Notes

Global Meltdown
Annette Kobak (BBC The Art of Travel) BBC 2/1994 P.12

travellers' penchant for solitude

abroad isn't as abroad as it used to be. - Jan Morris
queue to climb Everest
even the most far flung places are relatively commonplace

journeys have been such a profound and ambivalent part of the human psyche ever since God cursed Cain and packed him off east of Eden, condemned to be a fugitive and a vagabond.

Robert Louis Stevenson famously described the normadic urge in its purest form:
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go; I travel for travel's sake ... to feel the needs and hitches of life a littel more nearly; to get down off this feathered bed of civilisation ...

open-endedness
unprotected by home and familiarity, it has a hardship component

prilgrimage ... to trust what life might offer you along the way, good or bad.

everything, in fact, which belongs to your everyday life, is merely a hindrance.

unmediated,
reduced to essentials

As a lone figure in the landscape, you are gradually tempered by it, you acclimatise, learn to observe and respect details: if you don't, you might not survive.

psychological isolation
relentlessly self-scruntinising

We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. - Humbert Humbert, Lolita