Travel, or movement, is fundamental to and inseparable from the human experience. And after
visiting one hundred and twenty countries, I believe in its sacredness more than ever, in its
ability to foster wisdom, compassion, and empathy. Yet the best travelling requires little physical
movement and pays little philosophical respect to borders and walls and passports. Travelling,
for me, simply recognizes that a world exists outside my own personal one; communities of
human beings breathe and laugh and love outside my house, town, city, and country. And they,
too, demand reverence. Travelling, for me, is about honouring and acknowledging and respecting
connection. It is about accepting the interconnectedness of all things, debunking the myth of the
individual, and rejecting the tenets of isolation and fear. It is about learning about other people in
ethical ways. It is about valuing and protecting difference. It is about bearing witness to injustice
and suffering and working to eradicate them in solidarity with those affected. Travel humbles.
Travel challenges. Travel changes. In the age of nationalism, movement’s antagonist, travelling
must encourage empathy because empathy is revolutionary.
Yet in an age where people travel more than ever before—whether seeking pleasure,
permanence, or protection—the kinds of movement tolerated and promoted by states has sharply
declined. The tourism industry is one of the great cogs of the world economy, as in 2016, alone,
it pumped 7.6 trillion US dollars into the global coffers. The industry affects and influences
many segments of a national economy, including hospitality, transportation, and entertainment.
In terms of tourists themselves, their arrivals increased from 528 million in 2015 to 1.19 billion
in 2015. Europe receives the most international tourists while producing the most tourists—635

million in 2017. The Middle East and Africa sent the fewest tourists, 42.1 and 39.8 million
tourists, respectively. Tourism shows no signs of slowing and certainly no signs of escaping the
clutch of capitalism or existing outside its logic of profit maximization or embracing anyone who
does not possess the funds, or papers, to visit Europe or North America. For a certain portion of
the world’s population, travel has never been easier and more convenient; for the other, much
larger, pool, it has never been fraught with so many obstacles.

I am of the privileged category. I find it rather curious when people call me adventurous
or independent or courageous. I have the ability to do these things through no great effort of my
own. I have the financial means. I have the time. And, most importantly, I have the passport.
Whenever I cross a border, I am rarely met with derision or suspicion. Whenever I hand over my
passport to an immigration agent, whether in a polished airport or a decrepit building at a land
crossing, I feel no great trepidation as they rifle through the pages filled with stamps and
multicoloured visas or when they check my details against what appears on their computer
screen or when they compare my passport photo with the actual human standing before them. I
experience no great anxiety under this silent interrogation, no great fear from being pinned down
and analyzed under a microscope’s hot light because I know I belong. I know, for me, a border is
a mere administrative hurdle, something requiring a little patience, a bit of resolve—certainly
nothing dangerous. For the border guards, my Canadian passport humanizes me more than my
words, thoughts, and experiences. I need prove nothing to them other than my birthplace. My

Canadian passport speaks for me. It grants me access to the world; it gives me the privilege to
move.
I have seen others with more unfamiliar passports, more suspect documentation—with
more bent or torn pages—experience the border in different ways. On a shared taxi ride between
Yerevan and Tbilisi, I sat beside an Iranian man over the undulating hills of northern Armenia
until the Georgian border when he disappeared, like a ghost, somewhere within the Georgian
immigration building and never reemerged and never returned to his seat next to me, which sat
empty, unoccupied, all the way to touristy Tbilisi. On a bus journeying the ten kilometres
between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, I watched Palestinian commuters disembark at the border,
form a line in the rain, and wait patiently to have their documents checked by young Israeli
soldiers holding automatic weapons, and I continued to watch them, the Palestinians, wait
outside the bus, wait to have their dignity approved by armed military personnel when another
Israeli soldier, much younger than I with machine gun draped over his shoulder, entered the dry
bus, asked for my passport and nonchalantly glanced at it before moving on his way. On the
border between Ghana and Togo, I followed my Togolese guide as he approached a Ghanaian
official, showed him his identification, and was promptly asked for a bribe to return to his
country of birth, and when the official realized my guide had no such money and saw me—tall
and white—standing behind him and waiting, he motioned for me to pass, and it was only when I
said the Togolese man was my guide that the Ghanaian official did his duty and allowed both of
us to leave his country.
And I have seen episodes and I have heard stories of others who have tried to travel to my
country—or the nation-state on whose land I had the particular fortune of being born upon—and
have had great difficulty accessing the land of the red maple leaf. Checking in and boarding

