The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
SIMON PARKER INSIDE TRAVEL
After a month of mobile-free travel, I was forced to confront the imperfect real world and learnt to appreciate it, warts and all
Within 16 months of joining Instagram and with 603 followers and 500 posts to my name, I had become everything I once ridiculed – giddily hashtagging words such as #wanderlust and #instatravel in a narcissistic haze.
A month ago, however, I was served my comeuppance when my smartphone left a Central American bar in someone else’s pocket and I was plunged into social media cold turkey. The Yucatán Peninsula lay ahead of me. How would I show off my carefully curated #instalife to a group of strangers? If you didn’t photograph your avocado, did you really eat it?
At first, there was an overwhelming feeling of grief. But bereft of my hi-tech comfort blanket, I found that within just 24-hours muscle memory began returning to my hands and eyeballs. Amazingly, they could be utilised for hundreds of other purposes beyond aimlessly scrolling through photos and nonsensical #inspo. I had time-travelled to a less conceited era. The world around me was bright, tropical and vivacious – broadcast exclusively and in high-definition down my pre-Instagram #nofilter optic nerves.
I’d never considered myself a phone addict, but all of a sudden I’d freed up several extra hours a day to invest in looking at the real world – a world utterly obsessed with and dependent upon smartphones. Sitting in the coffee shops of Antigua in Guatemala, surrounded by baroque archways and pastel hues, I now had ample time to look down from my high horse as people on neighbouring tables arranged green juices between poached eggs and pairs of Ray-Ban wayfarers. We’re the most intelligent life form on the planet, but technology has rendered us imbeciles.
On the one hand, smartphones have of course made travelling easier, safer and more communicative; on the other, apps such as Instagram have sucked all originality out of what should be a personal experience. The very idea of hashtagging is, surely, an admission that nothing’s remotely unique anymore. People used to name-drop as a means of showing off; these days, we leave hashtags and geotags – place-dropping is all the rage. And who would want to use an original hashtag, anyway? No one would ever find it. And in our self-obsessed modern age, what would be the point in that?
I travel a lot and can reveal, unsurprisingly, that the planet very often doesn’t look half as good as it’s portrayed on Instagram. We conveniently leave out all the pollution, poverty and degradation because it doesn’t fit in with our idea of #instaperfect. This is incredibly unhealthy, not only for our collective psyche but for the well-being and future survival of our planet. We should be documenting the problems we face, not glossing over them.
On Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, I checked into a hotel that looked incredible on screen, via its #instapics. In reality, Instagram’s flattering letterbox aspect ratio suited it perfectly – the half-built, derelict hotel next door aligned just out of shot in every single one of its posts. So-called “influencers” are at it, too – portraying destinations in a meticulously composed style that is often wide of the mark. Granted, I sound like a snob but it’s a form of lowbrow “content” that’s so editorially unsound that it would seldom be tolerated elsewhere in the media. Social media, however, has become a law unto its own.
This unreal “reality” could leave people feeling extremely short-changed. The beaches of Mexico’s Playa del Carmen and Tulum are, for example, currently swamped in tons of smelly seaweed. Not that you’d tell that from Instagram,
If you didn’t photograph your avocado, did you really eat it?
because hotels are working around the clock to rake out gaps in the sand where amateur photo shoots can take place. Over the course of just one day I witnessed more than a dozen bikini-clad wannabe influencers pretend to wade out to sea. As soon as their friends had taken the desired shots, they turned their disgusted backs on the water and retreated to the hotel pool.
On returning to the UK, after 33 blissful days smartphonefree, I have vowed to make a beeline for an old “brick” of a mobile phone. If I don’t, I fear I’ll simply dismount my high horse, order a green juice, and let the narcissistic haze wash over me once more.