Being a Traveler Doesn’t Automatically Mean Being Open-Minded

🌍 The moment I realized being a traveler doesn’t automatically mean being open-minded

I stood barefoot in the mud outside a clay-walled house in Svaneti, Georgia, holding a chipped ceramic bowl of kubdari—spiced lamb folded into thick dough—while my host, 72-year-old Nino, watched me closely. She’d just told me her grandson wouldn’t marry his fiancée unless she converted from Orthodox Christianity to Catholicism. My instinct was to say, “That’s not fair. He should choose love over doctrine.” But before the words left my mouth, I paused. Not because I lacked conviction—but because I’d spent three days assuming I understood her worldview. That pause, in the damp mountain air smelling of woodsmoke and wet sheep wool, was the first real crack in my own travel confidence. Being a traveler doesn’t automatically mean being open-minded—it just means you’ve moved across borders. True openness requires deliberate listening, suspended judgment, and the humility to revise your assumptions mid-conversation.

🗺️ The setup: Why I went—and what I thought I knew

I booked the trip in late March 2022—a deliberate pivot after two years of pandemic lockdowns. I’d spent those months consuming travel content like oxygen: documentaries on nomadic herders, podcasts about slow travel ethics, Instagram feeds saturated with ‘authentic’ village life. I’d even written several budget travel guides for Eastern Europe—advising readers on how to find homestays, bargain at bazaars, and navigate Soviet-era bus stations. My internal metric for competence was simple: if I could get there, eat there, and photograph it without major incident, I was doing travel right.

The destination was Mestia, capital of Georgia’s remote Svaneti region—a UNESCO-listed highland zone accessible only by winding mountain roads or a 20-minute helicopter ride. I chose the road: a six-hour minibus crawl from Tbilisi, past glaciers and abandoned watchtowers, through villages where electricity arrived irregularly and Georgian script adorned crumbling stone walls. I’d read that Svans were fiercely independent, spoke their own language (Svanuri), and preserved medieval traditions—including polyphonic singing and clan-based land stewardship. I’d also read they were deeply religious, conservative, and wary of outsiders. So I packed accordingly: modest clothing, a phrasebook, and an unspoken assumption that their conservatism equaled rigidity—that their faith meant resistance to change.

I arrived with a plan: stay three nights in a family-run guesthouse, hike to Ushguli (Europe’s highest continuously inhabited settlement), and document the ‘enduring traditions’ of a culture ‘untouched by modernity.’ It was a classic traveler’s framing—one that treats culture as static scenery rather than lived, evolving reality.

🎭 The turning point: When my lens cracked

It happened on Day Two—during lunch at the guesthouse run by Nino and her husband, Giorgi. I’d just returned from a steep, rain-slicked trail to the 12th-century Lamaria Church. My boots were caked with mud, my camera full of shots of weathered frescoes and women in traditional black wool cloaks. Over stewed apples and sour milk, Nino asked what I did back home. I said I wrote about travel—how people move, adapt, and connect across difference.

She nodded slowly, then said, “You take many pictures. But do you ask why the woman wears black? Or why the church has no door?”

I blinked. I hadn’t. I’d noted the black cloaks (‘mourning attire,’ per my guidebook) and the church’s entranceless facade (‘symbolic threshold,’ per a blog post). But I hadn’t asked her. I hadn’t considered that mourning in Svaneti isn’t just grief—it’s active kinship duty, lasting up to seven years, during which women abstain from public celebration and wear black not as sorrow but as embodied responsibility. Nor had I known the church had no door because villagers believed sacred space shouldn’t be entered casually—only approached with prayer and silence, then entered through a low, arched window reserved for clergy and elders.

My face warmed. I’d documented surfaces while calling it understanding. That afternoon, walking back toward Mestia along a narrow path lined with wild garlic and juniper, I replayed every interaction: the way I’d chuckled when Nino refused to let me pay extra for hot water (“We share what we have, not what you think you owe”), the time I’d corrected her pronunciation of “Tbilisi” (she said “T’bilisi,” with a glottal stop I’d misheard as hesitation), the way I’d mentally filed away her refusal to discuss politics as ‘typical rural reticence’ instead of recognizing it as a hard-won boundary after decades of Soviet surveillance and post-independence instability.

🤝 The discovery: People who taught me how to listen

The next morning, I didn’t reach for my camera. Instead, I sat with Nino while she kneaded dough for kubdari, her knuckles swollen, her forearms dusted with flour. She showed me how to fold the meat so steam wouldn’t burst the crust—“like holding breath before speaking.” She told me about her daughter, a nurse in Kutaisi, who’d left home at 19 and now called weekly—but never visited during Lent, because, as Nino said, “She prays differently now. Not wrong. Just… elsewhere.”

Later that week, I met Levan, a 28-year-old Svan who’d studied anthropology in Tbilisi and returned to digitize village oral histories. Over strong black tea in his cramped office—a repurposed barn filled with microphones and notebooks—he challenged my framing head-on: “You call us ‘preservers of tradition.’ But tradition here isn’t museum glass. It’s negotiation. Every wedding, every harvest, every argument about whether to install solar panels—it’s tradition being remade.” He showed me recordings of elders debating whether to allow non-Svans to join the zhami (clan council)—not out of xenophobia, but because the council governed land inheritance, water rights, and dispute resolution. Their concern wasn’t ‘outsiders’—it was accountability. Who answers to whom when boundaries shift?

