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.
> everyone with Rick Steve’s guidebook, they all go look at exact same thing [...] I wonder if there are any other guidebooks
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".
> 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.
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.
It would still break down at scale, statistically speaking, at least for the most famous destinations (i.e. the above-mentioned European capitals). And the experience would still be sub-par: you appreciate more what you discover on your own, because your brain is reacting to your own instincts rather than being intellectually told what you should like. It's also much harder to be disappointed, because there was no guide raising your expectations.
Don't take this the wrong way but if you travelled to Europe and your main criticism is that places are swamped by huge swaths of Tourists all trying to see the same thing then unfortunately you're one of them.
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.
The world is a staggeringly huge place. It's filled with complexity from top to bottom. There are more wonders than could fill a library of travel books.
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.
Seriously? You'll be killed if you don't use a guidebook? Most of the world is quite safe. For the few places that arn't, I dont think Lonely Planet is going to going to be much help unless your keep it in your breast pocket.
Don't take bad risks. Use your wits and common sense. Stay aware of your surroundings. Fear is the mind killer.
I often wait until I have a personal connection to a place, such as a friend or related hobby, before traveling. The experience becomes very removed from that of a tourist, and so much more rewarding.
Am I selfish if I put extra effort into maintaining friendships with foreign friends so I might end up visiting them?
I can relate to this. I have had some more rewarding travel experiences in Europe on short work trips, than I have in similar places as a tourist. I think its a combination of better connections with locals and a reason to be there beyond just looking at things.
I never had much interest in travel. Peers and friends are constantly nagging me I should visit awesome places. Something with a beach and a blue ocean or something. I am german and hardly anyone ever told me a story about my coutry that made me curious about germany. But I know the day I find the curiosity and patience, I will travel germany. I had little travels here in the past, but if you opt-in into those seemingly boring things there is a lot to find. But one should look and for historical stories and places, not for fancy stuff. Germany played several roles how the modern western world came to what it is today and this story is insanley deep and complex.
If you don't want to be a random tourist, then this is my hint.
One of my favourite cities in Italy is Venice, I am italian, and I have been there visiting friends several times. Tourism have ruined the city, they are there all year, residents don't have breaks...
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.
"One of my favourite cities in Italy is Venice, I am italian, and I have been there visiting friends several times. Tourism have ruined the city, they are there all year, residents don't have breaks..."
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.
Very much agree, there are ways to avoid the masses with a little thought and research.
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.
My only personal thought is to use as many resources as you can to plan. A lot of places have Tripadvisor forums as well as other old school forums or other pages on the Internet where you can get deeper options than many guidebooks can provide, as well as other opinions of many other people. The biggest issue with Rick Steve is that a single opinionated guide is misinterpreted as a bible. I don't think one single guidebook suffices that well these days.
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.
You can take a "Last Minute Trips"[0] approach and just throw a dart into a map. You'd have to work a bit harder to find out the interesting stuff about the place you're going to. You're going to miss some of the huge popular stuff. But it's going to be a nicer experience.
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.
I'm about to launch a startup which if it works well will distribute experiences, moving people away from all getting the same recommendations for the same places because some algorithm created the recommendation. The problem with crowd sourced averages is that the curve is exponential. If there are 2 places with 4 reviews and one has a 3.5 rating and the other a 4.5 rating more people will go to the 4.5 rated place.The increase in traffic becomes a self-fulfilling cycle of validation. Bibimapp is a social place recommendation engine using the follower / following model. You can signup for early beta access here: bibimapp.com
You might want to consider that if you’re seeing them a lot you are also there and part of the problem. There are lots of places you can go and not see lots of tourists. You just have to go see things that tourists aren’t as interested in.
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 :)
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."
> And decrying "mass tourism," as Russell 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.
I really appreciate you using the term “classist”. I think that term, and not “racist”, needs to be much more widely applied these days.
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.
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 ...
The ugly tourist the piece refers to is all tourists being somewhere the wouldn’t otherwise have been except for relative affluence and the opportunity. Lots of people who just go places, which by definition become tourist destinations.
Actually, I read literally in the last few days that a survey indicated 'Instagramability' was the #1 issues for Millenials in their choice of destinations. I think it was the Globe and Mail, sorry I don't have the link. That kind of threw me a little, but I think 'it's a thing'.
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 ...
My parents did not even bring a camera on vacation; they considered it an annoying habit of tourists and that is 30+ years ago. It had the sideeffect that we did not get flagged as tourists but as locals/expaths which is better usually. With smartphones all of that changed ofcourse.
I don't believe your parents were the norm, and taking pictures is generally not considered rude in any culture, really.
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.
I did not mean to say it was considered rude; when people got robbed/pickpocketed it was not us as we didn't look like clueless tourists with huge cameras around our necks.
And is your claim that the vast majority of these users are curating a personal brand, as opposed to simply sharing with friends and family, actual corporate brands maintaining an online presence, or any other use case besides?
