The Amazing Race 34, Episode 2

Munich, Bavaria (Germany) - Innsbruck (Austria)

Filming of The Amazing Race was interrupted by the outbreak of COVID-19 in the middle of the previous season of the reality-TV show about travel around the world, just as broadcasts of the first season of the show were interrupted, just days after the premiere, by the events of 11 September 2001.

In both cases, the show (eventually) went on. But for how long (perhaps for the rest of our lives?) will travellers who lived through these times continue to divide our thoughts of travel into what it was like before and after the outbreak of COVID-19 as well as before and after 9/11?

It’s too soon to tell which one of these inflection points will prove to have been of larger or more lasting significance. But this first season of The Amazing Race produced entirely in the shadow of COVID-19, and twenty years after the launch of the show, is an occasion to think about some of the changes in travel as depicted on The Amazing Race.

9/11 changed how governments relate to travellers, accelerating and providing excuses for the implementation of pre-existing authoritarian agendas for greater surveillance and control of travel. But since the adoption of passport requirements in the second half of the 20th century, international travel has almost always entailed a certain amount of bureaucratic friction including passport checks. (Exceptions have included, at times, travel between the USA and Canada and travel within the European Union.) The changes since 9/11 have been annoying, but governments and the travel industry have been working to make travel surveillance and control as frictionless and “touchless” (except for those who are prevented from travelling or on whom other adverse consequences are imposed) as it is omnipresent. Aside from acquiescing to these often-invisible “security” measures, most travellers fairly quickly went back to travelling the same way they did before 9/11. For the most part, they visit the same places, and do the same things, as they otherwise would have.

I think some of the other dimensions of changes in travel are likely to be longer lasting if not permanent:

The pandemic continues to impact where and when people choose to travel, what means of transportation they use, and what activities they engage in, even for those people who have resumed travelling. In this second episode of The Amazing Race 34, masks were never seen, even in the background, and COVID-19 was never mentioned. But the cast and crew travelled by car, driving themselves, not by public transit. The race was scheduled during the European summer, when it was easiest to arrange primarily outdoor activities. And the few indoor activities were in relatively uncrowded settings — not like the real-world Oktoberfest crowds.

Smartphones existed in 2001 when The Amazing Race began, but they were rare and expensive. Most people in the USA didn’t yet have a cellphone, much less a smartphone, and would remain unaware of what smartphones could do (or even of their existence) until after the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007.

In 2001, a cellphone or smartphone was a supplement to the “normal” tools and methods of travel research, reservations, and navigation, with which travellers were already familiar. Today, of course, the norm is for travellers to have a smartphone. And that’s been the case for long enough now that, as we saw in this episode of The Amazing Race 34, a generation has grown up without ever knowing a world without smartphones and the services to which they give access.

“I’ve never navigated without a phone,” one of the racers said this week. For this generation, using paper maps and a compass wasn’t reverting to the “old” (familiar) way, but trying to do things in a “new” way they had never tried before, and learned only as part of their preparation for the race. One of the younger racers was surprised, for example, to discover on the race that a magnetic compass doesn’t work very well inside the metal body of a car.

The corolllary of this for The Amazing Race may be less obvious: As long as contestants aren’t allowed to bring cellphones, smartphones, or other connected digital devices with them on the race, older “non-digital natives” should have a substantial advantage in navigation — which has often been decisive in the race — and other offline travel skills. That advantage of age and experience could increase with time if offline ways of accomplishing travel tasks become increasingly forgotten as archaic. And older travellers have the same advantage in the real world when they find themselves without a smartphone or without a signal. Much the same applies to driving a car with a manual transmission, something the racers are given as a challenge at least once in almost every season.

Aside from map and compass navigation, what offline travel skills are being forgotten in the smartphone era?

The Amazing Race has been on the air for twenty years. The relationship between television and reality has changed, and in some respects reversed, for the generation that has been watching this show for as long as they can remember, as several members of the cast this season have mentioned doing. When it launched, both the cast and the viewing audience brought to the reality-TV show their pre-existing experiences of what “real” travel was or would be like. For a generation that has grown up watching The Amazing Race since their childhood, it’s this show and others like it on the Travel Channel and elsewhere that have shaped their expectations of what real-world travel will be like.

The is is part of a larger phenomenon in which people travel with the intent and expectation of replicating what they’ve seen on so-called influencers’ Instagram and on YouTube channels. This isn’t entirely new, of course: there have long been travellers whose trips were defined by the iconic locations they “captured” in snapshots. But I think that something of spontaneity and serendipity can get lost if we get too fixated on what we think we are going to see, do — or learn.

Experiencing the unexpected doesn’t require going to the back of beyond. The more “remote” a location is, the more limited we may be in our choices of how to get there and what to do there. But it does require travelling with an open mind as to what will happen or will prove significant. As I say on the home page of my Web site, travel is an activity, not an industry; an experience, not a product. We may pay for transportation and for places to sleep, just as we may pay for schooling, but we can’t buy experience any more than we can buy enlightenment — even if, in the best of worlds, travel sometimes brings us both.