Airport security checkpoints have got to be the ultimate yardstick for human evolution. First, you queue – an activity that has set us apart from animals since the invention of the hot beverage. Second, you show an official your ticket so they can be sure you actually have a plane to catch and aren’t just queuing for the sake of it. Then comes the tricky bit: remove shoes, coat, keys, wallet, unpack laptop. Put in plastic bin. Push bin over rollers into dark box of lasers. Walk through metal detector. Beep. Bugger, belt. Start again.
Add the need to do all this at a thousand miles an hour because of the people behind you and we have the ultimate test of co-ordination, comprehension and speed. Pass, and you are the travel maestro; a step above the swing-door king, two ahead of the knight of the registration form. Fluff it, and you might as well change your name back to Homo erectus.
It was during one of these tests at New York’s JFK International Airport that I inadvertently stole a laptop. I aced the security checkpoint and had packed my laptop back into my bag. Clearly still blinded by my success as a modern-day human, I immediately forgot I’d just done that. An exact replica of my laptop popped out of the dark laser box. I grabbed it, packed it and went to my boarding gate … 10 minutes later I was in an interrogation room with two of New York’s finest. I may as well have been in an episode of Law & Order.
One of the officers’ gold badges flickered as it caught the reflection of a slow-turning ceiling fan. ‘You, sir, have got to be the dumbest criminal I have ever met. Who steals a laptop in front of airport security?’
‘Person’, I mumbled, looking at the two matching laptops on the table. ‘Dumbest person.’
They proceeded to do the best good cop, bad cop routine I’d ever seen. They reviewed the CCTV footage, listened to my feeble explanation and finally concluded that I wasn’t a dumb criminal and, as I had explained, just a dumb person. They let me go.
On the aeroplane, I pictured them speeding through the streets of NYC, executing handbrake turns, eating doughnuts and shooting baddies in helicopters with shotguns. I smiled. I’d had an authentic New York City experience – the way I’d always imagined it. Or rather, the way I’d always seen it on TV.
What we see in those moving pictures on the walls of our homes influences how we understand our world. And I’m not just talking about cops-and-robbers shows (at least we know that’s fiction), I’m talking about reality television…
When it comes to reality travel programmes, most miss the golden opportunity to show us something new and insightful. Take for example Top Travel on SABC3, the show that jets you around the world and teaches you absolutely nothing while you’re there. Its good-looking presenters, Jeannie D and Janez Vermeiren, dazzle us on its big brother show, Top Billing. Yet when it comes to travel, they bobble and skate the surface of ‘must-see’ golf courses, ski resorts, spas and hotels with all the dexterity and insight of a pair of Chihuahuas hobbling around in high heels.
Excessive adhesion to this sort of mindless TV is causing dark gooey spots in our brains; spots that could be scanned for by airport security (I mean, the dark laser box is already there) and flagged as ‘dangerous’ because they make us forget that travelling isn’t about throwing parties and catching tans, it’s about releasing prejudices and giving yourself over to a place and its people.
But there is hope. Maybe one day we’ll get to a point where we’ve become so desperately discombobulated that broadcasters will start scraping the top of the barrel to which more discerning, Michael Palin-type presenters are stuck like wise old pieces of chewing gum. Presenters who realise that travelling smarter doesn’t mean stuffing your traveller’s cheques in your underpants; it means having a purpose to explore a new culture.
Column taken from Excess Baggage (Getaway magazine November 2013 – on sale now). In the December issue, Tyson Jopson wonders if Gauteng’s eToll gantries might be better suited as an ancient relic. Read it on shelves 25 November.
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