Are you a Traveller or a Tourist

2014-11-09T20:29:11+01:00

"Tours for travelers, not tourists" is the slogan of a tour company whose brochure landed on my desk a while back. This stuck me as a pretty nifty little Zen koan. Tours that aren't for tourists, I gather, are roughly equivalent to bicycles that aren't for bicyclists and flutes that aren't for flutists.

I hate to shatter anyone's cherished prejudice, but here's the definition of "tourist" in Webster's New World Dictionary: "a person who makes a tour, esp. for pleasure." Which means that if you go on a tour -- even one operated by this particular company -- you are, by definition, a tourist.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

But among the status-conscious, the word "tourist" has come to mean "anyone who travels in a style I consider inferior to the way I like to think I do it."

You can't open a glossy travel magazine or click on a Web page these days without tripping over one of those tiresome aphorisms: A tourist travels to get away from home; a traveler feels at home when he travels. A traveler sees what he sees; the tourist sees what he has come to see. A traveler makes his own way; a tourist has another make his way for him. A tourist takes his prejudices with him; a traveler is transformed by his journeys. A tourist comes home with photos; a traveler comes home with memories.

In other words: A traveler like me is cool; a tourist like you is a dork.

The travel media loves to promote this bogus dichotomy. "Be a traveler, not a tourist," is the slogan on ads for "Without Reservations," a new show on the Travel Channel, as writer Rolf Potts pointed out recently on his blog. The very same tagline is on the cover of a guidebook series published by Open Road and was, for a while, the name of a column in National Geographic Traveler magazine.

If there really is that big a gap between travelers and tourists, I truly doubt you're going to bridge it by choosing one mass-market guidebook over another or watching a half-hour show wedged between Texas Hold 'Em tournaments on the Travel Channel.

The problem, I think, is that it's gotten so much harder for status-conscious travelers to feel superior. A generation or two ago, merely stepping onto an airplane or a train or a ship and going somewhere -- anywhere -- was all it took to give you the backyard-barbecue standing of a sophisticated man of the world. But these days everyone travels -- on the trail to Everest I once ran into a vacationing San Francisco stripper -- so what can be done to elevate yourself over your fellow travelers? Deride them as "tourists."

The thing is, as Potts noted, we're all tourists (in the "unsophisticated traveler" sense of the world). We all spend a brief time in a foreign place and then leave. Some might work harder than others to get off the main tourism grid, and some put more effort into chatting up the locals. Riding on the chicken bus or sleeping with the pigs on the floor of a village headman's house are memorable things to do, but if you think this gives you any significant insight into another culture you're kidding yourself.

Travel for me is humbling, and the more I do it, the more I realize it's impossible to come home after a few weeks with any more than a surface-skimming understanding of other people, no matter how many chicken buses I ride. I try to make a few friends and absorb as much as I can, but I've come to appreciate that the world is an impossibly vast and complicated place.

Sometimes when I travel abroad I do feel at home, and sometimes I feel (as "tourists" are accused of feeling) like a stranger in an extraordinarily strange land. I like that feeling much better. Sometimes I make my own way, and sometimes I'm happy to have my way made for me. Sometimes I'm transformed by my journeys, and sometimes, to be honest, I'm not. Let the traveler-not-a-tourist without sin cast the first stone (or flaming e-mail).

As far as I'm concerned, whatever anyone wants to do on his vacation -- walk barefoot across the Hindu Kush or sip Bahama Mama cocktails on the Lido deck -- is his own business, as long as he adheres to a couple of basic rules: Treat the people and places you visit with respect. Act in a way that reflects well on your fellow Americans. That's pretty much it.

Last year in Venice, I found myself dining next to a rather voluble family from Dallas. They spent most of their meal speculating about the upcoming high school football season, and at one point the father raised his glass and declared that they'd traveled the length and width of Italy and never once had a meal that couldn't be bettered in Dallas.

Now Venice is hardly the culinary capital of Italy, but this guy almost made me choke on my pasta e fagioli. Still, he was entitled to his opinion. I fault him only for broadcasting it to the entire restaurant. Oh, and I also fault his wife for standing up and yelling at the waiter who still hadn't brought her glass of wine after five whole minutes. I just prayed they wouldn't recognize me as a fellow American and try to strike up a conversation.

Were these folks "tourists" and was I a "traveler"? Well, we'd all found our way to the very same restaurant and were eating the very same food (which frankly wasn't very good, although I'd still rank it ahead of a T.G.I. Friday's). I suppose I felt a little superior to these people, but what's the point?

Why don't we focus on our own experiences and spend a little less time judging our fellow tourists/travelers? If you go on a tour that's advertised for travelers, not tourists, and you want to fancy yourself more sophisticated than someone who goes on a tour that's merely for tourists, go right ahead. But please keep it to yourself.

—

Text originally published on www.sfgate.com.

Travelling: Running Away or Running Towards?