While your point about racism is kind of tautologically true from a purely semantic standpoint (in the same way that "primate" is a more widely applicable term than "human"), race and class are inextricably linked in the US, and the problems caused by it deserve focus on their racial context.
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.
"alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have"
I find this hugely classist.
I thought the quote was going more for a "leave-no-trace" approach to interacting w the world. Clean up your physical and digital trash so that it doesn't destroy the experience for others.
Once on a hike I was passed by a man and his wife who commented they had to get somewhere further along to see it. This was along one of my favorite trails.
"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."
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.
I agree, the absurdity of the notion of digital gatekeeping of beauty becomes apparent if we think what the first pictures of our planet from space have done for the ecology movement. People need to experience to connect.
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.
It seems like you're assessing this in a very abstract way, as evidenced by your "what if we took this logic to the extreme" examples. I assure you your perspective changes once you have skin in the game and are invested in an activity which is substantially diminished by the introduction of a large number of uncaring people.
Literally the same argument was made when blacks tried to move into predominately white neighborhoods. “Oh it’s never been the same since, we had to leave to a more exclusive town.”
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.
1. You can indeed be invested in your own amusement, through sunk time & money for equipment & training, a social network of others invested in the same activity, and many things less tangible.
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 nothing to do with this discussion.
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.
I'm afraid you are mistaken. Under discussion is whether there is a moral imperative for individuals to publicly disseminate their personal knowledge of locations of natural beauty. Again, rights are not at all relevant, unless you're talking about the right of someone else to my personal knowledge. Given your wild misreading of the topic I won't engage with you further.
I completely agree with your comment about democratizing of our outdoors with mediums like Instagram. They provide a phenomenal view into the beauty of our planet, but open that beauty to a lot of bad actors, or, at least, ignorant actors. Fortunately, there are a few 'grammers who adhere to digital leave no trace and always leave a blurb about the real 'leave no trace' within each post. I would love that to be the norm.
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?
Of course the original explorers feel that way! Heck, I sport climb, which at one point was nearly grounds for a beating in some circles.
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.
The hedonic rush of social media is an unfortunate aspect to modern travel. Vacations and trips have always had the aspect where the traveler plans how to tell friends/family about the trip after the fact. However, I've caught myself mentally planning out a social media post about something I'm seeing right at the moment.
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.
I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, I find it silly that literally millions of people take the exact same shot of things like the clock tower in the old town square of Prague and then post them online for a few cheap "likes."
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.
For me the fact there are 1 million pictures of that clock online is irrelevant. People follow others on Instagram either because they are interested in what the person does or they find the other places and pictures interesting which have been posted in the past and would like to see more.
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.
This tempts me to go grab a set of "Prague tourist photos" and just make up a fake trip. Just be upfront: I didn't take a trip to Prague, but here's what it would look like it I did. Just as curated, just as personal, just as compelling as any brochure. Oh look this guy who's into craft beer and chess history wrote up a hypothetical trip to St. Petersburg, check it out.
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.
I notice that for 99% of the places we go, if we just hike 10 minutes from the ‘touristic entrypoint’, places are deserted unless you can get there by car. Even in extremely densely packed places like Hong Kong or tourist places where in the weekend many people go walking; if you just go a bit further, there is no one for hours. You do not need to go mountaineering for that. A lot of people like nature but abhor walking, so in places like in Spain where I go often you see hundreds of tourists on the picnic place deep in the forest on the mountain you can drive to, but, again, 10 minutes walk on a solid nice path which is forbidden for cars, you will find no people at all. Even or maybe especially in high season (walking in heat seems even worse for people; I love it).
> places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you
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.
I am sadly very familiar with your second paragraph.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think "economically significant but existentially loathsome" also describes elitists/materialists who believe that only rich people should get to enjoy beautiful surroundings even part of the time. So it's an apt phrase, but probably not in the way ahelwer meant.
This Wallace guy is certainly proud of his opinions, I'll say that for him. The important thing is that he's found a way to feel superior to pretty much everybody.
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.
> 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.
Not sure why I got downvoted- why shouldn't these people be denied access to a certain geographical area and all its splendors before undergoing some, say, "naturalization" process?
Your original comment was snarky (with a borderline political bent given current US politics), and your followup doesn't really expand on the conversation any further than your first comment.
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.
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 disagree that it’s due to boredom, or that it is overrated.
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
There are so many different cultures much closer to people. If the motivation for travel was to learn about other cultures, go to a different part of town, eat at their restaurants, go to their bars, make some friends, and learn. There are Islamic families in the US as well as the Middle East.
You remind me of an old lady I met while living in Southern California. This lady was extremely proud of the fact that she had never set foot outside of California her entire life (by choice, as she was quite wealthy). I asked her about it and she said “Honey, why bother? It’s paradise here. If I ever wonder about life elsewhere, I can read about it or watch a documentary!”
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.
Think bigger. Her and you have never set foot outside Earth. What makes California so different from x or y point on Earth? Really think about it deeply.
