Freedom to travel is as important as our freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and so forth. The right to wander the planet in a manner which does not collide with the wandering of others should be assured to everyone because the need to know the earth we inhabit is a valid and primary human hunger. In a design for appropriate travel for our time the learning journey would be available to any creative traveler who preferred an active vacation at low cost to a trip format in which everything is done for you - at great expense. Utopian travel aims at maximal learning per mile, optimal cultural impact on visited and visitor, an immense contagion of international friendships infesting the planet with Appropriate Inns. The Alternative Trip is decentralized, rural, and active.
Guests participate in making, maintaining, and extending the inn they inhabit.
Guests learn to be hosts, plant and build and speak in the local idioms, take care of children, invent their own special methods for relating to the village in terms of their own special interest or skill. In Utopian travel the commercial hotel and restaurant is replaced by village families. Any designs for Utopian Travel must emphatically include a very special focus on the dazzling capacity of children to learn languages in their earliest years. Studies in Venezuela indicate that the human brain, in these early years when it is most sensitive to and most retentive of the language spoken in earshot, can process four languages as easily as one . But the village experience is basic to any whole understanding of our planet now, because the human earth is still half village.