Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
Am I selfish if I put extra effort into maintaining friendships with foreign friends so I might end up visiting them?
I was lucky to work in a city full of expats - so I now have friends all over the world to lean on.
In return, they lean on me when they want to visit my home country and I happily oblige.
Is this sarcasm? The existence of guidebooks, in itself, ensures that multiple people will do what the guide says. A "better" guidebook will just ruin those "better" experiences too.
In there you have the contradiction of tourism, which really extends to a lot of our modern lifestyle: everybody wants to be first and original, but also to be led safely. The two concepts are fundamentally exclusive; trying to chase them is a fool's errand. Just be yourself and experience what you want to experience, damn the guides. As a famous comedian says closing his show, "drive fast and take chances".
That assumes the guidebook is the same for everyone. In today's world of smartphone apps it's not hard to imagine a "personalized" guidebook for each tourist. You could even take it a step forward and make it fully dynamic and "re-route" tourists based on site congestion - sort of like Waze for tourists.
Anyway... there are nice alternative guides that do what you are asking, and for Venice the one of "Corto Maltese" is a good example. I managed to find this guide some years ago after some research. It is a bit rare, a friend had the first edition (I think only in italian), the second one was published by Lonely Planet, I think in 2008, and it is the one I found (in french, but I am guessing also the english version exists).
It is a very nice guide, full of drawings of Hugo Pratt's character Corto Maltese and his world. The guide takes you on a number of walks through the city and tells you a lot about history, people, buildings, and it does telling you also some stories about when Pratt lived there. Most importantly it points you to nice historic restaurants/bars (baccari and taverne :)) where venisians usually go. I used it last time there and the experience was really nice.
Amazon has it listed but only used and some times at a high price: https://www.amazon.com/Corto-Maltese-guide-Venice/dp/8817039...
On the same style I saw one on new york too, I think lonely planet published a few guides with this style.
Also, I find the New York Times 1/3/5 days guides also nice.
I understand you. But tourists are the only thing that keeps Venice a little bit afloat. It will sink sooner or later. Venice was once a former banking and trading center. They had some industry. All this is lost. They don't have the money to sustain the infrastructure anymore. Even the money from tourists won't be enough in the long run.
Belgrade instead of Prague
Visby instead of Copenhagen
Cork instead of Dublin
And the same applies in other parts of the world.
(I learned this the hard way)
But that still doesn’t change the fact that most tourists do not and the swarms of tourists do ruin things for the locals. I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and I basically don’t go out in my neighborhood anymore. The sidewalks are filled with tourists, so I’ve had to plan alternative (longer) routes to the subway. My favorite neighborhood restaurants I rarely go to anymore as they are filled with non-residents with waits routinely over an hour. And I’ve gotten used to drunk tourists urinating in front of my house as they come out of the bars down the block.
Ten years ago it felt like a neighborhood, even five years ago it wasn’t so bad, but now I’m considering defeat by moving and renting out this apartment on Airbnb.
I think it's more don't curate your trip. Don't have The Things That Need To Be Checked Off The List.
Michelin guides are generally fairly comprehensive, obviously they also include the big tourist traps but they list too many places of interests to have all of them be swamped by tourists. If you follow a Michelin guide and ignore everything listed in the common "Visiting Europe 101" guides then you're probably off to a good start.
But it's the travel books that are the main problem, along with our extremely narrow collective obsession in a few specific experiences. Our need to meet expectations. The crowds of tourists gather in just the thinnest spider web of places. Usually you can escape them by walking a single block from the guidebook must-see.
The only way to be a traveler is to reject the fools gold the tourist industry has for sale. Traveling is risky. Time consuming. You could be embarrassed. Lost. Changed.
That's an adventure.
Don't take bad risks. Use your wits and common sense. Stay aware of your surroundings. Fear is the mind killer.
Thanks for this analogy. Made me chuckle.
I have not traveled in Europe for a while, but in most places I have found it fairly easy to escape the crowds. Most of the crowds focus on the top spots; usually it seems like the crowds fade considerably even by walking a short distance a way.
It helps some to have some activity in mind other than "see stuff take pictures", something that fits your interest. Sure, some of these activities can also be crowded, but there is a better chance of much of the crowd being locals.
