Traveling in the Age of Anger

Political turbulence is affecting how we travel and where—here’s why that matters

It was late afternoon in the Ummayad Mosque, Damascus, and the sun was dipping behind the western colonnades.

Though hundreds of worshippers milled about the sprawling courtyard, one group caught my eye. Away to our left, a family was playing — father, mother, and two small children, girl and boy, pushing a pink toy car to one another across the polished-marble stones. My girlfriend and I looked on, in that broody way of couples on the cusp of parenthood. And as they rose to visit the prayer room, the father turned to us and said, “Welcome to Syria.” It’s what so many people did in the days when the tourists still came. They walked off, the children holding hands, a vignette of family contentment in the last weeks of 2010. A few months later, their country was in flames.

In the years since, I’ve often drifted back to that mosque courtyard. That afternoon, like pretty much every afternoon I spent in Syria before the war, came to symbolize those precious moments of human commonality that a trip abroad can often bestow. Only in hindsight, when I was safely home and the bombs started to fall, did it assume more poignant lessons: that peace is fragile and often illusory, and that our ability to visit places…