Not less importantly, it gives you empathy for "the other". It makes you understand how similar we all are at the core and, paradoxically, how diverse our behaviors and viewpoints can be. And it makes it harder and harder to believe that you, specifically, were born in the place with the correct behaviors and the correct viewpoint.
Tourism is a farce. I guess it gives you the social status points of going through a challenge, without actually facing any difficulties or learning anything. You can have your photo in front of the Eiffel Tower, or that cute Buddhist Temple, or whatever. Maybe use that super expensive camera you bought as a toy (god forbid you use it to do something different, something that hasn't been done before by one million people just that week).
Tourism itself is a paradox: its gaze destroys the very thing it wants to look at. The Ramones could no longer rent an apartment in Brooklyn. Struggling painters could most certainly not afford to live in Paris these days, Montmartre or otherwise. Punk Rock in London? Only if you have a banking job on the side... The old ladies who sang fado from windows in old Lisbon neighborhoods had to move to the suburbs, because Madonna arrived with her entourage and every rich kid wants a piece of that "genuine" action on their Instragram.
Be a traveler, not a tourist!
Now that I've got two kids and a high-pressure job, tourism is how I expose myself and my kids to other cultures and experiences. It is possible to do it right by keeping an open mind and not being "those people". I'll relate one anecdote.
A couple of years ago we went to Panama and stayed in Panama City for a week before heading to the coast. While in the city we read about Amazon jungle tours. Not wanting to end up on a bus with a bunch of people, one night I headed out to a nearby square and started chatting up people with the limited but decent Spanish I've managed to learn over the past few years. I met a friendly restauranteur, explained that we wanted to head up to the jungle, and asked if he knew anyone who could take us.
Next morning we all crammed into a pickup truck driven by an incredibly vivacious and chatty Panamanian woman (the restauranteur's cousin) and roared off to the jungle. The trip included memorable moments such as the part where a long, remote bridge was shut down to car traffic, forcing us to leave the truck by the side of the road and hike across in brutal heat. On arriving at the other side, seeing how exhausted my kids were, she told us to wait under a tree and took off. Twenty minutes later she rolled up in a minivan, which she had borrowed from a fellow Panamanian (a total stranger) who had agreed to lend it to us, free of charge, for the afternoon. She explained that she had a guardian angel that helped her arrange such things.
We were tourists, 100%. But my whole family learned a lot from the experience.
When you do it it's "tourism" when I do it it's "travelling". When you're visiting a place for a shorter period of time primarily for leisure, you're a tourist. Sure you can tourist in more or less intrusive ways, but just accept the label and move on.
the Ramones could no longer rent an apartment in Brooklyn. Struggling painters could most certainly not afford to live in Paris these days...
None of which has anything to do with tourism.
On the contrary. Tourism is a major driving force behind the large scale conversion of long term rentals into hotels via Airbnb.
Which part do you oppose the most? The queuing, the photo taking, or the finding of the changing of the guards an amusing spectacle worth seeing once in your life. If there's no queue and I don't take any pictures, is it still "touristy"?
The bottom line is that most "touristy" stuff became touristy because it was a kind of cool/unique/fun/interesting thing to see/do. I agree that if there's a long queue you have to balance how much time you want to spend against the value of the thing you'll see.
The one where you lift property prices so high that nobody can live in the city centres anymore.
Dictionary definition of a tourist: "One who travels for pleasure.".
This local goes the same places the tourists do because the UK is beautiful and the foreign tourists I meet have good taste ;)
In comparison, I also move to a new country every ~2.5 years on average because I get bored of the place I live in after a while, and that does nothing to reduce the enjoyment I get from traveling to new places.
I did that, and it didn't "enlighten" me much. I think it may be because I was already very aware, thanks to Internet and the media industry, of an American culture, which is very different from my own, so I already had a good basis for comparison.
> Tourism is a farce. I guess it gives you the social status points of going through a challenge, without actually facing any difficulties or learning anything.
I never do tourism stuff (not out of snobbishness, I am just not that interested), but my aunt does, and to her, it's just a best use of her 10 days a year of vacation that she gets. She's working 6 days a week for less than a minimum wage, so the last thing she wants is a "challenge" really - I'm impressed that she does not go get lay on a beach somewhere and just regenerate, but prefers being bussed around Europe.
> Struggling painters could most certainly not afford to live in Paris these days, Montmartre or otherwise.
Why is it important for painters to live in Paris? You can paint anywhere and there's plenty of affordable places in the world.
Please, please, please don't use this phrase. I don't want to be an instagram fueled "traveler" who ends up begging[^1].
[^1]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4400790/Rise-Wester...
If you want to travel, have the funds. Why on Earth would I support someone else's trip when I could save that money for my own?!
Of the ten pictures, five of them were busking (and of the five, two to three were pretty damn half-assed).
What is destroying the ability of kids to live in London and Paris is a lot more complex, but has a lot more to do with plutocracy and the rise of moneyed anti democratic forces than tourism.
And as every aging punk rocker knows, the Ramones were from Queens.
It would be great for many locations if half of the visitors would simply stay at home.
But,
> Be a traveler, not a tourist!
Please don't make this worse by putting this idea into more heads. Personally I read up on the most popular TV shows and advise everyone to just stay home while I go do (something else).
The way you describe "traveling" is actually tourism, just long-form. Read a book if you need to "expand your horizon," or I don't know, follow someone on Twitter.
Like, do you think wealthy expats aren't part of the issue? Sure, AirBnB has accelerated the process, but expat-driven price inflation and gentrification were displacing poor people for years before AirBnB exploded.
But it is definitely not the same to move to another city in your own country or go somewhere else where social norms and language are fundamentally different.
