The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Travel’s greatest decade? You decide
Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler celebrates six decades of wanderlust and our experts make the case for their favourite holiday era of all time
I’m a classic boomer, so my first travel steps were in a classic travel decade: the 1960s. Suddenly the world became a bigger place, our horizons stretched far beyond our parents’ boundaries, and in the same time window the means to get there also magically appeared. The Marrakesh Express or the Beatles in India may have enticed us to go further, but Boeing was also there to provide a double-decker magic carpet to ride on.
Those expanded possibilities may have been inviting, but getting to the edge of our wider world wasn’t meant to be easy. Aeroplane tickets, if you could afford them, meant queueing up at airline or travel agent offices. Visa and hotel bookings required letters, postage stamps and long waits. Foreign currency, once you had accumulated the means to buy some, meant travellers’ cheques and then, once you were overseas, the entertaining search to find somewhere to cash them.
Once you got to your exotic destination, sending news home was also far from easy. Remember postcards? And when it came to receiving news, remember poste restante?
It may have been romantic waiting for letters at exotic post offices, but it was also time-consuming and extremely haphazard. There were always telegrams for emergencies and sometimes you could even manage to get a phone call through, although in remoter locations – and back then, almost everything seemed remote – you could end up queueing for hours only to hear one word in 10 over a dodgy line.
Fast forward six decades and how things have changed. Want a visa? You can often do it online in minutes. Need local currency? It’s as close as the nearest ATM. Documents for your next flight? The boarding pass is right there on your smartphone. And when it comes to calling home, well, sometimes that same phone can ding, ring or ping a little too often.
Not that I regret any of these changes. Travel, if a little less romantic, has never been more accessible. And despite the fact that images of every destination or experience seem to have been uploaded onto Instagram, you can still find new adventures if you look hard enough. Even after all those decades, I am still regularly amazed to stumble upon some site, some place, some view that I had simply never expected.
The greatest era for travel? For me, the hippie trail of the 1970s will probably remain my take-to-the-grave travel memory. Those first big trips are hard to forget. But everyone has their own opinion. Here, six globetrotters put forward a case for each of the past six decades and share some of their fondest holiday recollections. Give us your verdict by emailing yoursay@telegraph. co.uk (for details see page 22).