Of course it's true that everything sucks and nothing is as (choose any two) good, hard, wild, fun, cheap, unpredictable, character-building as it used to be. That's true at home as it is out in the world....unless, of course, you happen to get caught up in one of those undeniably adventurous wars, civil disturbances or natural disasters which seem just as plentiful as ever.

I spent a year motorcycling around Latin America just a year or two after a few of the posters above. I found it remarkably easy, for the most part, even without a GPS or cell phone. There were ATMs, for example--when I started traveling there were only travelers checks, redeemable at selected banks in major cities. There was internet, the possibility of which I don't think had even occurred to anyone back in the early seventies. There were Lonely Planet guides, which again didn't even exist when I cut my travel teeth. I didn't use a cellphone, but I certainly could have, and I didn't use booking services for my lodging, although most people did. There were places where not too many tourists much like me went, but no place where we were entirely unknown. So easy, so simple, so predictable, so....un-adventurous.

I also rode around Laos in 2018, and was recently in Central Asia. Those places seemed easy and fairly straightforward to me, too. That's because my points of comparison are skewed by the places I went and the things that I did when I was young, fearless (to a fault), and had nothing much to lose. But even then, everywhere I went people told me how things had changed since the seventies, sixties, fifties, before the war, before the OTHER war....

And they were right, as far as that went. I complain about this too, but when I do I'm mostly trying to cling to a certain sense of myself, the bold and adventurous traveler guy. There are, at best, only scraps of truth in that sort of self-description, and I think this goes for most of us--and Charlie and Ewan, too.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled kvetching. Stay tuned!

Mark