The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
LIZZIE FRAINIER INSIDE TRAVEL
For a generation of millennials like me who took holidays for granted, this pandemic is a wake-up call: travel is a privilege
t always seemed unfair to me that avocados bore the brunt of the rampage against millennials. This humble but pricey fruit just wanted to get smashed and hang out on toast, and yet it took the blame for myriad things. Not least the fact we couldn’t afford our own houses.
But the avocado stands for a lot more. It represents the life expectations of my generation – from dining out each week to buying the latest iPhone and, most importantly, travelling the world. Scan our social media accounts and you will see that there is one thing that binds us together: that, as often as we can – work and budget permitting – we get on a plane or a train and go somewhere new.
So much so that we began to take it for granted that we could pop to Mexico last-minute to feast on tacos, or island-hop in Greece when we needed sunshine in our lives. To some extent, our parents did too, but we are a generation that has grown up expecting not just a summer holiday, but multiple trips a year.
Yes, it all sounds very middleclass, but an obsession with travel often transcends backgrounds. Holidays have become cheaper than ever (at great cost to the environment, of course) and stories of city breaks and long-haul adventures were the currency of our communication. Somehow, travel morphed from being a privilege to a right.
That poor avocado also shows how the world has changed for everyone. We live on a planet better connected than ever, with different cultures criss-crossed all over the map. Even if you don’t travel, you find evidence of this in your own supermarkets, shops and restaurants. We are a closer global community, and all the better for it – even if it has left us more exposed. Then the coronavirus arrived, and borders were slammed shut, aeroplanes grounded, and the Foreign Office began advising all Britons to remain at home.
Many of my friends joke that they don’t like to return from a holiday without knowing when the next one is, so this is a truly strange experience. I know our elders will call us selfish, because that is the default adjective for millennials, but I don’t think that’s fair. We’re lost, not angry. I’ve seen my peers mourn cancelled forthcoming trips, just like thousands of others of different ages, but nobody has thrown a tantrum. We understand the severity of the situation and that, for now, a new kind of normal must be adopted.
However, while we may have less of many things, there is something of which we now have a whole lot more: time. Time to think and reflect. Which has made me realise how lucky we have been to experience so much of the world. Also that, by allowing travel to become such a normal part of my life, perhaps it had lost a bit of its sparkle. I’m not saying that I didn’t enjoy holidays before – they naturally form some of my favourite memories – but I wasn’t always 100 per cent in the moment. They had become so regular, so last-minute and so standard, that I could get caught up in sending an email as we whizzed past the remarkable mountains of Colombia, or find myself scrolling social feeds on a park bench in Budapest instead of listening to the birds flying above me.
Books, films and theatre are beautiful windows into other worlds, but they cannot and will never replace the feeling of that hot slap of air as you step off the plane, the heady smell of a spice you haven’t encountered before, or the dusty pink of the sky as the sun sets into a slice of the ocean you’ve just discovered.
This pandemic is a major wake-up call: the ability to visit both near and faraway places is a gift that deserves more of our attention. If anything, the current travel bans will only
By allowing travel to become so normal, perhaps it had lost a bit of its sparkle
improve how I holiday in the future. Above all, it will encourage me to make smarter and better choices about where I go, what I do there and how I spend my money.
None of us know when normal life will resume, and I’m sure travel will be changed forever. It will be impossible not to think of the world as pre- and post-coronavirus.
However, I’m sure that you can’t press pause on the world forever. The industry will rebuild one way or another and, when it does, I hope that I remember how lucky I am to be able to roam freely, enriching my life in all corners of the globe. It’s not goodbye, but see you soon.