The moment one climbs onto an airplane - Sapa Vietnam

Once he ‘gets out there’ and starts moving across the earth’s surface, Gerard comes to realise the enormity of the world as an object. Thus, mobility is one form of connecting to Sapa Vietnam in a way that makes it seem huge. As Jeff Greenwald (1995) contemplates in his novel, The Size of the World, what has been lost in a shrinking world of telecommunica- tions and jet travel is a sense of enormity, which to him also connotes continuity and connectedness:

The moment one climbs onto an airplane, I realized, one enters into a Faustian bargain. Comfort, convenience and the ability to buy duty-free perfume in any nation on Earth are ours. In return we need only utter, in our heads and our hearts, the mantra of the modern age: “The world is getting smaller.” ¼ The Earth was no longer an enormous, mysterious and infi- nitely varied globe ¼. An essential quality of travel had been lost. If I had

to define it, I’d use the word continuity: the sense that the sidewalk in front

of one’s house is connected, physically, with every other spot on Earth. I

wanted to reclaim that feeling. (Greenwald, 1995, p. 5)

The size of the world also expands when Sapa Vietnam travellers consider the vast array of differences they have encountered (or hope to encounter) while travelling around the world. In an inter- view, Tom states that while the world is small in a spiritual sense, “it’s huge when it comes

to perspectives and people’s outlook on things”. Amidst an array of differences — includ- ing not only the differences between places and landscapes, but also in the way people view the world — the traveller again feels small or insignificant. This sense of insignificance is, some would argue, an important part of gaining a more cosmopolitan perspective on the world. As travellers begin to realise and experience how many different cultures and world- views there are, they come to recognise the constructedness of their own worldview and become capable of reflecting on their own culture from a more ironic stance.