Ensayo

LET’S GET LOST
So, after six seasons of curlicued characters and plot-lines that even the producers admitted they made up as they went along, that TV series ‘Lost’ finally ended on Sunday. Fans hit Twitter, many calling it the best finale ever and asking, ‘What can I watch now?’ USA Today, apparently seriously, called the finale an ‘earnest’ ending that actually taught us something: ‘Individualimprovement and redemption are vital, yet not enough. We are not in this alone.’
That we’re not alone in this wacky world? That’s the payoff after the price of admission totalling 121 episodes and, per my count, some 88 hours of programming (not including ads)? Doesn’t seem quite the Tolstoy Deluxe I had expected when I finally gave up on ‘Lost’ mid-way through the second season.
But the conceptof ‘lost’ is a key part of travel. In Rebecca Solnit’s 210-page A Field Guide to Getting Lost — about a four-hour read — the California writer (and ‘lost’ expert) weighs in on all sides of lost — in terms of place, understanding of country music, art, desert landscapes. My favorite quote was from the colonial-era frontiersman Daniel Boone, who apparently said, ‘I was never lost in the woods in mywhole life, though once I was confused for three days.’ An interesting distinction. (In the video I speak with a Daniel Boone re-enactor about it; he said of his work, ‘I’m living the American dream’ — nice guy.)
Actually travel works the same way — getting lost, or being in surroundings you aren’t familiar with at least, is part of the process of building many great travel experiences.
One ofmy favorite ‘lost’ episodes, from travel I mean, was simply riding a motorbike on a random dirt road out of Phnom Penh, Cambodia — trying to follow the Mekong River as far as I could go. I passed dusty villages sun-drying red chiles on the road itself. At one small village I finally stopped — to see what would happen. Soon I was enveloped by about 25 people, mostly kids, and was soon led off ‘tomeet uncle’– we weaved on our motorbikes another 30 minutes, via two-foot wide paths over sunken rice fields, to a tiny duck farm, where uncle swayed in a hammock by an open hut. We had some duck eggs and chuckled at the language barrier.
I love seeing places like Angkor Wat or the Taj Mahal, but often it’s the other things discovered in a trip I remember more. So I always leave deliberate room inmy itineraries to have no idea where I’m going or what I’m doing. That approach, common for many travelers, reminds me of another passage in Solnit’s book, of an old Buddhist story, with a man galloping by a monk who asks, ‘Where are you going?’ And the man replies, ‘Ask the horse.’

7 things I hate about travel
I love travelling, but I do have a few complaints…
1. Too many other travellers.The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre noted that “hell is other people”. This pretty much covers how I feel about the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) estimate that there were 880 million international trips in 2009. A large proportion of these trips are taken in the northern hemisphere’s summer months, especially July and August. Or they are taken whenever and wherever I go.Although, always a little bit ahead of me. So they’ll typically be queuing in front of a museum in their thousands when I arrive, or crowding into a restaurant I want to eat at.
Evidence of this can be found in the photo below of the Spanish Steps in Rome when I was there in April. Spot the steps?

Solution: First, don’t go in the peak season (typically, the summer months). Second, get upearly or go late — if there is access to the sight at night, and it’s safe. Third, go somewhere off the beaten path. Instead of Italy, go to Lebanon.
2. Touts.
Wikipedia defines a Tout as “any person who solicits business or employment in an importune manner”. Importune is the key word here. Trying to sell me stuff is not annoying in itself, it is the persistence: either the individual persistence...