01 ‘Travel’ used to mean ‘torture’ In recent decades, we’ve come to think that new technologies can protect us from certainty. Through the magic of modern machinery, we hope to take the world out of mediocrity – out of those sparrows, starlings and blue jays that are everywhere in the trees – and fill it with rare Sutton warblers, ivory-billed woodpeckers, whooping cranes and brown hummingbirds. Every bird watcher knows how uncomfortable it is to accept that common birds are the most common and rare ones are rare. These days, the daily expectation of experiencing the exotic (and not losing its flavor), letting the mediocre disappear entirely, is a source…