Can you remember the last time you visited a new place and didn’t already know what it would look or feel like? If you’re like me, you can spin through a rolodex of Instagram images in your brain or screenshots from a hit TV show to imagine yourself somewhere before you’ve even boarded the plane. I’d be hard-pressed to recall the last time I blindly went somewhere without having a very clear picture of what the experience would look like and feel like already crystalized in my mind.
As I made this observation recently to my husband, I racked my brain to think of the last time I had an “unadulterated” travel experience. It’s almost impossible these days to go somewhere that surprises you because you’ve already seen dozens of viral TikToks about seemingly every travel experience on earth. Nothing is a true wonder anymore, or so it seems. But I don’t like that. I want to be surprised when I travel. I want to feel like I’ve discovered something. I want to see something for the first time with my own eyes rather than through the iPhone lens of some influencer.
The last time I went somewhere without really knowing anything about it, or having any visual expectations whatsoever, was Jordan. It was 1997 and I was a 15-year old sophomore in high school doing a four-month exchange program. Social media didn’t exist and I didn’t even think to pick up a guidebook before boarding a Royal Jordanian flight from NYC in late August ’97. I was young, dumb and completely naive about a country that I hadn’t even heard of until earlier that year when I met the two Jordanian girls from Amman who were studying at my boarding school in Connecticut.
I landed in Amman with a senior from my school who I didn’t know at all. I walked out of the airport and remember the sun being so bright I couldn’t open my eyes. The long drive from the airport into the city was a clay-hued monotone desert dotted with lone buildings and the odd person on the side of the road selling fruit. After an early morning spent watching the news about Princess Diana’s death with my host mom, the next few months were spent like your average high school autumn semester – taking the public bus to school, wandering around Amman, watching movies at friends’ houses, and ‘wild’ Friday nights at the Hard Rock Cafe. Hey, it was the ’90s.
The weekends were where things got interesting. My host family would put me on a bus to some historical site or send me on a road trip with a British couple who were teachers at the high school. We explored the ancient Roman city of Jerash, right outside Amman, posing for film photos against the towering columns. We drove out to Mount Nebo, where Moses saw the Promised Land and we saw Jerusalem in the distance, and we gawked at a dusty, mosaic map of the Holy Land from the 6th century in Madaba.
The crown jewel of one of these weekend road trips was a bus ride out to Petra with stops at the Dead Sea and Wadi Rum. Today, I’m sure there are a lot of 15-year olds who know what these places look like because they’ve seen an influencer decked out in a headscarf posing in front of a geodesic dome in the Jordanian desert. Back in 1997, I had absolutely zero idea what any of these places were, let alone their visual impact and ‘wow’ factor. I remember rolling my eyes as my host mom pushed me onto the bus in downtown Amman, setting out on yet another ‘boring historical journey’ into the countryside. Another weekend, another boring ride out to some boring historical site.
Picture me at 15 getting loaded onto a donkey at the mouth of Petra, zero clue that after 10 minutes of riding this animal through the narrow carved paths of the pink sandstone cliffs towering 100 feet in the air on either side of us, I would be spit out into a clearing with The Treasury right there in front of me. I hadn’t even looked at a picture of Petra before going. I’d never seen the Indiana Jones movie that was filmed there. I was absolutely and utterly in shock from what I was seeing. Genuine surprise and awe. If I were to pick a better place to go in blindly, I don’t think I could come up with something better than Petra. The buildup from that donkey trek alone!
Nearly 30 years later and I can remember exact moments from this day like they were yesterday. I remember the Bedouin tents and herds of goats on the side of the road between Amman and Petra. I remember floating in the Dead Sea while looking at Israel across the water, and bottling up some of the salty water to bring home. Seeing something new for the first time with your own set of eyeballs is such an uncommon experience today that these memories are burned into my brain, creating stronger impressions than Thai beaches and Japanese temples I’ve seen just last year.
I wish more of our travel was about seeing things firsthand IRL for the first time, without any preconceived notions or through the obsessively documented experiences of others. Maybe I need to get off social media. Maybe I need to stop booking trips a year in advance, which gives me dangerously ample time to research and become overly familiar with a destination before touching down. Maybe I need to go places that are off the beaten social media path. I’m afraid places that fit this bill are becoming fewer and farther between, as more people like me strive for a fleeting sense of discovering something new…