One evening, as fog rolled down the valley and turned the mountains into ghostly silhouettes, Nino lit beeswax candles and sang a fragment of mtsvan kharo—a lament sung only by women during funerals. Her voice was thin but unwavering, vibrating in the low ceiling beams. I didn’t understand the words, but I felt the weight of syllables shaped by centuries of avalanches, invasions, and isolation. I finally understood: open-mindedness isn’t about agreeing—it’s about holding space for meaning you can’t immediately translate.

🚌 The journey continues: How the story developed

I extended my stay by five days—not to collect more photos, but to learn how to ask better questions. I stopped using my phrasebook for transactional exchanges and started carrying a small notebook with blank pages. I’d write down a word I heard repeatedly—kheli (hand), tskali (water), mamuli (mother)—and ask its layered meanings: Is kheli used for work, blessing, or punishment? Does tskali refer only to liquid, or also to lineage, memory, or risk? I learned that in Svan, the same word for ‘river’ is used for ‘bloodline’—and that droughts aren’t just ecological events but ruptures in ancestral continuity.

I joined Nino’s neighbor, Lela, to gather herbs on a south-facing slope. She taught me which plants treated fever (chabre), which strengthened bones (tskhalo), and which were forbidden during pregnancy—not because of superstition, but because local pharmacological knowledge, tested across generations, showed teratogenic effects confirmed later by Georgian medical researchers 1. When I asked why she didn’t sell the herbs at the Mestia market, she shrugged: “They want dried leaves in plastic bags. I give fresh stems tied with string—so the roots remember the soil.”

I also made mistakes. I offered money to help repair a collapsed section of Nino’s fence—assuming generosity. She accepted it quietly, then used the notes to buy wool for her granddaughter’s wedding shawl, explaining later: “Money is not gift. It is promise. You promised to remember us—not just see us.” I’d confused transaction with reciprocity.

💡 Reflection: What this experience taught me about travel and myself

This trip didn’t make me ‘more open-minded’ overnight. It exposed how easily I conflated mobility with insight—and how often I’d mistaken familiarity with empathy. I’d traveled to 27 countries before Svaneti, yet I’d rarely interrogated my own interpretive habits. I’d assumed fluency in logistics (bus schedules, hostel bookings, visa rules) translated to cultural fluency. It doesn’t. Logistics are scaffolding. Meaning is built in the gaps between intention and reception—in the pauses, corrections, silences, and shared labor.

I also saw how my privilege as a Western traveler operated invisibly. My passport granted access; my budget allowed flexibility; my education gave me frameworks to ‘analyze’ what I saw—often before listening to what was being said. Open-mindedness, I realized, isn’t a trait you possess. It’s a practice you return to daily: choosing curiosity over certainty, discomfort over convenience, and humility over expertise—even when you’re the one holding the notebook or the camera.

Most importantly, I stopped seeing ‘culture’ as something to observe and started seeing it as something I participated in—however clumsily. When I helped Nino carry firewood, my back ached in ways my hiking gear hadn’t prepared me for. When I tried (and failed) to weave a basket from willow shoots, my fingers bled and my pride stung. Those weren’t ‘authentic experiences’—they were moments where my body registered difference in ways my mind couldn’t rationalize. That’s where openness begins: not in the head, but in the hands, the feet, the throat.

📝 Practical takeaways: What readers can apply to their own travels

None of this required special training, funding, or status. It required slowing down—and adjusting my tools:

• 📝Replace your checklist with a question list. Instead of ‘See Lamaria Church,’ try ‘What does this place protect? What does it exclude? Who decides?’
• 🔍Carry a blank notebook—not for quotes, but for contradictions. Jot down things that confuse you, then revisit them. Did the shopkeeper refuse cash but accept cryptocurrency? Did the teen wear a hijab and stream K-pop? These aren’t inconsistencies—they’re clues to layered realities.
• 🤝Ask permission before documenting—not just for photos, but for interpretation. Before writing ‘this ritual means X,’ ask: ‘Would you describe it this way? What would you add?’ Then honor the answer, even if it complicates your narrative.
• ☕Spend time in functional spaces, not scenic ones. A bus station, a public laundry, a communal oven—these reveal rhythms, hierarchies, and unspoken rules more honestly than a curated homestay.
• 🌄Let yourself be bored. Sit on a bench without checking your phone. Watch how people wait, argue, bargain, comfort. Boredom creates space for observation that isn’t goal-oriented.

None of these practices guarantee understanding. But they prevent mistaking movement for meaning—and that, I’ve learned, is the first step toward genuine openness.

⭐ Conclusion: How this trip changed my perspective

I left Svaneti with fewer photos and more questions. My camera roll held 37 images—not the hundreds I usually returned with. But my notebook overflowed: sketches of woven patterns, phonetic attempts at Svanuri verbs, lists of words whose meanings shifted depending on who spoke them and when. I no longer measure a trip by how much I’ve seen, but by how many of my assumptions I’ve had to revise.

Being a traveler doesn’t automatically mean being open-minded—any more than owning a map means you know direction. Maps show terrain; openness requires learning how to read wind, light, and silence. It means accepting that some doors don’t open to tourists—and that’s not exclusion. It’s integrity. And sometimes, the most honest travel moment isn’t the one you capture, but the one you let go of: the unphotographed conversation, the unrecorded hesitation, the quiet realization that you’re not here to understand—but to be unsettled, respectfully, and well.