Hiking in Northern Italy this summer, we didn’t have cell service most of the time, and it wouldn’t have mattered much if we did—Google Maps is useless in this vast network of trails, and most trail apps, which are crowd-sourced, will lead you to, well, the crowds. This, along with an Instagram-driven approach to travel recommendations, is how we all end up in the same places, taking the same photos, desperately trying to replicate the same travel moments.
Instead, we pored over actual paper maps every morning at breakfast and consulted our Tabacco topographic map dozens of times a day, corroborating our route with wooden trail markers along the way. Yes, it was confusing at times. We took wrong turns, we retraced steps. But we also talked to strangers and relied on landmarks. We discovered gloriously empty places and spaces along with that nostalgic old feeling of being lost. We loved every minute of it. And it made me deeply nostalgic for a time when we didn’t have every route, every recommendation, and photograph of every destination at our greedy little fingertips—for a time before ubiquitous connectivity.
In that spirit, below, a handful of inspirations and recommendations related to, however tangentially, navigating the world with less precision and less expectation—and more unfamiliar sights, sounds and experiences.
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I can’t remember the last time I was so delighted/inspired by a piece of travel writing. Did you see this life-affirming story in The New York Times a few weeks ago? Photographer Ben Buckland hikes his way across Switzerland relying not on Google Maps or GPS but by hand-sketched maps by people he meets. Let me repeat: HAND-DRAWN MAPS FROM STRANGERS. It’s the kind of wild luddite adventure that might initially sound like a lark, but ultimately tells a deeper story about the humanity and generosity that exists outside the realm of our digital lives. “Our attention is a gift,” he writes. “Reading maps is an act of empathy. They tell us as much about the person who made them as they do about the world.”
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Five Radio Stations, which is more of a performance art piece than an actual radio station, is the brainchild of Silvia Guerra and Seb Emina, the latter the editor of The Happy Reader (who also has his own Substack newsletter, Read Me). Try Infraordinary FM (my favorite of the five stations) for a steady, hypnotic stream of random, real-time quotidian happenings, from weather events to plane landings and pinball scores 24 hours a day in the most hidden crevices of the map. I’m not sure if it’s the soothing voice or the seemingly infinite word parade of prosaic information, but I find it calming and strangely addictive. Sometimes I pull it up and press play for a few minutes just to be reminded that the earth is big and made up of very small, mundane moments. Is it art? Is it poetry? Is it beauty? I’m not sure, but I really really love it.
Snippets:
The tide is low in Vinalhaven, Maine.
A goldcrest was sighted in St. Stefan, Switzerland.
In Belize City, Belize, there is a gentle northeasterly breeze.
The moon is at its zenith in Gibralter.
It is lowtide in Lauvstad, Norway.
The planet Saturn is visible from Erdenet, Mongolia.
A new highscore of 123450 was achieved in the Kiss pinball machine in Washington.
There was a beautiful sunset in Hawally, Kuwait.
It is midnight in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia.
In Netherlands, 15 jackdaws were sighted.
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In more than a decade of visiting the behemoth that is MASSMoCA (250,000 square feet plus outdoor space), I have developed a new wayfinding strategy: wander aimlessly. A couple weeks ago, this is exactly how I stumbled across a collection of handmade instruments by Gunnar Schonbeck, who taught at Bennington College from 1947-2008. His guiding philosophy—anyone can make music out of ordinary materials and objects—is the stuff of pure joy. Drums made from aircraft fuselages, welded steel harps, zithers and pan pipes, tubular chimes, triangular cellos—all pieced together with childlike creativity and makeshift craftsmanship. Tucked away in a room on the second floor, surrounded by artworks from giants like Sol LeWitt, Louise Bourgeois, Laurie Anderson and James Turrell, this little exhibition is a world of its own. Like hopping in a time machine to Schonbeck’s way-back Bennington workshop of experimental musical contraptions and sounds of your own making, complete with orange carpet, where play and touch are encouraged.
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Speaking of the tactile, there’s nowhere better to reminisce about pre-digital age travel than vintage travel magazines, which once upon a time lit up the collective imagination with stories about far-flung places most readers would never see. Now we have Instagram, and we see everything. We see too much of everything all the time. For the time-travel-inclined, some favorites: Holiday, Travel, and my favorite, which is more international art journal than travel guide, Broom (that cover art!), which was published from 1921 to 1924, first from Rome, then Berlin, and ultimately New York City. In the very first issue, there’s a story titled “America invades Europe.” Maybe things haven’t changed that much after all.
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For reading material more readily available, allow me to introduce Cosmographia— a brilliant newsletter written by M.E. Rothwell about exploring the world via history, myth, maps, and art. One of the first newsletters I discovered on Substack—thrill of thrills!—it continues to offer intellectual sustenance. Even though a bit of a departure from his regular coverage, I insist you start with All Hail the Cloud, an epic scourge against the iPhone as constant travel companion and our enduring, nonsensical pathos about how we photograph the places we visit. A brief clip:
For a long time I believed unquestioningly the standard critique of our times. It’s the phones.3 It’s the algorithm. It’s our base narcissism. That our obsession with recording every fleeting moment of our lives betrayed a deeper malaise. We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment.
If you have recommendations of your own, please share in the comments. Here’s to wandering aimlessly, being lost and relishing the thrill of discovery!
ADORE those magazine covers. How refreshing illustration and graphic design is amongst the bombardment of perfectly pristine photography we encounter!
The hand drawn maps story made me think of the time in 1990 when four of us trekked down the Hispar Glacier in the Karakoram with nothing to guide us but a map photocopied from an Italian mountaineering book. The sort which shows mountain peaks as little triangles and the linking ridges as black lines.
And when we had finished I found myself drawing a map for the proprietor of a shop in Hunza which he would photocopy to sell to other trekkers. In exchange I got a lapis lazuli necklace for my Mum.