Lauren Tamaki/Supplied
Last fall, I stood on the edge of a cliff, high above a rushing river, pretending I needed to take a picture of the scenery so that I could hide my desperate need to catch my breath. The hike was one of many I’d tackle at the Mountain Trek Health Reset Retreat in Nelson B.C., an elite, wellness experience that placed hiking poles in my hand, a sugar-free and fat-limited diet on my plate and hill after bloody hill in front of me. No matter how fast I willed my legs to carry me upward, everything in me demanded that I slow down. The whole experience was entirely foreign to the way I’ve travelled since our collective grounding in 2020.
Before the pandemic, my life as a travel journalist meant that I’d been a regular, but fairly blasé traveller. I took for granted that there would always be another trip on my calendar and that the colourful pins in the map in my living room, where my husband dutifully charts our family adventures, would continue to accumulate. But shortly after I returned home from Porto, Portugal, that February, the world came to a horrifying stop.
Within days of cancelling my first flight, I bought sexy, new luggage. It was my personal revolt against what was happening, a promise to myself that, given the chance to travel again, I’d be ready to go. So many of us did something similar and when the skies opened a few years later, airport concourses were clogged with travellers. The idea of “Revenge Travel” was born. We would get back at the pandemic by recouping all the time abroad it stole from us, those celebration trips, bucket list vacations and family gatherings that were lost.
For many of us, the pandemic payback continues. According to Statistics Canada, 2023′s tourism revenue is estimated to come in at $109.5-billion or 104 per cent of 2019 levels. The getaway resurgence has continued despite inflation and higher travel costs. That may shift this year. CNBC reported on a study by Morning Consult that Canadians’ interest in travel has dropped, in part because of a reduction in the anger and urgency we once felt.
Revenge as a reason for travelling simply isn’t sustainable. Travel has never been just about taking the trip. It’s about being present while you’re on it. It’s about pausing and looking at where you are and asking yourself the tough questions about why you’re there. I may have set out on my post-2020 whirlwind of adventures simply because I could, but by the time I paused, I knew there were so many other things that had brought me to that B.C. mountain: health scares, worry about aging parents and the stress that comes from being an empath during a global pandemic.
I’ve always travelled with the intention of finding good in the world. I try to remain open to changing my mind about the things I think I know (What good manners look like. What makes a destination safe) and remembering the important things I sometimes forget (That we are more alike than different. That the world runs on the kindness of strangers). There’s no room for revenge in any of that. It’s time to think harder about the impact to our planet and ourselves if we continue at this pace.
For those struggling with what comes next, I offer this. Let’s lean into taking the kinds of trips that leave us better for having travelled. The trips where we slow down long enough to hear what the places we visit have to teach us. It will take some practice. It will mean abandoning endless bucket lists and extending more empathy and patience on the go. It will absolutely require slowing down. Transformation is incremental rather than immediate. How can you absorb one experience when you’re already preoccupied with planning the next one?
My years of travelling vengefully are over. I’m not sure if there are more challenging mountain hikes in my future, but if there are, I’ll pause on that cliff and not just to catch my breath. I’ll take in the majesty of the view and consider the tiny place I take up in the world. And I’ll lean into the lessons that come from doing hard things – one more considered step at a time.
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