10 ways travel is unrecognisable from decades prior

Travel is different from decades prior. Photo / Unsplash

Including the last two decades as a Lonely Planet guidebook author, Auckland-based freelance travel writer Brett Atkinson has been exploring the world for more than 40 years. After visiting more than 70 countries, here’s his take on how travel has changed since he first ventured to Australia in 1980 and then further afield to the UK and Europe in 1985.

Phoning home

In Vietnam in 1992, or while exploring southern India in 1995, the only option for having a chat with the folks back home was to pre-book a timed slot – usually a few days ahead – in a private kiosk at the local post office or at a dedicated ISD (International Subscriber Dialling) phone booth. Chances are the line back to New Zealand was scratchy and loaded with echo, so for your allocated five minutes you spent a good part of it asking your mum or dad to repeat what they just said. Thankfully the closed door of an ISD booth masked most of the noise from rickshaws and motorbikes whizzing past outside.

The only option for having a chat with the folks back home was to pre-book a timed slot in a private kiosk or phone booth. Photo / Bill Aboudi on Unsplash

Travellers’ cheques and local currencies

Along with getting the requisite visas and vaccinations, another essential pre-departure task was visiting your bank to undertake the laborious task of signing travellers’ cheques. After carefully signing maybe 50 cheques – the procedure was to counter-sign at an overseas bank when cashing them – your precise signature had usually become a meaningless scribble. Until the early 2000s, pre-euro travel involved dealing in Italian lira, Greek drachma and West German deutschmarks, but now it’s all Wise cards or PayWave from your smartphone, and even using an ATM for local currency is largely obsolete. Don’t be surprised if that street food vendor in the backstreets of Bangkok is also now strictly contactless.

Photography

Social media is awash with travel images, and it’s easy to share them at will with friends, family and followers. Multiple photos can be taken to secure that “perfect” shot, unfortunately often negating any sense of spontaneity. A few decades ago, travel photography was strictly film-based, and you had to wait until you got home to get your photos developed. It was a great lesson in patience and, even if some of the images were under- or over-exposed, you got to relive your travels all over again. For better or worse, slideshow evenings of your cousin’s 1982 Contiki bus tour around Europe are now also consigned to history.

Photographs were expensive but they were irreplaceable. Photo / Getty Images

European borders

Travelling by bus with Contiki or Top Deck, or in your own VW Kombi van, crossing borders in Europe was much slower and another exercise in patience. Allowing borderless travel between European countries and now encompassing 29 different nations, the Schengen Agreement was rolled out between 1985 and 1990. Before then, crossing from Austria to Czechoslovakia (now Czechia and Slovakia), or from the western border of Yugoslavia (now Slovenia) to Italy often involved a few hours’ wait at the border. Largely disinterested immigration officials boarded your vehicle, passports were checked and a few bags were randomly searched.

Postcards and poste restante

Before the internet made global communication instantaneous, the world’s interlinked postal services were a traveller’s friend. Hastily scrawled postcards or aerogrammes – sometimes accidentally stained with coffee or beer from the local cafe you were writing them in – were dispatched to New Zealand, while heading north to Europe were regular reminders of home. Arriving in a big city like Rome, Athens or Paris, you hoped a care package from Auckland might be waiting for you at the main post office’s poste restante counter. Three-month-old copies of Metro and Rip It Up magazines were always well-received. Just don’t forget to add a Par Avion (airmail) stamp to speed up delivery.

In the pre-Internet age, postcards and aerogrammes were the main way to stay in touch with home. Photo / Brett Atkinson

Accommodation touts

Hotel websites and apps like Booking.com and Trivago now mean most travellers book accommodation before they arrive in a destination, but preceding the introduction of the internet, getting off a local bus in Siem Reap in Cambodia, or disembarking a Greek ferry at a harbour on Crete meant being confronted by a scrum of accommodation touts. Good luck choosing between Freedom Guesthouse and Guesthouse Freedom, and negotiating a price for the motorbike taxi to take you there. Now, rideshare apps like Grab make zipping on two wheels around Asian megacities like Bangkok or Hanoi a breeze. Especially when you already know where you’ll be spending the next few nights.

Hostel noticeboards

Forget Instagram and #hiddengemsparisbistros, the best social media app for travellers in earlier decades was the humble noticeboard. Trip reports, recommendations of where to go and what not to do, and offers and requests for onward travel were regularly posted and most hostels also had scrapbooks overflowing with travel information, brochures and business cards. Before the conversation-killing arrival of smartphones, tablets and free Wi-Fi, hostels were very social places with chat about Turkey’s best experiences being fuelled by a few Efes beers and rooftop views of Istanbul.

More spontaneous travel

The algorithms of Instagram and TikTok now largely reinforce a more narrow range of destinations – meaning lots of travellers end up with the #samephotoaseverybodyelse – but travel a few decades ago was definitely more spontaneous. Get chatting to someone at the Chiang Rai bus station in Thailand, and you might decide an impulsive detour north to Laos was preferable to heading back south to Chiang Mai. Apparently, Lars from Norway would tell you, there’s now a new boat service running all the way down the Mekong River to Luang Prabang. And in a world without Google Maps and Google Translate, the menu highlights at that riverside restaurant you chanced upon when you got there would be even more surprising.

It’s almost hard to comprehend how much travel has changed in the last 27 years. Photo / Engin Akyurt on Unsplash

Travelling for longer

With cheaper airfares – in the 1980s, a return flight to the UK cost on average a few months’ salary – and with a much wider of destinations able to be reached by air, travellers are now embarking on shorter but more frequent trips. Increased aircraft emissions make it a combination that’s a massive contributor to climate change, and the growth of low-cost airlines around the world also means slower and less-impactful overland travel is largely overlooked. Six weeks in Southeast Asia seeing the highlights of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos is now regarded as long-term travel, but in the 1970s and 1980s, a multi-country and multi-continent overland journey on the Hippie Trail from London to Sydney could take six months venturing through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and India.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a multi-country and multi-continent overland journey on the Hippie Trail from London to Sydney could take six months. Photo / Getty Images

Guidebooks

Inspired by the meandering pathways of the Hippie Trail, the first Lonely Planet guidebook, Across Asia on the Cheap, was published in 1973 and, for a few decades, well-thumbed copies of the travel guides known either as “The Bible” or “The Book” were essential for exploring the world. In today’s fragmented world of countless travel blogs, the uncertain credibility of online reviews and the over-hyped promise of AI travel planning tools, the ability of guidebooks to focus on the best ways to experience a city or country may now be even more important. Including off-the-beaten-path of coverage of alternative destinations, they can help mitigate the negative impact of overtourism. While social media tends to focus on just a few busy highlights, a good guidebook shines a light on the places in between.