Forget Rick Steves. Forget Lonely Planet. Forget Trip Advisor. The most time-efficient method of preparing for travel in Europe is to watch the first three movies in the Bourne oeuvre: The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007).
Matt Damon stars as Jason Bourne, a high-end super CIA assassin with a faulty memory and incredible language skills. These motion pictures are more than espionage spy thrillers/demolition derbies taking place in Paris, Moscow and New York City. They are how-to-travel movies.
I came to this conclusion while traveling this summer on a monthlong trip to Europe. It included a week in Paris (before the Olympics) with my longtime partner Denise. As she departed south for Provence, I went northeast on a two-day train trip to Berlin to join my older daughter, Cynthia. From there the two of us flew to Oslo for four nights. I took another train from Oslo to Flam/Aurland for a fjord cruise and then a bus to Sogndal before flying to Helsinki, and then on to Stockholm where I rejoined Denise.
On successive nights at an Oslo Airbnb, Cynthia and I watched the Bourne trilogy in succession. Why did we not go out at night in Oslo, you ask? Because summer in Norway has no night.
Not that I am complaining. The fast-cutting action sequences, the pulsating John Powell soundtrack and the scenes of cities that I have visited were all temporarily intoxicating, but gleaning travel tips from Jason Bourne has had more of a lasting impact on me. Here are three of them:
Tip #1 Money and Passports
Before setting out on any long journey, perhaps the most important thing while following in the footsteps of Bourne is to go to your local Swiss bank safety deposit box—bringing a sturdy duffle bag—and withdraw all your packets of cash, preferably a mix of Euros and U.S. currency. Forget the krone. The Norwegians themselves balk at taking the krone. You may be tempted to extensively use a credit card, especially in “cashless societies” like Sweden, but everybody who has ever watched a crime show knows that those records are practically in the public domain.
Remember a traveler patterning him or herself after Bourne should be deeply suspicious of everything and everyone. As Thomas Pynchon’s writes in Gravity’s Rainbow,“Paranoids are not paranoids because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.” (Proverbs for Paranoids, 5) Accepting that all international travel feeds one’s paranoia will put you in the proper frame of mind to survive.
Like credit cards, standard issue cellular phones are taboo. They make it too easy to trace one’s whereabouts. Use the Bourne work-around utilizing cheap deposable burners and mastering the ins and outs of international SIM cards. Also, you should know the locations of every working pay phone with a telephone directory in all the major cities.
(Hint: Be prepared to convert your cash into lots of coins.)
Equally important is that multi-colored collection of passports that you may have gathered over the years. To refresh your memory of which passport represents which country, visit passportindex.com. If you are an impulsive traveler (like Jason) you can then change your itinerary with no delay.
If you have the right passport, you can pick and choose which line you can get in at passport control. For you, the shorter line is probably the best, but Bourne has different standards: he looks for lines with faulty camera angles, patrolled by slow-footed, thick-waisted security guards that he can easily take out with a quick punch to the face.
One final note, leave behind any weapons you find in the aforementioned Swiss bank safety deposit box. Bourne is a trained assassin, you are not.
Tip #2 Limit Your Luggage
No large suitcases and no carry-ons. Be like Bourne—a backpack is all you will need. You won’t have to rely on the kindness of strangers about whether luggage will fit in your overhead on a train, plane or bus (like I did in Norway). Remember with enough passports and cash you can do just about anything.
I suspect the only thing Bourne had to carry in his backpack besides cash and passports was a change of drip-dry underwear (I am assuming he washed everything out in the sink every night—blood stains, you know) and a bottle of hair coloring and scissors because he like to style his on-the-lam girlfriends’ hair (Marie in Identity and Nicolette in Ultimatum) to gain their trust. To get his barber scissors through the airport, Bourne only has to give airport security his “don’t f— with me” countenance. You may want to practice that face in a mirror before embarking.
Tip #3 Use Alternative Transportation
In addition to his fluency in several languages (Google Translate is a time suck) Bourne also has a photographic recall for any bus, train or plane timetable he has ever seen. Otherwise, how could he jump from one moving train to another—traveling in opposite directions—with such precision? This skill was on display when Bourne met Nicolette at the Berlin Alexander Platz S-Bahn and easily gave the authorities the slip.
When public transportation was not available Bourne resorted to “borrowing” a car. This is necessary because no matter how many identification cards he has at his disposal, word is out in the worldwide car-rental cartel. Bourne and his multiple identities are red flagged. Believe me, when I was ticketed for a parking violation at a supermarket in Sweden (no free parking while you shop – it’s an American thing), I paid the fine because I knew that I would be hunted down by the cartel if I tried to skip the country without paying.
His avoidance of Hertz, Avis, Budget, etc. explains Bourne’s skill in finding alternative transportation and I am NOT talking about a lame scooter or bicycle.
He prefers to commandeer someone else’s vehicle based on his current needs. In The Bourne Identity it was Marie’s red Mini-Coup suitable for driving down stairwells on the narrow streets of Paris. In Moscow he took the wheel of a Russian-made, GAZ Volga 3110 outfitted with a BMW 3.0 liter inline-six engine and reinforced steel body (built like a Checker Cab). Instinctively Bourne knew that he would need something with power and heft to drag race with his rival assassin’s Mercedes-Benz G. Klasse W463.
This tip came in handy when I took a mini-van taxi from Flam to Aurland. I noticed at pick up that the whole passenger side fender was crushed. I asked myself, “WWJD?” (What Would Jason Do?). Undaunted, I calmly sat in the back, away from any windows where an assassin could get a clean shot at me.
And it worked, as I lived to write about it.
Final Thoughts
You may find these tips silly, but are they any less preposterous than the commercials you see for travel: pristine quiet beaches, airports sans lines and luggage graveyards (like the one at Atlanta’s International Terminal after the Global IT outage) or the colossal cruise ship blissfully sailing into a port (where all the locals hate you)?
Travel is fantasy punctured by real-world delays, inconveniences and sometimes danger, real or imagined. But as Bourne can tell you these “changes in the itinerary” make for the best stories.
Murray Browne is a writer, publisher and bookseller living in Atlanta (murray-browne.com). His latest book is A Father’s Letters: Connect Past to Present. This is his ninth piece for Tropics of Meta. The author thanks Cynthia Browne and Denise Casey for encouraging me to travel at all, and their help with getting the manuscript into something readable and not be taken seriously.
Photo Credits: The Matt Damon pictures from The Bourne Identity come from IMDB. The wall of passports is from passportsindex.com website. The author is the photographer of the picture of the World Clock at the Alexanderplatz train station in Berlin and anti-cruise ship poster, which appeared in a Venice bookstore window.