A postcard from the Baltic RELIGION

What’s the difference between a tourist and a traveller?

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

— St. Augustine

I was at the back of the bus. Up at the front, a delightful guide, who had clearly worked hard to perfect her English, offered anecdotes about who once lived in the apartment passing on our left and up that alley on our right.

I’d tell you who but I couldn’t hear exactly what the guide was saying. The problem wasn’t the bus’ sound system, but the women behind me who chose instead to talk. Incessantly. Loudly. About nothing. At all.

My blood was boiling. It took my wife to restrain me. I wanted to turn around and shush them like we were at the opera or at least ask why in heaven’s name they would come all this way to Scandinavia and the Baltic States? Did they want to learn anything or was it just about crossing off items on their bucket list?

The distinction between tourist and traveller is old. Maybe it’s just semantics and we who journey are both. Or maybe it’s elitism, a cliquish dichotomy where travellers point out stereotypical tourists and make derogatory remarks. (See first two paragraphs.)

I’ve been a stereotypical tourist following like sheep the guide holding a big lollipop with the number of my group. But the caricature of the tourist is not completely inaccurate. There are differences in attitude and behaviour.

Tourists tend to want everything to be translated and nothing to go wrong. Tourists go for the entertainment, the shopping and the bragging rights. As G.K. Chesterton put it, the traveller sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see. REV. BOB RIPLEY

I don’t travel to be entertained. There is more than enough amusement in the planet and its people who are navigating life. I want to be surprised. Plans change. It rains. Free time can leave you disoriented, but sometimes getting lost is the best way to discover something surprising about yourself or your view of the world.

Travellers learn more from the things that go wrong than those that go right. They learn the words for “hello” and “thank you” in the local dialect and try to use them. In place of souvenirs, travellers bring home new appreciation for the plight of others. Travelling can teach us tolerance and patience. Travel, as Mark Twain aptly put it, is fatal to prejudice.

I have my favourite places to which I return, but there is nothing like going somewhere for the first time. Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour and Bing Crosby in exotic locales such as Singapore, Zanzibar, Rio, Bali and Hong Kong. St. Paul sailing the Mediterranean with stops at Corinth, Ephesus, Thessalonica and Galatia; not to mention side trips to Jerusalem, Cyprus, Athens and Rome.

Whether you travel for the laughs or the Gospel, our destination, as Henry Miller suggested, is never a place but a new way of seeing things.

Face it, wherever we go, chances are someone has been there before us. We tread where others have trod. In his book The Glittering Mountains of Canada, J. Monroe Thorington wrote, “We were not pioneers ourselves, but we journeyed over old trails that were new to us, and with hearts open. Who shall distinguish?”

Journeying with an open heart — maybe that’s the secret of the traveller. And while St. Augustine was right about the world being a book to be read, you can still explore the page of your own backyard with a spirit not unlike a pioneer.

Henry Thoreau never saw Scandinavia or the Baltic States. He wandered to the woods just outside Concord, Mass., to Walden Pond. There he lived for two years and two months in a house he built himself. Walden is the record of those years and month, a record of inner exploration. As he wrote in his conclusion to Walden, “Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade but of thought.”