What is Immersive Travel?

One of the biggest misconceptions about immersive travel is that it is an extended vacation. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Immersive travel, whether it’s a study abroad or work abroad experience becomes real life. 

If you move to France for work or school, your days are not an endless Carrie-goes-to-Paris-in-Sex-and-the-City movie reel. Rather, they include such glamorous activities as  figuring out how to recycle without hearing from 5 different neighbours that you did it wrong, or trying to decipher the grade you received on your paper in the Lycée‘s strange marking system where everything is out of 20, and 10 out of 20 is an average grade, 12 is good, 14 is great, and almost no one ever gets a higher than a 16 out of 20 grade.

In Mali it means doing everything that you would normally do in a day, but without a sink. Worse, it can entail figuring out how to get rid of your monthly waste in the absence of well-functioning garbage removal like we get in the global North. Seriously, my neighbours would rifle through my garbage there so I was hesitant to broadcast my time of the month to the whole street.

Since my first immersive travel experience more than a decade ago, I’ve maintained that one of the easiest ways to get a feel for the local culture is to do something mundane while you’re there, like renewing a license or paying a bill. In France for example, their bureaucracy rivals Canada’s in its seemingly endless and not always sensible layers. Whereas in Mali, if you need anything, you just have to know a guy. You’ll have a go-to taxi driver, a security guard, a doctor, and even a bureaucrat who is more than happy to expedite things for you for a fee of course. 

Indeed, moving abroad for work or school is simply living real life in a strange place and that can present daily challenges for even the most mundane things. Despite these challenges,  I still believe that it is one of the most eye-opening, character-building, educational, and rewarding experiences that you can have.

This in depth article in Medium explains how a change of scenery can increase happiness and a sense of wonder for a spell in the same way the same way buying a new car might. But soon enough, your new car just becomes your car. You stop caring about whether or not it’s clean all the time, the compliments stop rolling in, and you drive your car to and from work without thinking about it just like you did with your old car. They call this the “Box of Daily Experience”.

Similarly, when living abroad your new home simply becomes your home. You can just as easily slip into auto-pilot while on a work-away as you can while going through the daily drudgery in your home country. This tendency to normalize is so hard-wired into our brains that even a dramatic change of scenery will eventually become mundane. The pull to complacency is so strong that Alistair Humphreys has made a name for himself by encouraging people to break up their daily monotony with “micro-adventures” as a way to re-inject wonder in and amusement into their lives, wherever they may call home.

Building on the point that living abroad is not one big highlight reel, it’s important to remember that when you put down roots somewhere you will start to see what is bad about a place too. In France for example, I loved my time there and was shown the epitome of hospitality, but was shocked by how a place with such refinement in terms of food and the arts, could also be so casually racist.

In those situations, it’s rather tricky to talk to a local about what you don’t like about their culture, and the people back home can’t relate to what you’re going through either, so you’re often left to deal with those complicated feelings alone. The French even have a specific term for this phenomenon, it’s called being dépaysé, or that lonely feeling you get when you’re outside of your home country.

Even worse, if something tragic happens when you’re living abroad, it can feel extra awful. You may not have your nearest and dearest by you to offer you support, and the locals may cope in a way that seems incomprehensible to you, which can only worsen your dépaysement. To illustrate this point, during my time in Mali, I witnessed a horrific vehicle accident that where there was a fatality. That is never something anyone should have to see but I struggled with how many of my local friends and host family responded to them.

Many of them just shrugged their shoulders casually and said “it must have been God’s will.” I was a wreck after seeing it and wondered if I was overreacting by being so upset considering how cavalier my Malian mates were being. I couldn’t help but feel like in if this accident had happened in North America, people would be demanding answers as to why this life was lost. Someone would be held accountable.  Someone would have to pay. But there are just so many challenges in Mali that people view death as commonplace and something that can’t be prevented at any stage in life. Their seemingly callous attitude wasn’t a reflection on their character; rather, it was a reaction to the daily difficulties that someone living in one of  the poorest countries in the world must face.

So far from being an extended highlight reel, living abroad can be both challenging and rewarding. I’ve always felt that it’s more like a roller coaster, where your highs are really high, as in awe-inspiring, take your breath away, stay with you forever high, but your lows can be really, really low. Talking about the lows with family and friends back home is never easy.

So How Much did You See?

If you’ve ever done an immersive travel experience, you will have undoubtedly been asked a question like “since you were there for XX months/years, how much of Country YY did you see?”. It’s a fair question, but I think it also stems from that misguided notion that when you live abroad, you’re spending all your time there with a backpack on hitting all the notable tourist sights in a country. If you are working or studying, you are bound by the same limitations of real life the same way that you would at home.

Most importantly, living abroad is about making good relationships with the people who live there, whether developing a rapport with the person who sells you fresh fruit on weekdays with such regularity that she quizzes you about where you were when you miss seeing her for a few days travelling for work, or going to dinner at your colleague’s house. It’s forming relationships that will last with you for a lifetime. It’s seeing the kind man whose shop I visited for months say goodbye to me with tears in his eyes when I told him that I was making my last purchase there.  When I realised how much our seemingly trivial interactions had meant to him, I too felt tears swell in my eyes. Perhaps unsurprisingly,  it’s the relationships that we have with the people in our lives that matter the most, whether at home or abroad.