The Traveler’s Funnel

Ushuaia, Argentina
Buenos Aires, Argentina
14 Dec 2008

When you travel somewhere for an event where you’ll gather with other people, you can see the Traveler’s Funnel. It’s most obvious in reverse, when you return home, and see the people you’ve been gathered with for your event dispersing, becoming fewer and more spread out, until finally, you’re alone in a cab or a shuttle from the airport to your house with no chance of seeing your fellow travelers on the last leg of your journey home.

On the way to the event, the Traveler's Funnel is harder to notice. But as you wait in line at the airport check-in counter at the start of your journey, you notice one or two people you saw on the subway ride in. Then you see more of them on the plane, more familiar faces at the other end of the flight. Maybe you see some again at the hotel, so that by the time you get to where you’re going there are often many familiar faces. This can be awkward if the guy who cuts in line at the taxi stand at the airport becomes the guy sitting next to you at the conference.

So, in Ushuaia, we have a concentrated form of the reverse funneling, as today’s disembarked Professor Molchanov passengers (the non-Finns, anyway), mill around the town for half the day, repeatedly seeing each other at cafes and on the sidewalk. The middle-aged guys and I hang out and have a nice meal, watching Prof M passengers occasionally walk by the windows of our parilla. At the tiny airport there must be a dozen of us, sitting around and talking about what comes next for each.

On the plane now we are only three: Sarah the kayaker, Freddie the Swiss-German and me. As we pick out our bags at the Jorge Newbery Airport in Buenos Aires and head off separately, there is the somewhat awkward goodbye of recently-minted acquaintances who will likely never see each other again. The three of us roll our bags in three divergent directions, each of us now moving singly again through the world.