrange a meeting place. Now search for each other
Expedition to K2
Explore the area on a town plan or map that sits in the square marked K2. Take full advantage of all sights, restaurants and bars. No need to carry oxygen
Gastronomy travel
Eat only dishes created exclusively from ingredients whose name contains a destination. Frankfurters, Chantilly cream, Brussels sprouts and so on
Insider travel
Explore a place following only the suggestions of locals. Practise in your hometown first, pretending you’re a foreigner
Opus-travel
Make a journey suggested by the title of a piece of art or music, a book or a film. Think One Night in Bangkok, Round Ireland with a Fridge or Miss Saigon
Slight-hitch-travel
Go to a motorway sliproad with a sign indicating that you are headed for a faraway location such as Buenos Aires. Put out your thumb and wait
Thalasso-travel
Citing a burst water pipe or lack of hot water, invite yourself to take a bath in
the hotel room or villa next to yours. Then turn up with all the stuff you would expect to find in a spa: bathrobe, relaxing music, seaweed scrub and champagne
Travel-pursuit
Secretly follow some friends on holiday. Take lots of photos of them with a telephoto lens. When you both get back, surprise them with a slide show
Source: Laboratory of Experimental Tourism (Latourex)
