"It's important to be amazed about absolutely everything."
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- Terry Pratchett, beloved English writer (of 41 comic fantasy novels) and thinker
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Readers, what if there are thrilling "microadventures" to be had within walking/cycling distance of where you live, however nondescript you have always imagined those local places to be?
What if those adventures may be so fulfilling that you no longer feel you have to rocket off overseas on climate-contaminating aeroplanes to become just another despicable tourist in a madding throng of that despised species?
Canberrans, does your much-maligned city have enough neighbourhood character to make for these sorts of adventures? Do you, Canberra citizens, have the talent, the aptitude (perhaps writer-thinker Terry Pratchett's recommended recognition of "the importance of being amazed about absolutely everything") enabling you to get big buzzes out of the discreet little things your neighbourhood has?
My carryings on here like a pork chop are triggered by Alastair Humphreys' new online piece, A Single Small Map Is Enough For A Lifetime.
In it, the famed English traveller-adventurer entertains the doubts lots of us have now about the promiscuity of international travel.
"With the climate in chaos," he agonises, "I can't justify flying all over the globe for fun anymore, burning jet fuel and spewing carbon for selfies."
He makes the case for, instead, local on-foot or on-bicycle "microadventures", made in Pratchett's be-amazed-by-everything spirit.
Is notoriously, allegedly featureless, soulless Canberra a promising place for microadventuring? Do Canberrans live within rambling distance of the amazing?
Well, certainly nowhere in Canberra is any less adventure-promising than the ostensibly "bog-standard corner" of England where Humphreys reluctantly lives and where he has begun to go adventuring.
"I don't like it," Humphreys confides, calling it an "unassuming landscape ... a strange, in-between edge-land [where] there are fields but factories too ... villages and farms, train tracks and tower blocks..."
In his essay he takes us on a day-long walk in this unassuming place, coming to take a Terry Pratchettesque interest in all of its minutiae, its stinking canal, its pylons, its fog, even its out-of-the-way, surprising-to-find-there graffiti.
As a student of Canberra and Canberrans, I am interested in how Canberra (in its own way a strange, in between edge-land) might perform as a microadventure venue. Then, do Canberrans, notoriously used to only ever looking at their city through their cars' windscreens, have the patience and talent to look at their city in amazed, microadventuring ways?
Of course one great virtue of the local microadventure is that, unlike one's adventures in famous foreign places, one doesn't have to cope with teeming, pleasure-debauched tourists.
On the day-long adventure he describes, Humphreys seems to see only one other person up close. It is an eccentric cyclist who, glimpsed, somehow contributes to the quietly weird charm of the author's microadventuring day.
MORE IAN WARDEN:
Humphreys' piece does some sober grumbling about tourists but coincidentally another new online piece about tourism's horrors, Henry Wismayer's Nice View - Shame About All The Tourists, pulls no punches.
Once you've read what Wismayer and his quoted thinkers have to say about tourists you'll shudder at the thought of ever being one of them, a tourist, again. Suddenly post-Wismayer, the dreams of tourist-free microadventures take on an extra lustre.
"Tourism's intractable contemporary paradox," Wismayer accuses, "is that the democratisation of our geographical and cultural riches too often precipitates their ruination. Again and again, tourism sacralises the objects of its gaze, then desecrates them with footprints."
"A crowd's contaminating tendency," he accuses, "does not necessarily correspond to weight of numbers, but how those numbers behave.
"People abroad are people at play, and the anonymity of being far from home invites disinhibition ... This inevitably means that holidays often provoke our most gluttonous, selfish and ignorant impulses. Camera phones have turned every tourist into a potential chronicler of the profane, meaning that each instance of touristic barbarism is now caught on film. Hence, in a video of a man scratching his initials into the nearly 2000-year-old masonry of the Colosseum or a woman's smiling selfie at Auschwitz, we see all of human perfidy distilled.
"The contradictions pile up. The traveller is a paragon of curiosity and generosity of spirit but the tourist is a facile automaton, a constituent of a witless herd."
Canberrans, how will we go when and if we set out on attempted microadventures in our respective corners of our city and territory? My prejudice, before I set out on the kind of neighbourhood argosy here that Humphreys describes in his piece, is that I don't like my immediate suburb-district any more than Humphreys, at first, likes his unassuming corner of England.
Hitherto I find my suburb petrifyingly uneventful and its colourless people alarmingly like chips off the same lifelong-Liberal-voting bourgeois block, its puritanically well-maintained walls and fences drearily bereft of any characterful graffiti.
And yet, who can say what may emerge, what one may find and delight in if one sets out in the right, Terry Pratchetty frame of mind, with maps, and field guides, and a notebook, and binoculars, with only one's noble self (that companionable intellectual equal) to talk to?
As I write, Europe beckons me. But what if to yield to its beckonings, to its crowd-contaminated popular attractions, is to become that contemptible thing, a tourist, a facile automaton, a constituent of a witless herd? How noble, by comparison, the solo microadventurer rambling, amazed, in his or her nearby world!
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
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