Come fast, before the high-speed rail lines connecting Madrid to several cities in the north and northwest are finished in 3-4 years from now. I cannot guarantee the situation will hold after that, my intuition is that bad infrastructure is a major reason for the relatively little attention these areas attract.
Vaux-le-Vicomte, which was the model for Versailles, is virtually unknown and a really nice visit. When crowd traffic jams happen in front of Mona Lisa in the Louvres, the medieval art sections, two stories above, are almost deserted despite very interesting pieces. Everybody wants to see Notre Dame, but there are about 100 monumental cathedrals in France.
If we let T (tourists/day in peak season) = 3t(tourists/day in regular season), then we have about 1.3t if it all smooths out.
Of course, depends on where you travel, but the places I've visited have been pretty busy in the off-season already, adding another 30% of them would be pretty hectic.
New startup idea: modelling the ideal time to take a trip somewhere within certain metrics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrenchiemsee
I've been there, it's pretty amazing, shame he ran out of money to finish it off!
Maybe the answer to sex tourists in the Red Light District is sex tourist tourists who rudely point and take photos.
I think you're spot on. Consider the tourist-y American cities - New York, Boston, LA, Chicago, SF, etc. - most of the city dwellers have no care for the tourists because they don't spend all of their time next to attractions. They go to work, they go to school, they go to parks, etc. All of these are different in different places, and worth looking at themselves! It doesn't need to be on a brochure or part of a guided tour to be rich with history and purpose. And often, venturing out from the "golden path" leads to a healthy dose of reality (valuable!) when you see how normal people operate outside of the tourists spots.
There used to be a handful of adventurous tourists who would walk across from Manhattan and look around. Now the Brooklyn waterfront is on every single visitor’s wish list and it’s packed with people and selfie-taking nonstop, and almost overwhelming during busy summer periods.
I think it’s great. The Brooklyn Bridge and the skyline are stunning and I feel lucky to have this view every day and I’m glad more people are getting to see it. When I go visit the places they live and look at their great views I don’t feel bad about that either.
I actually do agree with you that travelling has a lot or drawbacks--and I never would have travelled for this long if I wasn't a refugee running from bad things--but when I read someone say they gave up on it, it makes me sad. It has been an enlightening and beautiful part of my life.
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/schweiz-chinesen-1.4454...
I spent a month in Japan a few years ago, at the beginning of the year instead of the Golden Week when everybody goes and visited all over the place. No queues, no massive amounts of people (well, Tokyo is Tokyo), no stress. Sure, I missed the famous cherry blossoms, but to be able to visit e.g. Himeji castle and be in a room almost by myself contemplating was worth it. Had many experiences like this everywhere. I really enjoyed that trip and left feeling that Japan was even better than I imagined.
And then keep your mouth shut, as well as not post any pictures or videos publicly.
I was in some small town in the Philippine last year. Got into a pizza restaurant and there was a mini-event the locals made where they danced and singed. That's some genuine experience. You can have lots of these because most people are going with the flow.
Unfortunately, in this picture, turning around meant to go back up, towards the summit.
Travel can broaden the mind, but only if you let it, and most of the ways in which it does are through giving you unexpected things, good or bad. The more tightly you plan, or buy a package in order to remove uncertainty, the less serendipity you get. You can't order a surprise for yourself.
Given this philosophy, I felt bad about allowing a tour company to plan my South American trip rather than booking dozens of transfers myself, but in the end serendipity worked anyway and somehow we ended up with two of us on an itinerary clearly designed for larger groups. Speeding across Lake Titicaca on a catamaran to ourselves remains a peak experience. Later on we got to Machu Picchu, which really is reaching critical levels of self-destructive tourism: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/may/15/archaeologist...
(There is also something to be said for both straightforward hedonism and the "precision relaxation" of people who go to the same hotel for 20 years to order the same drinks, but neither of those really needs or deserves to be allowed to ruin a local community or natural wonder in order to make it happen.)
If you're very lucky you can wind up with the best of both worlds.
I've been on an organized three week trip to Peru, which was nothing short of mind blowing.
The thing is that my sister in law is Peruvian, owns a house in Lima, worked at the presidents palace (which we were able to visit on short notice) and has a lot of friends and family around the country.
So while she had some of things organized (you partially must. You can't spontaneously visit Machu Pichu [which was a bit of a disappointment, but I digress]). But she had those parts, which needed to be pre-planned organized by local travel agents and tour operators. Obviously, knowing the language, the people and the place was extremely valuable for that.
So, despite that it was essentially a "package tour" it felt like totally individualized travel.
While some of the elements certainly can be booked as part of a packaged tour I don't think it could have been done with such quality and insight without the local knowledge.
Another thing, which I found can be immensly valuable is hiring a local guide. A guide and car in Siem Reap (Cambodia) hit me with about 30$ a day (& tip). Sure, you can visit Angkor Wat by booking a tuk tuk, buy a guide book and head off on you own. But you'll have to make sense of a temple installation scattered around 400 km/2 on your own.
Having a guide on my side opens doors to places, which I would never have been able to do on my own. Let alone of getting all the background on country, poeple and (yes) politics.
Probably the true value of travel is not what you go to see, but the new knowledge and reflection about where you came from.
Not if you were £30k in the hole for the trip!
Tourism is a plague but travel will always be a significant human experience.
Sad to see the same thing happening on Everest. If I saw that line, I would immediately turn around.
When I was younger I thought travel was important to me. But after doing it a bit, I've realized travel isn't what I thought it was. It isn't that exciting and it's not some kind of achievement, other than the achievement of having enough disposable income to make it happen. The people who create things worth visiting--whether that's art or food or buildings or whatever--are people staying where they are and investing in their communities. I want to be one of those people, not the rich jerks taking up space and contributing nothing to the scene.