Enough With the Road Less Traveled: Six Ways to Enjoy the Beaten Path On Your Own Terms

Here's a great conversation-killer when you're talking travel: "I like the beaten path."

It's right up there with "I just can't [scratch] get rid of [scratch scratch] these bedbugs" and "For style and function on the road, you really can't beat cargo-pant Zubaz."

But I do like the beaten path. I feel no shame in saying that, even as I brace myself for the ensuing awkward silence.

The thing is--and I'm far from the first to say this, and it's a point I discuss quite a bit in the book--there's a reason people go there, a reason the path is beaten: because there's some cool stuff there. It's just as absurd to avoid a place simply because other people are there (even lots of other people) as it is to go there for the express purpose of following the crowds. And sometimes, yeah, the crowds are too thick, the site not actually all that attractive. Sometimes the tourist-haters are right. But not always. And that's a judgment you really need to make for yourself, on your own terms.

It's not just the "there's cool stuff there" argument that wins me over, though. Because sometimes (hello, Venice) even if a place is beautiful or interesting, the innate touristy-ness of the place--the crowds, the souvenir stands, the fact that you've seen all these sites in movies and friends' postcards--does rather detract from the over all allure.

I also like the beaten path precisely because of the extra effort required to make it feel interesting and new. Even in the midst of crowds, there are some measures you can take to shift the focus.

(And besides which, if you'll forgive one last digression, it's not like the proverbial road less traveled can't lead to its own flavor of misery. I mean, if I learned nothing from the important lessons of all those Hitchcock movies I watched at at far-too-early age, it's that taking one wrong turn will almost always lead to you being either (a) dead or (b) falsely accused of murder and tied up in a sprawling and sinister plot that involves, at minimum, the FBI, organized crime, and a femme fatale whose innate and oh-so-sublime sultriness is rather diminished by that whole fatale part.)

Manneken Pis in Brussels. Discuss.

Anyway. Like so, so many other things in life, travel is what you make of it. And here, based on my own experiences on that well-trod trail, are six ways to enjoy the beaten path on your own terms.

1. People-watch. Just sit on a bench or in a sidewalk cafe and watch the parade of life pass by. I mean, don't be creepy about it--you don't want the friendly local residents to call the cops about the shifty-eyed weirdo, lest you end up needing to reference the "What To Do If You're Tossed In Jail" section of your guidebook. But do just sit and watch. The world's an interesting place. Take it in. To make things more interesting, start keeping tallies of various archetypes: businesspersons traveling in packs; kids on skateboards; art-school hipsters who nonconform in the same way as all their counterparts in every other city on the planet; tourists trying to blend in but failing spectacularly.

2. Chat up the service industry workers. The woman at the gift shop, the server at the gelateria. If they're originally from the place, ask them how it's changed--or just, you know, ask them for their own advice. If they're immigrants--and a ton of service-industry workers are--ask them for their local-but-outsider take on this place. Touristic transactions don't have to be cold and impersonal.

 3. Look for the unfamiliar takes on things that are familiar to you. Because sometimes the sorta-familiar things can seem even more bizarre than the wholly new, because you understand the template but not the end result. Watch a Japanese sitcom, even if you don't speak Japanese, and see if the stock characters and situations hew to your expectations. Listen to the unintelligible trash-talk of Vienna teenagers playing pickup basketball in a park. Go to the local fast-food joint and order the least-familiar item on the menu. Also look around for the remixed versions of the local food or music—the immigrants' take on the traditional local music, or the locals' take on their immigrant neighbors' traditional foods. Look for the caroms of culture, the reinterpretations that create(as I put it in the book) the discreet poetry of the everyday but unexpected.

4. Indulge in the kitsch. Buy a tacky postcard and send it to your best friend. Go to a landmark and take a photo with a ridiculous pose—pretending to wear the Eiffel Tower as a hat, for example. Be silly. No shame. I mean, come on: You're an outsider in an unfamiliar place--that's the stuff of sitcoms right there. Embrace the absurdity of the situation. Have fun with it.

5. Or, be serious. Become a student of history. Nearly every tourist site is famous for a good reason—its innovative design, its astonishing back story. Read every brochure and plaque you can find. Brussels's iconic statue, Manneken Pis, is weird, but he's pretty interesting—and, okay, even weirder still—once you know just how popular he is and why.

6. Get lost. Shut the guidebook, turn off the smartphone, close the map, and wander. Trust in your own instincts and the Goddess Serendipity (and the fact that reality typically does not, in fact, conform to sinister Hitchcock plots). If you see something interesting in the distance or smell an interesting smell, go investigate. Lower your expectations and your understanding of where you are; reintroduce an element of mystery.

Tourists in denial

Proof positive that it's time to retire the term "traveler, not tourist" and all variations thereof: this ad from Delta's in-flight magazine, Sky. Click on the photo for a close-up of the full text. I've also seen Minneapolis light rail trains wrapped in a version of this ad, including that tag line.

