He said at the end of the video that he wants to go back, because the people were just lovely… I can find plenty of lovely people close to home, without having to go to Afghanistan! He had to leave within hours, or he’d go to prison for who knows how long… but… go back because the people are lovely? Uh, no.
He did another video, and went on a train that was actually a step up from the one Bald and Bankrupt went on in India. (Backpacker Ben, a hard-core traveler, was beyond his ability to endure on that trip. If he can’t handle that train, nobody can.)
Joe Fazer was on this train for three days, having to share his bunk bed with strangers, in addition to all of the other wonderful things that Indian trains are known for.
I am going to watch his Yakutsk video, as that is slightly less insane than Afghanistan or India. Just slightly.
I like these kind of videos a lot, because they show more reality than the travel shows I used to watch so often, or the National Geographics where I’ve read about these places. People walking around with cameras, showing what life is actually like in these areas, wheras GlobeTrekker used to try really hard to make the worst places seem so much better than they actually are. (Still a great show, though.) So many of these sources don’t have incentive to show you the real negatives of going there, something apparent in the videos of a regular person with a camera.
And yes, he’s going to the most dangerous or unappealing places on the planet to get clicks, I get it. But like police body cams, people with video cameras are revealing things that were hidden from us by the likes of shows and magazines that didn’t have a good reason to show things as they really are. And still there are a lot of cultural aspects to these places that aren’t fully explored, most of these people running around with their cameras need to get along with everybody, so there isn’t much revealed about pre-teen girls being sold as brides, things like that in these walk-around videos, but they are another step in being more aware of how things work in other parts of the world, other societies and cultures where there are major differences from our own other than language, food, and fashion.