2014-12-13T13:05:00+01:00

My dad always asks what I'm running away from with my travels. A few weeks ago, a commenter told me to stop running away and live life. And I once came across a travel blog called "Mom says I'm running away."

I'm not sure why, but there exists this perception that anyone who travels long term and isn't interested in settling down or getting a conventional job must be running away from something.They are, in other words, just trying to "escape life."

The general opinion is that traveling is something everyone should do—that gap years after college and short vacations are acceptable. But for those of us who lead nomadic lifestyles, or who linger just a bit too long somewhere before reaching that final homestretch, we are accused of running away.

Yes, travel—but just not for too long.

We nomads must have awful, miserable lives, or are weird, or have had something traumatic happen to us that we are trying to escape. People assume that we are simply running away from our problems, running away from "the real world."

And to all those people who say that, I say to you: you're right. Completely right. I am running away. I'm running away from your idea of the "real" world. I'm avoiding your life. And, instead, I'm running towards everything – towards the world, exotic places, new people, different cultures, and my own idea of freedom.

While there may be exceptions (as there are with everything), most people who become vagabonds, nomads, and wanderers do so because they want to experience the world, not escape problems. We are running away from office life, commuting, and weekend errands, and running toward everything the world has to offer. We (I) want to experience every culture, see every mountain, eat weird food, attend crazy festivals, meet new people, and enjoy different holidays around the world.

Life is short, and we only get to live it once. I want to look back and say I did crazy things, not say I spent my life reading blogs like this while wishing I was doing the same thing.

As an American, my perspective might be different from the rest of yours. In my country, you go to school, you get a job, you get married, you buy a house, and have your 2.5 children. Society boxes you in and restricts your movements to their expectations. It's like the matrix. And any deviation is considered abnormal and weird. People may want to travel, tell you they envy what you do, say they wish they could do the same thing. But really, they don't. They are simply fascinated by a lifestyle so outside the norm. There's nothing wrong with having a family or owning a house — most of my friends lead happy lives doing so. However, the general attitude in the States is "do it this way if you want to be normal." And, well, I don't want to be normal.

I feel like the reason people tell us we are running away is because they can't fathom the fact that we broke the mold and are living outside the norm. To want to break all of society's conventions, there simply must be something wrong with us.

Life is what you make it out to be. Life is yours to create. We are all chained down by the burdens we place upon ourselves, whether they are bills, errands, or, like me, self-imposed blogging deadlines. If you really want something, you have to go after it.

People who travel the world aren't running away from life. Just the opposite. Those that break the mold, explore the world, and live on their own terms are running toward true living, in my opinion. We have a degree of freedom a lot of people will never experience. We get to be the captains of our ships. But it is a freedom we chose to have. We looked around and said, "I want something different." It was that freedom and attitude I saw in travelers years ago that inspired me to do what I am doing now. I saw them break the mold and I thought to myself, "Why not me too?"

I'm not running away. I am running towards the world and my idea of life. And I never plan to look back.

—

Matt Kepnes is budget travel expert, author of "How to Travel the World on $50 a Day" and writes at NomadicMatt.com.

The article originally published on observer.com.

When tourism turns into narcissism

2014-10-28T21:55:20+01:00

Years ago, I bumped into a Canadian couple in Patagonia whose every step had been pursued by serendipity. They'd arrived in the Los Glaciares National Park on the day the ice bridge calved off the Perito Moreno glacier—a once-in-a-decade event. On the Valdes Peninsula, they'd witnessed a procession of killer whales beaching themselves to hunt for baby sea lions from the very same windswept promontory where, two weeks earlier, I'd stood for six hours without seeing so much as a fin. And how did they articulate their astonishing good fortune?

"It was pretty awesome," the man shrugged in a monotone drawl.

And that was it—the sum total of their response to the world's wonder summarized in one drab pronouncement.

Recently, I've found myself thinking about this pair of bons vivants again. They've become my personal symbol for an increasingly common phenomenon: the tedious, uninspired world traveler.

Anyone who's spent a bit of time in the world's hostel dormitories should be familiar with the stereotype. He sits there on the bottom bunk—tanned, emaciated limbs protruding from a Bintang vest and a pair of baggy dragon-print pants—and inevitably gets to bragging about where his journeys have taken him.

He's been away for a two-month stint, most of which he spent dancing on the beach, addled on diet pills and local grain alcohol. Perhaps the partying was punctuated by a week of hungover volunteering session, during which he built a retaining wall that's destined to collapse within the year. His destination's merits can all be encapsulated with the brain-dead epithet "amazing"; the natives are similarly dismissed as "so friendly." But this experience has invested him with unprecedented insight into Southeast Asian society—indeed, into the very essence of the human condition. Suddenly, he is Marco Polo returning from the court of Kublai Khan. He must write a blog, post endless photos on social media. Everyone must benefit from his remarkable new wisdom.

