Bristol to Gombola - An Accidental Journey

Say that you like travelling and cold beer without saying it - ed.

A guest star on the blog this week as my friend Alby writes about an eventful journey from England to Italy made all the more rewarding after a broken phone incident.

The journey got off to a false start. As a trio of buses pulled up to my stop, I noticed my railcard was missing from my wallet. Not wishing to commit what some train conductors see as the eighth deadly sin, I decided to awkwardly wave the buses on and return home to get it.

Luckily my housemate, Ned, was in. He is a writer. He’s almost always in. Ned “covers nature, the climate crisis, cricket, music, land access, sometimes not all at the same time”, whilst simultaneously rescuing housemates that have forgotten not only their railcards, but also their house keys. He’s recently been writing an article about how our reliance on GPS maps is altering our relationship with the world around us.

My navigation guru Ned Vessey in full flight

I’d read the drafts the day before and they were very good. His piece rekindled the smartphone sceptic in me and got me thinking. Given that using my phone is altering my brain, I should be devoting a whole lot more energy to understanding when the trade off is worthwhile and when it is damaging. But that could wait for after my month in Italy where even I could see that access to directions - but also tickets, banking, translation and Spotify - would be useful.

Back on the next 73 bus now (they run like clockwork) and I notice my phone has switched itself off and is showing no intention of turning back on. My nearly new iPhone is dead owing to a hardware fault. The gods of Silicon Valley are laughing at me. Now, in a strange twist of fate I am set to travel by public transport from Bristol to Gombola, North Italy (population - about a hundred, Apple stores - zero) without the blue dot of Google Maps that I’d been so innocently slating in conversation with Ned the day before. As someone with an already impressive track record of missed trains, ferries, and buses, it was difficult to see this as good news.

London Paddington to Kings Cross International. My main concern was that finding my own route between trains would be slow… too slow. I feared hastily retraced steps and missed connections but these fears did not materialise. At London Paddington, a friendly member of TFL staff pointed me towards Platform 16 for the Hammersmith & City line which, he assured me, would take me directly to the part of Kings Cross that I needed. Although almost everyone else was heading down an elevator in the opposite direction, I trusted him. As I stepped into the Eurostar departure lounge I doubted whether any app could have got me there quicker.

Gare Du Nord to Gare de Lyon (rush hour). I arrived in Paris confident that another cross-city connection was within my grasp. At first I stood at a distance, weighing up the challenge ahead of me. Everyone was moving very quickly and had it not been for the deafening clatter of turnstile gates, I’m sure you would have been able to hear the tutting as confused tourists slowed the flow. I also noticed that, perhaps in direct retaliation to the London Underground’s charming but confusing naming of lines, the Parisians had chosen a haphazard mixture of numbers, letters and worryingly similar pastel colours, to represent theirs. Whilst I consulted a map on the wall I kept half an eye out for any tips and tricks that would help me get that dreaded turnstile open without a milliseconds delay. Confident that I could get to Gare de Lyon within the hour and without feeling the wrath of a rushing Frenchman, I went for it.

Finding the hostel. Just after nightfall I arrived in Lyon, a city famous for people not really knowing much about it. I was staying in a hostel for the night and so my final leg of travel for the day was about accuracy rather than speed. I prepared by annotating a hand drawn diagram of the city with my hostel’s street name and nearest bridge. Bus networks are notoriously confusing, especially when you need to cross a city, and this one did for me. In the end I caught a bus to the centre and walked the rest of the way, guided by the beautiful Rhône river to my right and the slightly less beautiful diagram in my pocket. Like a train easing into its terminal station having coasted through the suburbs of the city, I got there in the end.

What was it about that blue dot on the Google Maps screen that I had seen as a non-negotiable travel tool just twelve hours before? Perhaps I really felt it would save me precious time between connections. Perhaps I felt I needed the constant reassurance provided by the moving blue dot and the on-screen eta. More than anything, I feared travelling without my Alby sized ‘looking down at my phone’ bubble. In new places and under time pressure I feel vulnerable, socially anxious, and overawed with new information. I believe others do too. We fear that if we stop for five seconds and look around for signs, look lost, look for help, people will know something about us that triggers an uncomfortable, evolutionary response. They will know that we are not from that place, that we don’t fit in here. By having a phone to look at we avoid this uncomfortable feeling by fitting in and looking like we know what we’re doing. Our phones help us find our way eventually, with our bubbles intact, but at what cost to our connection to the world?

Lyon to Gombola. I sat in the square in Serramazoni, a small town in Italy’s verdant Appenine Mountains, waiting for my friend who would arrive to take me to my final destination. I had no way of contacting him, and we’d simply agreed on the afternoon, but I knew he’d come. With time to reflect now I thought about the night bus to the outskirts of Milan, a metro into the centre, a train across to Modena, and then the rural bus service to the place I now found myself. I do not list these journeys as to be boastful - that would make me really quite odd. However, I know that given the option of a phone in my pocket, I’d have used it for every single one of them. With that option taken away and having learned a little bit about looking up, asking for help, and taking note of the important details, I did not miss it one bit.

The final destination - lots of Italian organic veg

A night bus to the outskirts of Milan, a metro into the centre, a train across to Modena, a rural bus to a small town called Serramazoni, two hours in the square waiting for my lift to arrive, and finally, to Gombola, my home for the month. I do not list these journeys as to be boastful - that would make me really quite odd. However, I know that given the option of a phone in my pocket, I’d have used it for every single one of them. With that option taken away and having learned a little bit about looking up, asking for help, and taking note of the important details, I did not miss it one bit.

So I didn’t miss anything, but what did I gain? Cities are a vastly complex web of connections, constantly altering, and I learnt to weave my own ball of string through them. That bubble that my phone provides would have allowed me to float above the web, taking what I needed, but leaving no trace. Instead London, Lyon, Paris, and Milan became more than just a sequence of isolated turnings and metro connections to me. They were places that, whether for just an hour or for a whole day, I became a part of. A small part, one that has contributed little more than a few conversational exchanges, half smiles and short pauses of appreciation for some wonderful station architecture, but a valid part nonetheless. When we travel through and do not allow ourselves to experience the place, we can only leave a negative mark. If we attempt to give ourselves to the places we are in, perhaps we can leave that place a tiny bit warmer, more open, than we found it.

At risk of alighting before it is safe to do so, it is important to acknowledge a couple of things. Firstly, I am a white male. This tends to mean I get a friendly response when asking for help, and I rarely get paid any attention when I stand looking lost. Sadly not everyone will experience these luxuries. It should also be said that not all of these realisations have come to me in the space of 48 hours in Northern Europe. I have for a while questioned whether our smartphones make our lives better. Friends might say I’ve built a personality around it. And yet the serendipity of a broken iPhone opened my mind up to a new way of approaching travel - an exchange between me and the place I am in, from start to finish. Google Maps is one of the most powerful tools we humans have ever had available to us. I won’t be deleting it for good any time soon. But like any powerful tool, we must be sure that we are the ones dictating when we use it, rather than allowing our world to be dictated by it.

~ ancient proverb

“Truly happy is the man who, instead of following the bus on the app’s live tracker, merely waits patiently for it to arrive.”