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
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.
I had to create an account just to agree with you. I express the same opinion to my wife and whoever else will listen and so far every single one of them get mad at me. I just don't understand the attraction of traveling to some country where it's clear that most of the people don't like you. You are not alone.
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".
Yeah it is definitely complicated. I think there is some degree of travel that makes sense but right now it has become a competition and a game rather than a stop and breathe, soak this in sort of thing. In that sense all this competition is for naught and much more can be learned by appreciating earth where one dwells now. Learn to see and understand the people around you in different parts of the city and better understand ho humanity impacts the environment similarly across the planet.
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.
I work remotely and find it very hard to believe you can go "anywhere anytime".
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.
Weird. I travel quite often. More often than not in remote places. In my experience there's ALWAYS an airbnb/resort/hotel that has WIFI satellite. Also, coding/designing/answering emails very rarely requires a fast internet connection. Some anecdotal examples: Galapagos, Socotra, Lofoten, Sacred Valley, Island of the Sun, Patagonia and Atacama's desert.
Yeah, the infrastructure most places isn't there. I remember recently a HN thread on why one would need a powerful laptop for work, when you should just SSH into a server...
Then I recounted my experience trying to do that from a decent hotel in Lusaka.
I know it can be hard to hear views that you don't agree with especially if you fantasize about doing something once/twice a year for vacation or escape.
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.
The real question you have to ask yourself is why is it foreign to you? You are breathing air, eating food that boils down to the same components, you are experiencing gravity at the same rate, you are seeing one moon, you are seeing one sun, you are interacting with homo sapiens. The differences are mostly psychological perceptions where you are bored and want to feel something different.
>> The differences are mostly psychological perceptions where you are bored and want to feel something different.
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
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.
"You are breathing air" - True, but it smells like a different place.
"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.
Believe it or not it’s possible to have a more meaningful experience when you travel. For example, I spent three weeks staying with a Mayan family in Guatemala while I learned Spanish. I’m not sure I took more than a couple of pictures the whole time I was there.
I think you should take a broader view here. Traveling is not to just go from point to point, traveling is wonderful, it open up to new opportunities and exposes to new ideas, culture and places that you would never know existed. Traveling teaches you so much about life and breaks singular view on world.
You can get a lot more exposure locally if you learn about your community and try to build and grow your country. Most of things you learn traveling or moving to some country named by a person over a war perhaps can be learned online.
You tell me how you learn what it’s like to eat a pupusa between sips of horchata, made by an old blind lady on a beachside stand in El Salvador, while chickens run around between your feet and the local bar is playing bachata music from going on line.
Why can’t you do both ? How can you learn about some 3rd world country, their culture, their social issues and innovations by living in first world community? Learning online about others is like learning to swim online.
I understand. It is really important to a lot of people. But the world is right there in front of you there is something to be said about appreciating where you are.
I appreciate where I live MORE because I see other things. Because you notice the differences and appreciate what makes it special. I spend 98% of my time there, and it's better because of the 2% of my time I spend elsewhere.
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.
There is an interesting (but perhaps not very insighful) connection to gentrification in this.
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).
> 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).
The actual local economy is suffering but is getting replaced with a new one: tourism.
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.
Lots of tourist from outside Europe use "hub" airports and then travel to their final destinations, often using low cost airlines. This why German and Dutch airspaces are so busy.
It would usually be the same airline that did the long flight or one of their partners - but Ryanair and Easyjet don't do those partnerships with Chinese airlines. I've also gotten a lot of their flights and hardly ever see Chinese tourists, mostly local (or other European) tourists in fact.
Well that's why airlines like Ryanair exist. If say Lufthansa is booked up by Chinese tourists and prices are rocketing, that leaves a gap in the market that these airlines fill.
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.
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".
> 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".
They were always fundamentally the same, the former is just being more honest about what you are doing.
It really depends on how you do it. I went several times on a holiday where I didn't knew the destination a day before. you just need free time, a car and a smartphone. Oh and avoid tourist trap places, it's just a huge crowd and overpriced stuff anyway.
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?
> either it's a lottery or it's priced out to most people
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.
I new this band before they were cool man. Now I can't afford tickets because of all the Johnny come latelies who can't truly appreciate their music like I can.
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.
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.
Stewart Airport (Newburgh, NY) to Shannon, Ireland. They fly out of several US cities.
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!
It was transformed from a public office into a private company with all shares owned by the state. They planned to sell those shares but this never happened for various reasons.
> Journalism aside, what is the reason? Are railways really that inefficient?
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.
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.
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.
This is actually done with certain destinations in the US. For example, after "The Wave" in Southern Utah became tremendously famous (driven, IIRC, by a very nice desktop photo distributed with Windows), access became permit-only determined by BLM lottery.
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.
It's cheap flights that make this work, electric planes are for now a pipe dream for international and intercontinental flights and high speed trains are not that high speed compared to aircraft.
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.