Somewhere like England is small enough that if you end up throwing your dart in Swindon[1] it's a short drive from a nicer place.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KL8yc-AUuo&list=PLxx9HYDHVI...
[1] Just kidding. Swindon is awesome and has some nice industrial museums and is pretty close to amazing countryside.
I think that is the first positive statement about my birthplace that I have seen in years, and by far the most positive.
It's just a pity that so much of the centre is so run down. Hardly any real improvement in the last thirty years as far as I can see.
"To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."
A similar phenomenon is happening in the outdoor industry. Instagram is (depending on your perspective) ruining everything or democratizing access to natural beauty. Most people I know practice some variant of a digital leave-no-trace rule: don't post photos in publicly-trafficked areas of the internet, or if you do then don't say where they were taken. It's not so much gatekeeping as ensuring people who want to experience that beauty have to put in the work - read terribly-designed websites, meet actual people and gain their trust, or even take a backcountry travel class which hopefully instills a healthy respect for the environment you're enjoying.
Another strategy is to delve further into mountaineering, where the obvious danger of the terrain repels everybody with a working survival instinct and ensures some degree of solitude :)
Or we could build more walls.
If you're trying to say "tourist locations could require more of their visitors," you could elaborate on this point and say why you believe this would solve the problem that the article presents.
Thank you for being patient enough to post the level headed comment you did.
Ouch
I especially like how he can write something as prescriptive as, "To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American, alien, ignorant, greedy..." while literally admitting that he can speak only for himself ("for me."). The greatest magicians are the ones who come right out and tell you that they're going to try to snow you, and then proceed to do so.
I find this hugely classist. (Edit: and I'm generally not someone to use that terminology)
Most (even American) travellers are just trying to see some sights, have a normal and are not particularly rude or problematic.
The issue is now that 'everyone' can afford to travel ... it's causing problems.
This is a problem of prosperity.
"alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have"
I find this hugely classist.
Animal-rights advocates frequently argue, not without some justification, that it's unethical and exploitative to capture wild animals and lock them up in cages so that we can gawk at them. So let's follow their advice in a hypothetical sense and get rid of zoos, circuses, even pet stores. Fast-forward a generation or two and let's imagine how that might turn out. The people from which those very organizations draw their membership will have never seen an elephant or a tiger -- or, for the city-dwellers among them, even a deer or a rabbit -- in real life. These are also the same people who vote for Congressional representatives to pass or repeal conservation laws.
In this hypothetical future, volunteers from the animal-rights organization will go door-to-door canvassing for votes or petition signatures, just as they do today... except no one will have the faintest idea what they're talking about. The activists will find that they might as well be asking their contributors to save the T-Rexes in Jurassic Park. What's the difference? They're all just pixels on a screen.
Tourism works the same way, IMO. It may have harmful aspects, but the effects of completely eliminating it will be worse.
And decrying "mass tourism," as Wallace puts it, is nothing but code for "Only a few wealthy people should get to experience this."
"Nothing but" is an incorrect over-reduction. Like any high-volume human activity, mass tourism can have real impacts. Concern over those impacts is likely to exist entirely independently of wealth-favoring classism.
And whether the experience is limited only to the wealthy depends what mechanism is chosen to limit access. If it's determined by pricing mechanisms responding to demand, then, yep, you're going to largely skew access to the wealthy. If it's determined by assessing the number of visitors that won't destroy the experience, and then handing out access via lottery then the criticism loses some of its power.
That being said, I really enjoyed the author’s post. If anything, the people who are going to these places are the social climbing, upwardly mobile middle class, determined to burnish their brand on Instagram.
Also the free flow of tourists is a problem that parallels a lot of other things in the world currently. Information, capital, trade, all these things have moved so much and so fast they have loosed control from national government sovereignty that used to regulate them. As the anti-globalization train begins picking up speed, all these will be severely restricted, for better or worse.
Stop projecting, 99% of people do not give a shit about this
There are many little tourist spots where 'selfies' are indeed a problem.
That said, we've always been taking photos on vacay. So maybe it's just that we can easily click-and-share ...
