Natural Opium: Some Travelers' Tales

[b:Natural Opium: Some Travelers' Tales|763255|Natural Opium Some Travelers' Tales|Diane Johnson|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|749343] is a collection of travel essays published thirty years ago that now seem curiously quaint. As I haven't travelled abroad since (reluctantly) getting a smart phone, it hadn't really occurred to me how they've transformed international travel. Before pocket internet access, you would arrive somewhere abroad and just... not not know where anything was unless you had a map or guide, not understand the signage unless you knew the local language or had a phrase book, and need to ask for help with things. Another retro element is Johnson's husband taking show more the Concorde - remember when that was a thing? If you're under 25, presumably not.

Johnson's thoughtful yet somewhat acidic tone seems coloured by the fact that her travels were not chosen for her. The journeys all over the world that she recounts involved accompanying her husband (a doctor) on work trips to meetings of the International Infectious Disease Council. I wondered whether she was more inclined to criticise something that she didn't choose, but also more open to new experiences because she wasn't paying for them? Her adventures include walking on the Great Barrier Reef, a safari in Tanzania, perilous late-night sledding in Switzerland, and touring ancient tombs in Egypt.

My favourite chapter covered an unexpected stop in the then-Soviet Union on a flight from Paris to Hong Kong. I enjoyed these comments on the psychological impact of international travel:

Poor [husband] in uncomfortable Shenyang, or perhaps he was by now in Hong Kong. Any worries about him seemed far away, that effect of travel by which real life is left behind and a new reality, the here and now, is more important. The new difficulties of the here and now make the old seem flat and simple. I felt an intense pleasure merely in being, here, this minute. The absence of normal context proves that you must exist independent of it, you, a being alive. Here I am, a woman alone in the Soviet Union, and I will go on being me. The world is interesting and the food not bad (as long as you pay in hard currency). Thinking like this, I was filled with the happiest of traveller's emotions, an existential sense of belonging.

I was less keen on some of the preceding chapters, although the insight into how travel has changed was thought-provoking. I prefer armchair travel by book to the real thing, but [b:Natural Opium: Some Travelers' Tales|763255|Natural Opium Some Travelers' Tales|Diane Johnson|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|749343] didn't quite hit the spot. Perhaps Johnson's judgements on her fellow-travellers seemed a bit too sharp and her treatment of cultural differences somewhat inevitably old-fashioned. show less