Perhaps a touch of inanity is to be expected in an age when everyone seems to travel. Tourism is a rapidly democratizing business. Fifty years ago, as granny and granddad spent their vacations at the nearest body of water, the experienced traveler was a storied soul, a seeker possessed of genuinely unusual knowledge. Only as the Baby Boomers came of age did travel to foreign countries become quotidian. Not until the 90s did going to more exotic climes—in the UK, we've got the ubiquitous "gap year"—become a post-secondary school rite of passage for the middle class.

Tourists being tourists in Egypt. All photos below courtesy of the author

The received wisdom is that travel makes us more interesting, that it is an essential ingredient of a life well-lived. But somewhere amid the collision of widening global curiosity, runaway self-absorption, and ever-more insidious technology lurks an unavoidable sense that travel is losing its capacity to make us wonder.

The internet, that great reductive heap of YOLO hashtags, has been one of the main instigators of this phenomenon. Walk into a hostel bar nowadays and there's a good chance that half the patrons will be ensconced in their digital worlds. Expressionless faces illuminated by the deadening LCD glare of tablet screens, they sit plugged into the home they intended to leave behind, able to research every flight, hotel, and restaurant in advance based on countless peer reviews. By shrinking the world, the web has stifled our capacity for independent discovery.

With the arrival of Google Glass, shameless self-obsessives everywhere will soon be able to access travel information by conversing with a pair of spectacles. "OK, Glass," we'll say, "please go ahead and expunge any last shred of motivation I might have to rely on the kindness of strangers and hand me everything on a screen beamed directly into my jaundiced fucking eyeballs."

In a homogenizing, fast-paced world, our appetite for knowledge—and our ability to instantly acquire it—has demystified foreign places. Instead of taking time to absorb and consider, many people seem more inclined to travel quickly, tick off the "don't miss" highlights, and form broad-brush assumptions based on the bare minimum of experiences. Yet the axiom that all "travel" (as opposed to "tourism") is by definition enriching and transformative persists.

Except it's not. Not always. Going on an overland truck tour through Tanzania, traveling with people from your own country and demographic, on the same prescribed routes, stopping only to point at animals and get trashed in Westernized hostels does not make you an authority on all that ails postcolonial Africa.

Perhaps my Canadian friends' yarns about their time in Argentina electrified Ontario, transforming their previously leaden dinner-party presence into something more akin to Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn. More likely, they bored friends and family to the brink of violence with Gringo Trail anecdotes that had been heard countless times before—of delicious steak, cheap cocaine, and the hilarious severity of their diarrhea.

In part, our impatience with people blowing on their travel trumpets is born of envy—who, after all, wants to hear about someone else's hedonistic escapades while they're stuck in a barely remembered routine of workplace drudgery and escapist binge drinking? But we also need to realize that not every traveler's story is worth relating.

Like the dude on safari who doesn't lift his head from the lens, many of us have started vacation to accumulate—stories, photos, and experiences—rather than just letting the unfamiliar wash over us, and reveling in the surprise of unexpected things. We have become a generation of traveling consumers, convinced that the image of a misty dawn over Machu Picchu just wouldn't be the same without our faces in the foreground.

It's as though we've lost sight of the fact that it's not the fact of your experiences but how you perceive them that really matters. The apocryphal cosmic adventurer who lived an entire imagined lifetime inside an orange after drinking some ayahuasca—that's the fellow I want around my dinner table, not some dunce who's Eaten, Prayed, and Loved his way through a week-long wellness retreat in Rishikesh but had already decided upon the myriad ways the journey would alter his life before he stepped off the Shatabdi Express.

The author, inserting himself into his travel memories

This stance is partly a confession. I'm a travel writer, which is shorthand for saying that I'm a work-shy dilettante with an overinflated respect for the value of my own experience. What started as a means of investing my inveterate wanderings with more purpose has become an exercise in massaging my ego, and a burden: Each turn in the road is now scouted in advance, the camera never far from my side.

The life my stories illustrate has little basis in my daily reality. For every hour I spend scribbling notes in some remote Shangri-La, I spend 20 more hunkered in a spine-degrading keyboard hunch, hammering out articles that only contribute to the problem, exhorting people to visit places that may well be better off without them. And, in moments of honesty, I know that I may never recapture the magic of my earliest independent trips abroad: the naïve kid perpetually rudderless in Asia, without a guidebook, mobile phone, or map to steer me.

Look, I'm not saying that certain types of travel are without value. Get away, get some sun, write a journal, prostrate yourself before the altar of benumbing technology, and record every step of your journey on social media if you really must. Just realize: If your traveling is a box-ticking exercise, if you predicate even one iota of self-worth on how many countries you've visited, if you think in "ten best" listicles, take it from me—traveling isn't making you interesting. It's just confirming your position as one of the crowd.

—

Henry Wismayer is a freelance travel writer whose work has appeared in more than 50 publications, including the New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, and Time.

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Are you a Traveller or a Tourist

Travelling: Running Away or Running Towards?

When tourism turns into narcissism