Stepping into the fountain, doing something stupid, mobbing people, stepping 'over the rope', crowding a public space to get a picture - this is 'rude'.
Taking a photo of the Eiffel tower from the sidewalk is normal.
If you're using "class" as a synonym for "concerned specifically with the divide between poverty and not-poverty", then this is especially relevant. Colorblindness in anti-poverty solutions has been historically a way to aggravate problems problems caused by systemic racism that is not addressed (like Federal housing loan guarantees to jump-start an American Middle Class that "just happen" to only be available to people who meet a particular set of characteristics that "just happen" to correlate strongly with whiteness).
If you're speaking specifically about objections to how loaded the term "racism" is when speaking to people, thanks to an inability of our broader society to produce a distinction between individually non-complicit, systemically racist outcomes and individually complicit, "racist intent", then I would suggest moving the burden of the term to "classist" is a form of euphemism, and will generally only serve to make the word "classist" take the same emotional connotations in the future rather than solve the terminology problem it is presented to solve. We are probably better just trying to find a way to grapple with why the term "racist" makes us so emotionally charged than avoiding the subject.
I love travelling and I'm soured at how overrun places are.
But it's not a problem of the 'ugly tourist' it's a problem of just 'too many people'.
I don't go to tourist destinations, I just go to places.
Every French or German village is 'interesting' to those who don't know them. They are all full of history.
Same for so many other places.
The only 'non destinations' on planet earth are the suburbs, and places where there are a lot of Starbuckses, unfortunately, that seems to be what we are building everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. The suburbs of Toronto, Singapore and Istanbul are oddly similar in too many ways ...
I wonder how we would treat our travels differently if somehow we were not allowed to share anything visual with other people. There's something diminished that happens when it becomes so easy, so low-effort, to capture something about a place you're in. You don't have to observe or be in the moment; you just run from place to place collecting views you can horde in exchange for likes and clicks. It's a mechanization/industrialization of experience.
But if I didn't shoot a few photos there, I might not remember the great meal I had seated at the base with a few friends that was such an enjoyable time. Small details fade, but photos I personally took jog the memory.
No one can see everything in the world so it is more like curating it, you follow a bunch of curators, see a bunch of stuff, for some stuff a photo is enough, for others it makes you want to see it yourself.
I have had loads of travel ideas from Instagram and have visited lots of places after seeing posts on Instagram.
Or better, a startup idea: tell us where you're going on vacation and we'll produce your social media posts accordingly. You just enjoy your vacation and we'll get you all the likes.
Or tell us where you want to pretend you went and we provide a fake vacay with which to wow your pseudo friends.
Bonus points: You can market your service as "eco friendly" and actively encourage people to admit they used it. There can be footnotes cataloging how much smaller their carbon footprint is for having only pretended to go.
Wilderness areas which were once quiet most of the year now hum with activity from even before the snow is completely melted to after the first fresh flakes of autumn arrive. These areas can be remarkably sensitive, and most lack the trail and human-waste infrastructure to handle the new crowds. These new users often lack training in leave-no-trace principles and result in blown-out trails and piles of used toilet paper behind every nearby tree. I suspect that our cash-strapped parks and forest services will impose visitor limits instead of expanding infrastructure. For those with the skills to navigate confidently off trail, there are still many quiet corners of our ranges to explore. For the rest, the future looks a lot busier.
Look at the upside though. More visitors means justification for more funding. And more voters who will raise a fuss if that funding isn't provided. You can always train newbs to get better. There's a thousand entertainment choices competing for people's attention today. Most of them are easier than packing a 20lb backpack and tramping off into the woods. On balance I'd say more people venturing outdoors is better than them staying home.
Have you ever considered how the actual residents of those places feel? Even for a moment? I'm sure some of them would prefer a return to a more "authentic" condition, but I'll bet the great majority are pretty happy for the $$$ that tourism brings in (or in some cases for the public goods those $$$ buy and that they enjoy). They don't have some duty to maintain things in a pristine state, at cost to their own quality of life, so that those oh-so-precious few who have the money or time to "make the effort" can come see them without the hordes of less privileged following.