Canada-bound flights from Bogota or Addis Ababa, I have witnessed people who usually do not
look like me have their documents scrutinized, their stories checked, and their credibility judged.
In the customs areas of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, I have witnessed Spanish-
speaking families ordered to unpack their suitcases and answer a litany of questions about their
purpose for travelling to Canada as well as their itinerary in the country. I have read about those
travellers who have had their asylum claims rejected or have had committed a crime and are
deemed a flight risk imprisoned in detention facilities for years without trial, only having access
to hearings that may run into perpetuity. I have read about those travellers who cannot prove
their relationship to any other country or whose country of birth refuses to receive them and who
must then sit and wait behind bars and within pens, and who grow so desperate and distraught
that they take their own lives in Canadian prisons and detention facilities. I have read about the
Canada Border Services Agency’s desire to increase deportations of failed asylum claimants and
other desirables 35 per cent, which would amount to around ten thousand people removed per
years. I have read about the recent attempt by the Canadian Liberal government to reduce the
number of asylum claimants in the country by amending the Immigration and Protection Act to
disqualify any asylum seekers who have made a refugee claim in any other country. And I have
read about the populist resurgence in Canada, mainly among its white citizens, who fear the
shading of the populace and who desire more walls and more border security and more respect
for traditional Canadian values, whatever those may be.
And here among insular communities, or parochial ways of being, does travel have the
greatest potential to disrupt and oppose such thinking. Travel’s effect on people lies not so much
in its physically bridging of different people and cultures but its psychological connecting of
disparate parts: how it engenders a particular way of thinking about other people. Travel

encourages a mode of thought transcending nationalism’s provincial concerns, a method of
empathy prioritizing the inherent value of all and of seeking commonalities through our
differences: the essential paradox holding the key to our collective survival.
Yet I have also seen travel used to reinforce an othering that reduces locals to nothing
more than mannequins to be dressed and posed and photographed. On the Filipino island of
Bohol, along the Lobuc River, I watched hordes of tourists, myself among them, disembark a
tour boat and snap photos of an Indigenous group dressed in traditional cloths, particularly of a
young girl who danced on a makeshift stage to Gangnam Style while Psy’s voice reverberated
through speakers and out into the jungle. In Jodhpur, India, I descended from the fifteenth-
century Mehrangarth Fort, traversed the sprawling alleyways painted in a glorious blue, and
watched a tourist physically position a local child so that she could best capture him and the
beautifully blue chaos of Jodhpur with her mighty DSLR camera. On the cashew-shaped Thai
island of Koh Phi Phi, I walked past bronzed-skinned, shades-sporting white boys and girls who
worked the island’s bars and scuba shops and then offered me discounts on PADI courses and
rum cocktails, and I noticed the locals riding bicycles and selling souvenirs seep into the few
remaining cracks not yet filled by the expatriate and they all seemed resigned to the necessity of
the tourist dollar, the inevitability of this invasion.
To have any relevance, travel must escape the logics of both capitalism and narcissism; it
must become more than simply an expensive mirror for our own vanity. Travel is cosmopolitan
in its outlook and focuses on communities of people, not communities of states. It bears witness
to and stands in solidarity with the world of people. Travel surpasses the level of policy, the
parliaments and assembly halls of states the world over, and instead fosters new relationships
between the self and the world. It demands we see ourselves as connected, as part of the same

web of relations, parts of the same ecosystem. Travel resurrects notions of hospitality from the
service industry and instead asks communities how they may support people on the move, out of
place, or in need of protection. It asks communities to open their doors to the world without
demanding gratitude or thanks, without asking for anything in return. Travel bolsters personal
epiphanies, revolutions of the soul. It rejects ideas of altruism and idealism and instead replaces
them with notion of being in the world, the radical potential of merely thinking about other
people.
Travel need not require physical movement; travel exists in the books we read, among the
people with whom we interact, and how we filter and interpret the information presented to us
daily. One of my greatest travelling experience happened at student pub at York University in
2004; I was an undergraduate at the time and was prone to engage in drunken arguments for the
sake of engaging in drunken arguments. Over pints and cigarettes, my friend and I were
discussing Bush’s war on terror and his compartmentalizing the world into evil and non-evil
parts. We derided his simplicity and cruelty—and how one typically flowed from the other—in
his recent invasion of Iraq and his fearmongering over Iran and its supposed threat to world
peace. Not realizing the ramifications of what I was saying, I asked my friend, somewhat
rhetorically, somewhat drunkenly, whether the people, the average citizen, who thirsted to bomb
Iran could actually locate Tehran, its capital, on a map. If a person has troubled themselves
enough to find a city on a map, if they have shielded themselves enough against the constant
barrage of war-hungry rhetoric to have the resolve, a sense of duty perhaps, to locate that city of
eight million inhabitants and, maybe, wonder about the fate of just one person under a blizzard of
bombs, then, I reasoned, they would surely reject war, catastrophe, and massacre, would surely
reason that a people are not their government, and would surely shout that any freedom project

dependent upon the slaughter of human beings is less about freedom and more about empire. Of
course, at the time, my argument was nothing more than a drunken attempt to sound worldly and
wiser than my years would suggest. Yet I still believe that travel nourishes compassion and
consideration, not in a hierarchal or condescending way in which people are mere objects to be
rescued, mere pawns to be paraded across a stage to satisfy other, and more egregious motives.
Travel centres power in its analysis and asks why some can move and others cannot. Travel
spotlights hospitality and asks why some are welcomed and others not. Travel focuses on
empathy and asks why some are thought of and others not.