As Raleigh International announces its plans to ban smartphones, just how has the mobile affected travel for the younger generation?
Raleigh International, the adventure programme that hosted both the Prince and Princess of Wales during their gap years, has announced that it intends to ban smartphones in order to enable their youthful participants to actually get to know each other a bit, instead of whiling away their evenings under the tent canvas lit by a phone screen – something they’ve apparently been wont to do, of late.
“In the post-Covid world,” according to Lucy Constable Fernandez, managing director of Raleigh International, “a lot of young adults report that they find it difficult to have those face-to-face interactions. There is increased anxiety.”
Increased anxiety? There was a time when the WHOLE POINT of travel was to leave behind the security of friends and family and come face-to-face with an anxiety-inducing, unfamiliar world. Learning to grapple with that world was “character-building”, as people used to say. An alien land was, in a sense, a training ground.
For instance, we can easily imagine the anxiety felt at times by the great twentieth-century explorer Freya Stark, a lone Western woman in remote Arab lands without recourse to a GPS and mobile. Yet through all her years of travelling – and she was someone who travelled even in her 99th year – very little happened to her that was seriously untoward. She learned to measure herself, and she learned to measure those she encountered.