This is sheer nonsense and IS ridiculous gatekeeping. Ensuring people who want to experience beauty need to put in work for it? Some people may never be able to visit these places, not everyone is so fortunate to be able to afford or have time off to travel. You might as well say they should never look at book of photos either, or they can never look at a painting without becoming an artist first. Maybe they would never gain a love of the outdoors if they had never seen some of these photos first and wanted to see more?
Now, I agree with the sentiment that there can be tourist overload on places, and that they should be managed well so they aren't destroyed. But 'digital leave no trace' is just nonsense. We should be sharing the beauty of the world, not restricting it.
Take that away and living in air conditioned condos and driving big diesel SUVs to the next strip mall for your latte is just how the world is supposed to be.
As long as gates break down new ones will emerge. That surfing spot down thr road is now 5x busy as it was a decade ago? Doesn’t matter, those with means already moved onwards to the better exclusive spot on some remote island.
Odd phrase. "Invested" in your own amusement? And that trumps others' right to be in the same place? The ones with "skin in the game" are the residents, owners, and/or official caretakers. If they want to let the unwashed masses in, as seems to be the case, who are you to overrule them? Instead of trying to exclude people, maybe we should educate people about what not to do and why not, providing facilities to contain the damage, hiring personnel to enforce rules and/or ameliorate damage as much as they can, etc.
I've been an active hiker, occasional backpacker, etc. for many years. Longer than most HNers have been alive. I've seen plenty of the damage that crowds can do. But I still realize that turning public places into private preserves for the most privileged is not an acceptable alternative.
2. "Rights" have nothing to do with this discussion.
3. Unless you're talking about a national park, the residents/owners/official caretakers of the backcountry are often nobody, or at most a volunteer trail maintenance org.
4. Educating people costs money. Providing facilities costs money. Hiring personnel costs money. Ameliorating damage costs money. These things all happen, but they cost money, and nobody is champing at the bit to pay.
The approach many in the outdoors community take is indeed everything you suggest, plus an information diet to concentrate use on trails which have seen a lot of work and can handle the traffic.
Rights have everything to do with this discussion. You're trying to argue that other people have less right to these areas because they've enjoyed them less than you. One could easily argue the exact opposite, that you've exhausted your share and should stay away. It's not a very good argument, but it's still more morally supportable than the one you're making.
> the residents/owners/official caretakers of the backcountry are often nobody
The default owner is the government, the default caretaker is BLM. Or equivalent in other countries. They have the authority to determine who should or should not go on that land, for what purpose. You don't. Get over it.
Who said there was such a moral imperative? Not me. Not even you. I'm not misreading; you're misrepresenting.
From a personal level, I came to the same logical conclusion as you - push ever deeper into nature via mountaineering, bc skiing, etc.
At the end of the day though am I not just a hypocritical ass? I can explore further into nature due to gps, maps, synthetic materials, lightweight AT ski gear, etc. Are not the 'original' explorers just looking at me like I look at the wave of new 'for the gram' hikers?
I think people worry too much about hypocrisy. Arguments of the form "you believe X, but if we take X to its logical extreme then you yourself run afoul of X!" lost all weight with me a long time ago. Sure, in the long run all attempts to avoid the crowd fails, and of course you yourself are part of "the crowd" to some people. But human life doesn't take place in the long run, it happens in the time preceding it.
I can enjoy my favorite backcountry spots (which I learned about from someone else, and so on) for some number of years before they are overrun with crowds, but the inevitability of them being run over by crowds does not take away those years.
That’s one of the main complaints of the opponents of Germany/Europe’s liberal immigration and refugee policies. They admit this in the article but dismiss it instantly.
Okay let's be honest for a second what does most traveling boil down to? You basically use a form of transportation to ping pong from one point of Earth to another to say you visited a piece of land named X or Y, a country let's call it, named by some person or group who is no longer alive and maybe started a war with other humans to solidify the country name and its artificial border lines. We are moving people from A to B back to A every day and in the process destroying our planets climate because people are bored with the lives in the place they inhabit.
We need to find out what is causing the boredom. Understand it and work to solve it so that people can enjoy the places they live. To embrace our shared humanity and environment in front of us everyday if we do not overlook it during the hassle of everyday life.
