Dealing with travel anxiety amid terror
EVERY time my anxiety about travel seems to have subsided, new horrific terrorist attacks in Britain, like the one at London Bridge on June 3, close to where my wife and I once lived, and the bombing just days before at the Manchester Arena, have brought my worries back to the fore, especially since we’re off to London in a couple of weeks.
But while I can’t seem to outrun the creep of travel anxiety, I remain committed to travelling, and this, I’ve found, is the best tonic. My wife and I consider ourselves respectably prolific travellers, even as we raise two young children in New York. We met as journalists in Cambodia shortly before September 11 and lived in India and England, where she is from.
Even the most hardened travellers have to admit a certain amount of fear while travelling in this era of heightened global terrorism. My fellow travelers seem jittery too. I was on a tiny regional jet from Knoxville, Tennessee, to New York last summer – a harrowing experience at the best of times – when our flight was diverted to Erie, Pennsylvania, because of, as far as I could tell, a rumour of rain at La Guardia Airport. As we headed hundreds of kilometres out of our way, I heard a fellow passenger ask the flight attendant if there had been a terrorist attack at our original destination. It wasn’t a far-fetched situation.
The travel industry seems attuned to these fears. I was depressed recently to come across a product – the MultiThreat Shield – which has “the appearance of a laptop computer bag”, but, when an active shooter is on the loose, “a quick flip of the wrist swiftly deploys a three-foot-long blanket of protection to defeat multiple impacts from most handgun, shotgun and pistol-caliber submachine gun threats”. The bag itself, however, could be made obsolete by the proposed laptop ban, which Wired suggested only increases the collective unease without necessarily making anyone safer (although I suspect my wife would be pleased if I wasn’t allowed to take my laptop on vacation).
I’ve been rewarded, though, by quashing the impulse to stay home. And so will other travellers, I suspect. While it’s tricky to predict the impact the recent attacks in Britain will have on travel, industry experts say it is likely to be minimal in the long run, partially because that country is now relatively cheap for Americans. The more I travel, the more I feel at ease about travelling. My anxiety generally rears its head in the run-up to a trip. When we’re actually travelling, those fears tend to be displaced by more practical matters, like whether we have enough diapers, snacks and patience to last through the day.
When I indulge my worst fears, the scenarios I’ve come to fear are most likely rooted in the three years I spent as an expatriate in Mumbai, which has suffered multiple terrorist attacks in recent years. The most notorious was the three-day siege of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and other sites in 2008 by militants who sailed from Pakistan carrying little more than machine guns. The raid left more than 160 people dead. It didn’t affect our decision to move there but led to a heightened state of security in our neighbourhood near the Taj, where numerous permanent measures had been put into effect: soldiers walking the beat, barriers erected, public Wi-Fi in nearby cafés disconnected and elaborate paperwork rituals required to check into hotels and internet cafes.
Thoughts of the siege of the Taj came back to me in late 2015, when my then 2-yearold daughter and I accompanied my wife, Flora, a travel editor, on a business trip to Marrakech, Morocco, a city I had wanted to visit since reading about the Rolling Stones’s swinging parties there in the 1960s and Winston Churchill drinking Champagne and gin cocktails at La Mamounia, one of the world’s classic hotels. I didn’t give a second thought to the security situation.
But on our first day in the hotel, when my wife was at a conference, I decided to take a peek at the State Department’s travel advisory for Marrakech, which declared right off the bat, “The potential for terrorist violence against US interests and citizens exists in Morocco.” A curtain of panic descended, my heart began to race and I began to feel guilty for exposing my daughter to what were essentially worstcase possibilities cooked up by my overactive imagination.
While frequent travellers, such as myself, might be embarrassed to find themselves thinking about which targets might be the most vulnerable, experts suggest we put these risks into context. Travellers should not discount a threat of terrorism that has been given a higher profile because of the increasing frequency of attacks and the way they are covered in the news media, but neither should they exaggerate it, said Rob Walker of the risk consultancies International SOS and Control Risks. “By far and away the biggest risk that most travellers will face is road safety,” Walker said.
This is a fact that resonates with me. Looking back, the riskiest behaviour I can remember taking part in while travelling was riding a few times in a speeding taxi on a motorway in Bangkok, where buckled seat belts are seen as a sign of weakness.
George Morgan-Grenville, the founder of Red Savannah, a high-end tour operator in England, said the best way to become inured to fears of terrorism was to travel more. “When people have traveled to destinations where they have initially been nervous of going to and they haven’t encountered anything adverse,” he said, “they come back correspondingly more relaxed about travelling again in the future.”
It’s true: The more I travel in today’s security climate, and refuse to alter my behaviour, the better I feel about travel – and the sillier I feel afterward for worrying. I would deeply regret hunkering down in our hotel this summer instead of taking my daughter to see Big Ben and London Bridge.