The package tour of the road less traveled, part III

Y'know, I really don't mean to pick on the New York Times travel section. And yet I see that I've recently blogged about several of their stories, and I'm about to do so again. So allow me to note that it's the travel section that I read the most, so by default it's the place where I find the most comment-worthy stories.  They publish some great stuff (recent favorites include this and this). Someday, I'd love to see my own byline there. I'm probably not doing myself any favors with the Newspaper In Which I Would Most Like To Have My Own Book Reviewed (preferably positively ...) by cherry-picking examples of just how silly it can be sometimes.

Still with me? Okay, here we go. Thing is some of the NYT's stories, man ... They just keep hitting some of the classic tropes of travel writing, the themes and adjectives I love to hate. Like this "Practical Traveler" blog post, in which I have added my own running tally of road-less-traveled cliches (my numbers in grey):

Beat the Crowds to Up-and-Coming Destinations


The upside of visiting an emerging destination is pristine (1) landscapes, reasonable — if not decidedly cheap — prices and the rare opportunity to experience the authenticity (2) of a place before it’s overrun (3) by tourists.


There are, however, often trade-offs: the lack of a good transportation infrastructure, rudimentary hotel service, and poor medical facilities. Timing a visit can also be tricky in countries where political stability is a relative term. But with an adventurous attitude, the benefits of exploring new places usually outweigh the struggles involved. Ready to lay claim (4) to the next great place? Below, four emerging destinations.

Notes: 

• (1), (2), (3) I feel like I've just said this, but there's something especially self-centered and absurd--even odious--about the mindset that you just know a place is about to become "spoiled" or lose its so-called authenticity, so you have to get there first. That is, you need to help destroy it before others can. Don't forget: travel is a race! Whoever gets there first gets more Authenticity Gold Stars!
• (4) I know it's a blog post and I shouldn't get too hung up on word choice (goodness, if anyone started parsing the phrasing of my own hastily-scribbled posts, well, I'm sure I'd cringe). But I do think that the expression "lay claim" is telling--it gets at the same authenticity-seeking mentality and also betrays a certain manifest destiny attitude. The place is mine--the tourist's--for the taking. If I get there first, I get to keep it.

Discuss.

And I promise that my next post will have absolutely nothing to do with the Times. 

The package tour of the road less travel, part II

Everything this blog (and my book) is not, Exhibit A, from the Times:

In India, Luxury Arrives in a Himalayan Haven

THE little boy in the maroon robe had me at “Julé.” As his friends flitted about pouring yak-butter tea into tourists’ bowls, he limped toward the back of the windowless Thiksey monastery’s prayer hall, heavy copper pot trailing behind him. He offered a small serving of the creamy broth, a flash of Chiclet-like baby teeth and that Ladakhi greeting. Then he slipped back into his row and began to sway to the rhythm of the surrounding chants.

... The journey we took was a half-week of walking and driving for $515 per person per night, starting in Leh and meandering to Stok and Nimoo — towns separated by death-defying overpasses and landslide-scarred valley walls. It promised all the exoticism of Tibet with all the grand service of Raj India.

So. Where to begin? Or perhaps I'll just let this speak for itself as I stare in slack-jawed amazement, especially at that last sentence above.

Have at it in the comments, if you like.

(Via my friend Arijit.)

The package tour of the road less traveled

Is there a single part of the world today that does not have its own package tour? I rather doubt it. "Off the beaten path" has become just another marketing phrase, one used to attract the authenticity-seekers who are so over the tourist trails of Europe and Southeast Asia. There comes a point, though, when that endless--and, importantly, mass--quest for the unspoiled becomes not just absurd but wholly unsustainable.

I think we've reached that point. Two articles from the New York Times in the past week provide ample evidence. First up, from last week's big "41 Places to Go in 2011" package (with my emphasis added at the end):

34. Iraqi Kurdistan
As United States forces withdraw from Iraq, a handful of intrepid travel companies are offering trips to the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north, which has enjoyed relative safety and stability in recent years.

...

Visitors can tour significant cultural landmarks like Erbil’s citadel, which dates to the Assyrian empire, and the site of the Battle of Gaugamela, which ended in the defeat of the Persian king Darius III by Alexander the Great and led to the fall of the Achaemenid Empire. The biggest lure is the opportunity for authentic cultural encounters. “Authenticity is something that can be lost so quickly as development occurs,” said Janet Moore, of Distant Horizons.

Yes, correct, it's true: with development comes a decline in authenticity. Now, development can have plenty of positive effects, too--improved medical care, infrastructure, economic growth, etc.--but never mind all that, we want authenticity! But who can tell me where the first wave of development and authenticity-leech might come from? Tourists, perhaps? 

And now on to the second article, from yesterday's Times:

Tourists Mimic Polar Pioneers, Except With Planes and Blogs

When the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the South Pole only to find that he had been beaten there by Roald Amundsen and his team of Norwegians, he was despondent. “Great God! This is an awful place,” he lamented in his diary.