I think that's just a controversial view you created and therefore particularly like. It's likely also one you created to explain some preferences of yours (e.g local attachment). Likely instilled from parents.
I think my view on your comment is: true as long as you're a cyborg. Personally, I travel where(and when) no one goes. Unique, remote places. It's scientifically proven that when you experience something completely new your brain it's over clocking . That's what usually drives a good % of people. The rest simply follows. Not really clever marketing.
Personal still take leave to go traveling, the infrastructure in most places on Earth is virtually nonexistent. There's a reason you won't find any digital nomads working from beautiful Pacific islands.
Then I recounted my experience trying to do that from a decent hotel in Lusaka.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...
Learning about other cultures and other people’s way of life is incredibly important in an increasingly divided world. I strongly believe that if the average American spent time living with an Islamic family in the Middle East for a week, we might break down a lot of barriers between all the folks that share this rock we live on.
It’s another question as to whether that’s the type of travel people want to do, or whether it’s all collecting Instagram photos because #wanderlust is trendy and accessible right now
I mean, to each his own, but to me it’s the difference between reading documentation about code vs. writing code. The former may give you some good information, and may even be essential, but it’s not the same as experiencing the real thing.
Care to explain why you have an issue with my analogy?
Or opposite. Dating girl from strict Muslim family was eye opening.
During the Colonial era, quite a lot of indigenous peoples were wiped out by exposure to new diseases. Last I checked, we still haven't figured out what caused Gulf War Syndrome, much less how to cure it.
I'm convinced that there are a lot more health problems related to traveling and having no understanding of what we are exposing ourselves to than gets recognized, and there are plenty of stories out there of people bringing back horrifying health issues from their honeymoon or whatever. (I'm thinking of some article about some couple that picked up some parasitic worm from walking on the beach. The photos were disturbing.)
And it can be an issue that a local wouldn't have a big problem with. Maybe they have immunity or maybe they know not do X or whatever.
I don't want to shut travel down entirely, but I think ideas like yours contain very, very large blind spots.
No it is not. It is only overrated for folks who are trying to "gain" something from it.
>> Okay let's be honest for a second what does most traveling boil down to?
The whole point of traveling is to be in an environment foreign to you. Interacting with locals, eating local food, trying local shit. This was all more fun before globalization since you couldn't fly into Phillipines and walk into a McDonalds. But now, you can and that reduces the charm.
You might find traveling overrated because it is monetarily and passport-wise easy for you.
You might find it overrated because even after going to a far away land, you're using uber to go from point A to point B instead of what locals use there.
You might find it overrated if you are trying to use traveling to make you feel special. You want to be the only instagrammer who has gone to Bali? Too bad, so many others have.
The real fun of traveling is really meeting people from around the world in a foreign land, doing local activities, seeing amazing sights (natural and man made) learning their way of life and opening mindsets. It's crazy how wonderful this little blue rock in space is.
Only if you have a shallow perception of differences. You need to engage.
This is what your idea of traveling looks like (minimal interaction with locals, going to familiar brands, looking at everything from a sheltered familiar lens): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdSppr-ltd0
This is what fun, engaging and interesting traveling looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PJ7670mV6E
You really have to enjoy getting out and meeting people for this to work. If you're only in it for social media or with a defeatist armchair philosophical perspective, it won't be fun.
"eating food that boils down to the same components" - Only in the most technically reductive sense. There is no locally sourced crocodile where I live.
"eating food that boils down to the same components" - But entirely different stars
"you are interacting with homo sapiens" - With cares and life experiences utterly different to my own.
However, there was that one time we went to Ireland and were the only Americans in a bar and the band found out we were from Colorado and played John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High" and the whole bar was singing along. That was one of the best nights of my life. So I guess it's more complicated than just saying "traveling is so overrated it's insane".
I still travel.
I'm not sure what the solution is but that town is effectively ruined for normal people.
//EDIT: also the worst part is that instagram and whatever else people are using now is so ridiculously prevalent that you can literally sit down somewhere and hit the refresh stream to see the selfies of people right in front of you appear on the geo tagged location page. It's literally going there just to make a stupid picture.
