Sight-skipping

Sometime in May 2008, I was sitting on a train crossing Central Java, en route from Bandung to Surabaya. Almost exactly halfway through the journey, the train pulled in to the station at Yokyakarta, a small city famous for being the gateway to Borobudur, the largest Buddhist archaeological site in the world. Once it had stopped, the train disgorged a handful of passengers, took a few more on, and resumed its course eastward. 

I stayed in my seat, watched Yogya recede from view as the train got up to speed, and skipped what is probably the biggest man-made sight in Southeast Asia after Angkor Wat. I didn’t regret the decision then, and I don’t regret the decision now, five years later. I had been on the road for three months. I was weary of sightseeing. I just wanted to move.

The handful of big sights I’ve seen in my life (the man-made ones, that is), have been an incredible bore and disappointment to me. Not because they were smaller, uglier, or more defiled than I had imagined, but simply because nothing at all happened when I saw them. One day in Sydney, for example, I walked past the Opera House and over the Harbour Bridge. That’s it. There’s no story to the experience, just as there never is in  sightseeing. The grand sights of Sydney were boring, as was the Grand Palace of Bangkok, the Empire State Building, all of Washington, D.C.

The most interesting and memorable part of Sydney, in fact, was my nearly unhinged middle-aged roommate who got drunk on boxed wine almost every night and told me about the plans he and his girlfriend had to resurrect dinosaurs from the rich jungle soil of Vanuatu. In retrospect, the time I spent seeing the sights—and not chatting with this loony character—seems like a waste. 

Paul Theroux wrote that sightseeing “has all the boredom and ritual of a pilgrimage and none of the spiritual benefits.” I have to agree. The few times I’ve gone out sightseeing, it has always been with a sense of duty. Up until the day before I passed through Yogyakarta, I had intended to do what I was supposed to—go see Borobudur, snap a picture, be able to say I had seen it. But my road-weariness made me realize I was simply following what other people thought I should care about, not what I actually did care about. So I passed it up.

Was my travel experience necessarily richer for having skipped this major attraction? Hard to know. But I do know that the best memories from that trip involve people rather than sights, and if the choice were between either seeing the wonders of the world or skipping them and having more days like the one I had in Medan—where two college guys befriended me, taught me how to ride a motorbike, and introduced me to goat meat and durian—I’d take the latter in a heartbeat.

Now that I’m going to be doing some traveling again, I’ll probably be skipping a lot more sights. What I hope is that, in skipping them, I can maximize the experiences that make travel truly rewarding—namely, human connection, and honest observation of what makes a place tick. It’s not always easy. Travel can be lonely, and the days can be long. Sightseeing is often a way to fill a void of time. But I’m convinced that simply existing in a place, maintaining a slow pace and an open mind, is a more likely route to travel fulfillment than dutifully trekking from one sight to the next.

After all, the people living in a place rarely go out of their way to gawk at the local monuments and grand buildings. What New Yorker cares about the Statue of Liberty? Life happens elsewhere, and the life is what I’m most interested in when I visit a place. To see it, absorb it, and be richer for it.

Postscript

None of the above applies to the genuine grandeur and awe of the natural world. The sight of Mount Rainier trumps any other experience I know of.