Always worth posting Wallace's quote on the subject:
"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 :)
Interesting to see Den Spiegel sympathize with the people who “no longer feel comfortable in their neighborhood because they have become a minority in the cafés and restaurants they traditionally frequented.”
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.
Traveling is overrated. Often times in modern life it feels as thought traveling is a competition rather than for leisure and pleasure. People are often competing to take pictures and say they have been to as many places as possible. Props to travel companies for propagating the travel craze and selling people on the allure of taking pictures and eating food in another spot on Earth. Count the number of people's profiles on social media that do not say they like traveling.
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 went with my wife to Hallstatt this year. It's a tiny picturesque town in Austria. I was there not that long ago, maybe something like 10 years and it was nice and memorable but for a local no big deal. This time we went on a wimp and jesus christ there were so many tourists. It was insane how utterly impossible life must be there for people. There are signs in Chinese and Japanese everywhere about local laws, not to fly drones, not to take pictures of little children etc.
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.
The problem is that limiting access to those with the greatest means (factoring in leisure time as well as money) is horribly elitist. This is similar to a conversation about teleportation that I've had several times with my wife and more recently my daughter.
"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.
Funny that they blame Ryanair and Easyjet, who only serve Europe, in the first sentence, then plaster a big photograph of a field full of Chinese tourists that most likely did not use Ryanair or Easyjet to get there.
At a fundamental level, I think the mysticism and admiration of many of these tourist destinations in Europe has greatly eroded in our internet and social media age. It's not like how tourism was 50 years ago when people mostly relied on anecdotal and literary knowledge of places to get a glimpse of what they are like. It's much more of an experience to have to go see something for yourself to really get a substantial view of it, in a sense. Now, I could go see what Barcelona or Prague or Rome is like today on Google Maps, look through Instagram stories of people who live there, and sort through countless "10 Things to do in __" guides on the internet. Of course, there's pros and cons to each way, but in modern times tourism really is more about "I just want to do predetermined cool stuff in a place for my 1 week vacation" rather than "I want to experience a place and immerse myself in the culture for 1 week".
Isn't this in a sense the goal of globalization? Each region adapts more and more to the niche that they serve best.
"hell is other people"
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?
Recently, in the german edition of the Spiegel, there was a similar column[1] saying there was "something really going wrong" when a flight from Berlin to Cologne costs 15€ while the train ticket for the same destinations costs 120€. The same article said that the flights were "absurdly cheap" and that the budget airlines are "displaying the type of capitalism that is disconnected from reality".
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
Everything must be matained forever or it will disappear. Areas of economic unproditivity will be capitalized on. If there were no crowds of tourists filling ancient cities, there'd be less incentive to maintain them or not replace them with new construction. If no one used our national parks they'd be sold off to developers or resource extractors.
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.
I've been playing tourist in Switzerland and northern Italy recently and had a few thoughts related to this article.
- 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.
While I think this is being exacerbated by the social media culture of travel ("I love to travel, crazy wanderlust" reads a profile, next to pictures at every guidebook location), this is just the consequence of a global world, where transportation between places has become cheaper and easier than before, and incomes have made much of the world accessible. I for one welcome the human progress. My grandparents had stories of saving up, leaving from their job, and going on long trips on barges for travel.
Hopefully we can contain the tourists in a small touristy part of town, friendly to travelers.
An excellent YouTube channel called Rare Earth did a video on this subject:
In my mind, this could be solved fairly simply with government regulation. The government can sell tourism passes to enter the country, therefore socializing some of the profits of tourism, or even just hand them out in a lottery. It seems obvious that this will need to be done at some point; there are fundamental limits on how many people a country's infrastructure can support. Without the government stepping in, it will only get worse.
Tons of people would never got chance to enter most of the world. See this third world passport thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17778108
When - not if - cheap oil finally runs out tourism will be a fraction of what it is today.
Author fell into a common fallacy - mistook lust for love.
As a side note: I have the feeling spiegel.de is getting worse and worse by the day. Ever increasing click-bait titles, aricles with little depth, more and more content paywalled. And don’t get me started on the page filling ads... or is it just me?
Why bother traveling? Well I live in the UK and want to experience:
-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.
I grew up with stories of people like Maco Polo and love of travel but my recent trips to Europe has almost repulsed and disillusioned me. Tiny European countries are being swamped by huge swath of tourists, everyone with Rick Steve’s guidebook, they all go look at exact same thing, take exact same pictures and even eat at exact same recommended restaurants. There is a lot to see and little to reflect when you are among herds of camera clicking tourists. I wonder if there are any other guidebooks people use (especially for Europe) that puts them more on path of becoming traveller and less on tourist.