It sounds like that city is still having growing pains with tourism influx, but it also sounds like the local economy is probably doing pretty well, so I don't know if "ruined" is the right term (in absolute terms).
Put another way: the locals will have a much more annoying but (hopefully) much richer existence as a result of that influx. Those that dislike this can either move or work with local governments to transform policies to stop the tourism (and fight those who prefer the income).
The actual local economy is suffering but is getting replaced with a new one: tourism.
"Sure, it would be great if we could teleport to some unspoiled natural place without having to deal with the hassle of regular travel and hiking for hours/days to get there. Maybe we could even maintain a place there, so we could visit whenever we want. But wait, if everybody else did that then it wouldn't be unspoiled any more. So maybe if teleportation cost a lot ... but not so much that we ourselves were excluded, naturally. But we're not elitist scum, are we? Oh well, let's keep walking."
I totally understand the urge, I feel it myself, but my aversion to being or becoming part of a new aristocracy is even stronger. The only fair way to keep places unspoiled would be to issue licenses via a lottery. Non-transferable licenses, or else you might as well just sell directly to the rich. Other than that, this is just an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of giving people freedom (and the means) to travel where they will.
Also people aren't stupid. They shop around and find good deals. I've seen many South Americans using London or Amsterdam as hub airports before jumping on cheap flights to Spain/Portugal etc.
They were always fundamentally the same, the former is just being more honest about what you are doing.
I think most anti tourism pieces are elitist. I also find crowds and queues a drag but either it's a lottery or it's priced out to most people. Which is better?
Exactly. I guess there's a third option, which is that it's simply closed, but that would only be OK if the residents unanimously want it that way and I doubt that's ever the case. The sentiment behind all articles like this is that the authors think access to $whatever should be more exclusive. I wonder how many would advocate for that if they knew they would be among the excluded. Darn few, I suspect.
Im not joking. The question they asked themselves was not why the Deutsche Bahn [2], receiving billions ins subsidies every year, is unable to compete agains budget airlines, but why the government doesn't forbid such low costs flights. The elitism of the authors really scares me. It almost seems as if they want a minimal ticket fee, making flying a luxury once again.
Ryanair and Easyjet are well run companies that are enabling millions of poor people to see the world, visit family members they haven't seen for decades, leave their countries for better opportunities abroad.
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/billig-fluege-der-...
[2] The major german railway company, privatized in 1994, but still fully owned by the government
I just flew Norwegian from New York to Europe for less than $75. Parking my car at the airport cost more than the flight. That entire airline is some sort of financing scheme and won’t exist in a couple of years.
They run specials frequently and you can get flights to London, Bergen, Barcelona, etc. A friend and his wife were able to fly to London to see Hamilton last year for less than it would have taken to see it in NYC!
Sounds like someone in Germany needs to crack a dictionary
I remember the RyanAir CEO once saying he could do base fares for free if it weren't for airport taxes.
I love travelling on trains not to mention the environmental benefits but the cost was unjustifiable compared to flying in Europe.
Most likely they (are forced to) cross-subsidize the non-profitabele routes from the profitable ones like Berlin-Cologne. Unlike national railways, cheap airlines can choose which routes they want to serve.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_subsidization) (https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2018/06/cross-subsidies.h...)
You can't have it both ways. Either tourism and outdoor recreation are popular and the market will respond by preserving unique places worth seeing. Or there will be no interest in preserving these places and our very large and resource hungry population will put these places to more productive use.
- Knowing the tourist stereotype and not wanting to be that makes me self-conscious. I've intentionally avoided some popular attractions because I didn't want to be part of the tourist scene. Worse, I've felt pressure to modify my normal behavior so as not to appear touristy. For example, at home I go into the city with my camera fairly often to photograph the streets and trash cans and shit like that, but I hesitated to do that in Zurich because I didn't want to be that tourist walking around with their camera. That's really stupid.
- The most fun I've had has been taking the wrong bus or a random train and then just going wherever looks the most interesting. The same with restaurants or bars or events: just head out without a destination and pop in wherever looks cool. If you do use Trip Advisor or other popular guides, wander around the destinations and discover what else is nearby. (Atlas Obscura and Google Earth have also taken me some fun places.)
