The card of the helpless traveler

I sometimes tend to forget I have it, yet I always have it with me: it’s the card of the helpless traveler. It’s like an get out of jail free card, but I can use it in almost any situation. Whenever I seem to lose myself in local criteria that I don’t know, I can always bail out: I just pull my helpless traveler card out. Yet I sometimes tend to forget it, while it was just there the whole time, and I didn’t thought of taking it out. Stupid me.

I was hitch-hiking from Toulouse to Bordeaux when it got to me: ‘this traveler-rhetoric is super powerful!’ I can make almost anyone envious, I can make eyes sparkle with joy, curl lips in an ear-to-ear smile: I simply talk about freedom and traveling so that it turns even myself dizzy. I talk about exploring our communal roots, our heredity and history, and our current cultural reality.

I was standing on an entrance for the ring way in an outskirt of Toulouse. It was cold. A cold wind was blowing into my face. My eyes teared. I knew I wouldn’t get a lift by crying, yet I couldn’t help it. I held up a piece of paper with big letters ‘BORDEAUX’ and tried to look inviting to the passers-by. But the wind blew my face into a sad, drowsy grimace and I couldn’t help but feeling the sadness my face was expressing.

I changed my strategy. I noticed that every car that drove onto that entrance where I was standing, drove in the right direction, although they were mostly making faces as if it wasn’t their direction. They were doing the ‘je suis désolé’-face that only the French can feign so sympathetically. Of course I didn’t suspect one of them to drive all the way to Bordeaux. So I took a new piece of paper and wrote in even bigger letters ‘NORD.’ It didn’t work any better. In the meanwhile I was trying to guess what they were thinking but didn’t come up with anything optimistic.

The wind was merciless. My hands were freezing and I took a little pause to warm my hands. I shoved them in the inside of my boxers, gripping them around the warm flesh of my ass cheeks. I stood there ridiculously, but I didn’t care. I convinced myself not to care that much. ‘I’m not what they think I am,’ I said to myself, ‘I am very special kind of tourist with a very special mission, and that makes me interesting.’ I found some good arguments to boost to my confidence. I smiled self-satisfied and I took a third piece of paper and wrote in giant ugly letters ‘NORTH’ and I assumed the face of an American world traveler, the sort everyone knows, the sort everyone can understand, the sort… well, it’s a ‘sort’ and that says enough!

So there I was standing, as a dumb, superficial tourist with a confident (arrogant) smile on his face. Yep, I was one those for a moment. And it felt easy. People looked and knew what they saw. One of those.

A young guy in a Volkswagen Golf stopped. ‘I’m a Belgian traveling through France,’ I explained (in French), and I asked to ride along al little while. He was a student on his way to another part of Toulouse. He would normally take the first exit, but he drove a bit further. And that bit became more than 20km, ‘avec plaisir.’

He told me that ‘north’ is ‘nord’ in French. I answered him that I knew that, but that I just wrote it to catch people’s attention, that it makes me to belong to a category that people can identify easier. He forgave me this mortal sin and asked me where I was from. ‘Ghent,’ I answered, and I narrated how I traveled from Lyon to Aix-en-Provence, to Avignon, to Montpellier, to Perpignan, and to Toulouse, and that I’m now on my way to Bordeaux. We talked about travelling, global networks as couchsurfing and the prices of hostels in France, etc. etc. He also asked me what my motives and goals were. I talked about my passion for travelling and difference, and my goal to know this continent we live in, from within the language, from within its day-to-day popular culture.

It’s a strong rhetoric: see the world from the perspective of others, and all that, - while in reality it’s no more than a noble goal. There is no knowledge to be found in a diversity of perspectives. Diversity isn’t practical. We want absolute knowledge, absolute and universal knowledge, for everyone, everywhere and at every time! ‘Cause in the end, it’s already a big challenge to follow some sophisticated reasoning from one of our closest friends.

Tolerance, diversity and polyvalence sounds very attractive, and it makes sense also, but it’s not realistic. We can’t assume an unanimity, we can’t speak in authority in many languages at once. We talk to people, and we adapt our voice to whom we are talking to. Diversity is weak, and it will always be. It’s almost paradoxical that a diversity gets that much attention by that travelers rhetoric. Blending in makes me weak. I'm stronger as a 'helpless tourist'. It's just a way of demarcation, a way of identifying and categorizing myself vis-à-vis the other.

Couchsurfing.com is thought to be a means to exchange couches. It is explained as if we surf couches the same way we surf from website to website. But if there is something that creates enough swell to form a surfable wave, then it’s this rhetoric of traveling, and subsequent it’s rhetoric of diversity, of learning from others by looking at the world from by their side, and share their vantage point for a moment. This is what I do. And I guess I’m the only one that would explain it the way I just did.

(I’m not writing a lot of English blogs because I simply don’t get a lot of stimulation from the French I meet. I thought most young French people saw English as an international language too.)