Video has all but replaced sight seeing

A contrarian post in this Christmas traveling season.

Sure, there is a buzz in going there and I've done a bit of that be it walking down the rim of a volcano in Indonesia, walking up the Champs Elysees in Paris, absorbing the silence of falling snow in the Swiss Alps, gazing up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, watching wild horses run in meadows outside Seattle. Et cetera.

They were all moving experiences.

But I've seen so much more without going there. The last village in Indian Kashmir and the irony of the border, the windswept town at the southern tip of Chile before the freezing wastes of Antarctica, the European capitals with their cookie cutter layout of being built on either side of rivers with pretty bridges spanning them, the depths of the Grand Canyon, the remoteness of the Australian Outback, the samba in Brazil, the teeming wildlife in Africa, misty Machu Picchu... and dozens of other places I will never see in person.

Video has changed everything. With their drone shots and close ups and on the ground reporting, travel industry folks and vloggers today bring you experiences as near to real as dammit. If you are just traveling to see the sights, video has all but replaced going there.

If you are slow traveling to stay in a place to seep in its culture over weeks or months, that's still worth doing. But then you gotta have some work there for a reason to stay and pay your way.

I'm ready to be a digital nomad but not a sightsee-er.

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