- With your phone, you never really have to leave home or truly get to know a place. I can always reach my friends and family if I am just board; I can always use Translate; I can always look up transit directions. One effect of this is that meeting people—including other tourists—can be very hard because not only are you in your own little phone bubble world, they are also in their own little bubbles (not that this is any difference from home actually). I can't imagine what it would be like to travel while uploading images or commentary for the world.
- Tourists are only doing what systems have optimized for. We tourists go to Florence because the tools and infrastructure make it easy, and because the guides tell us that it is somewhere that we must visit. Then we take selfies to prove we were there because our culture values and rewards experience consumption. I'd like to think that we can build tools and culture that has a broader view of what travel can be and what you get from it. Because not only is travel an essential way to learn about and see the world, it also helps you better understand yourself and the place you come from.
Hopefully we can contain the tourists in a small touristy part of town, friendly to travelers.
I've been trying the lottery w/o success most months of the last year. It's frustrating not to win, but it's a fair way of meeting the demands of both access and preservation.
-Swimming with sea turtles in the wild
-Seeing whales breach right in front of me
-The feel of the finest sand I have ever experienced at Whitehaven between my toes
-Swimming in the warm sea
-Learning to surf with the perfect waves
-Sleeping in a ger with a family in Mongolia and getting an insight into how they live, what is important to them, understanding the things which can make people happy (which is very different to what lots of people think makes you happy at first glance)
-Hearing the emotion in a guides voice as he talks about the personal loss his family had due to communism, feeling connected to someone and caring instead of reading a fact in a book and it meaning very little
-Looking up at buildings I have seen countless times in photos and yet speechless, as the photo had zero impact on me yet seeing it in real life is amazing. For example the Taj Mahal blew me away, looking at it from different angles, seeing the detail close up, getting a true feel of the scale and spectacle of it.
-Dancing on the sand in bare feet through the night at a full moon party surrounded by people who are there to have fun and be happy. Sharing moments with other people. Moments that you can recall in a heartbeat throughout your life and mean something to you.
-Going to iconic places from films, tv, books from your childhood and feeling that sense of excitement which seems to erode away as we get older, but as an adult you still get that buzz when it is seeing something that meant something to you as a kid.
-Tasting home cooked food from an Indian family which tastes nothing like any Indian food I have ever tasted in the UK.
-Being surrounded by wild deer and feeding them special deer cookies. Laughing as they shake their heads around and then having to run away as too many of them surround us.
-Experiencing the lack of things, the lack of drinkable water from a tap, the lack of hygienic washing facilities, the lack of western toilets and getting so much more appreciation for what we have.
-Hearing what local Tibetans thinks about Tibet and China and contrasting it to what is put across publicly
-Seeing a sky full of stars reaching out to us from the opposite direction and being in the middle of the ocean or on an island without any lights on and get amazing views devoid of light pollution.
-Seeing how unfair the world is and questioning so much about life and how we are currently living it. Perhaps making life-changing choices, moving to a different country, changing vocations, etc.
-Filling up your senses with things which aren't available in the UK
I mean I could go on and on and on. I am 34 and have taken a year off to travel the world, seeing 20 countries, getting some classic Instagram snaps, drinking with a bunch of British people in remote places, doing things which are cliché and doing something which I don't even like for no good reason. Finding the most British food I can and being happy to taste coke. But that is all just one small part of the experience. When you have been in Asia for 5 months and have basically had a stomach which has never quite been completely right, the most western classic food can be very much welcomed. I personally find it tiresome to hear people for ever complaining about what you should and shouldn't do. If you want a Starbucks in Vietnam then have one, you don't have to drink their (very different) coffee (I have given up coffee so not something for me personally). If you like McDonald's in Malaysia then go have it (McDonald's is great in terms of something safe, reliable, cheap, easy, although not much good for me as a vegetarian).
Taking a year off to travel is one of the best decisions I have made. I am confident it will change my life (it already has) and also confident it will create memories which will stay with me and something I will always look back on positively.