Awful as it may be, it is about to get a lot of foot traffic. Hundreds of people — tourists, adventurers and history buffs — are lining up to visit the South Pole in honor of the 100th anniversaries of Amundsen’s arrival (on Dec. 14, 1911) andScott’s (Jan. 17, 1912). The preparations are already speeding along.

...

Needless to say, people will not want to replicate Scott’s entire expedition. He and his men died in a blizzard during the 800-mile trek back from the pole, huddled in a tent that was, famously, just 11 miles from a vital cache of supplies.

Instead, many people plan to ski to the pole, then fly back. One of them is Matt Elliott, a 28-year-old Briton, who will compete in a 440-mile ski race, pulling 200 pounds of gear the whole way. A resident of Windsor, he works for his family’s paper wholesaling business and calls himself “a complete polar novice.”

He has never tried cross-country skiing, and he is not a big fan of cold weather, but he has been practicing by dragging two car tires on a rope for several hours at a time.

“I want to know how far, physically, I can go,” said Mr. Elliott, who is paying about $95,000 to enter the competition, sponsored by a London-based company called Extreme World Races. “It would be great to get there first and run the Union Jack at the South Pole before the Norwegians get there,” he said.

It's tempting to be snarky and note that this can't end well and wonder if Jon Krakauer will be on hand to write the book about the inevitable disaster this will turn out to be. But I don't want to joke; it's really not funny. Truly: this is a tragedy waiting to happen (though I'd love to be wrong). This guy has never skied before, and surely he isn't the only member of this group who is astonishingly ill-prepared, but who seems to think that writing a big check and training in entirely different conditions (not on skis, not in the cold) is all the preparation he needs. All in the name of ... what? Competition? Hubris? I can think of a hundred ways to prove yourself with less chance of dying. The Ironman Triathlon, for one.

The article continues: 

David Wilson, a great-nephew of Edward Wilson, the naturalist and sketch artist who marched to the pole with Scott and died beside him, will join other descendants of Scott’s polar party in Antarctica next Jan. 17 in the vicinity of the tent, where they will hold a memorial service.

He echoes the Scott party line: that the British expedition went to Antarctica to do science, not to race to the pole. The people planning competitions are “completely misunderstanding what happened 100 years ago,” Dr. Wilson said.

Despite the potential circus atmosphere, some veterans insist that Antarctica is not for novices.

“It’s a place that wants you dead,” said Robert Swan, an environmentalist who walked Scott’s route to the South Pole in 1985. “Scott found that out 100 years ago.”

Seriously: there are some places tourists shouldn't go. For their own good.

And also for the good of the place. Look, I get the appeal of the authentic and unspoiled and untouched (here, travel journalists, have some more synonyms). There's nothing so transcendent, so stirring, as beauty in the raw.

But I'll say it again: it's not sustainable. Even if the Antarctic tourists don't die (and, truly, I wish them all the best), there's a good chance some of them will have to be rescued. They'll leave garbage. And even just by being there, as tourists, they send a message to the rest of the world: come on down! Anyone can do this! It's totally extreme ... and totally awesome! I await the filming of the first sports-drink commercial with Shaun White snowboarding down a glacier and doing a McTwist 1260 over some startled penguins.

In a 1972 profile of Arthur Frommer for Harper's, Stanley Elkin observed, "It's no accident that Arthur Frommer, the Pill, and credit cards are simultaneous phenomena. Everybody deserves everything. You only live once. Screwing for everybody and Europe for everybody too. This is the egalitarian key to a proper understanding of Europe on Five Dollars a Day."

Today, it's not just "Europe for everybody." It's "the whole world for everybody." And as much as I like the notion that travel is becoming more egalitarian, I can't help but recoil at the perception that it's everyone's birthright to see everything, do everything. Not sustainable, not sustainable. 

It's time to put the brakes on this kind of tourism. Not that anyone from the New York Times travel section or Conde Nast Traveler or Travel + Leisure or, for that matter, Budget Travel reads this blog, but if they did, here's what I'd say: please stop with the lists and stop with the authentic and stop with the endless quest for the unspoiled. I know it's a game you play. I know it gets the readers who draw the advertisers who pay your salary. I know you like to talk up "green" travel and ecotourism (although I respectfully submit that there's no such thing as a truly environmentally-friendly lodge in the rainforest, especially one that then attracts more people and more lodges to a place that was truly untouched and ... well, there goes the neighborhood).

But. Maybe it's time to rethink things a bit. How about an article or two embracing the beaten path, finding new ways to appreciate the seemingly-cliched cities and landmarks? How about mentioning that the truest ecotourism is to leave these "unspoiled" places alone--not to rush to get there first so you can later brag that you saw them before they got overrun? How about acknowledging that we're all tourists, no matter how far-flung, and what matters is not finding something your friends haven't found but appreciating and understanding that thing--that culture, that place, that food--on your own terms, in your own way? (Oh, and if you want someone to write a story with an offbeat take on the beaten path, well, I might know someone ...)

Of late, one of the big culinary trends, at least the US, has been classic comfort food done right. Witness the rise of the gastropubs like the Spotted Pig in New York or the nouveau diners like my hometown favorite, the Town Talk Diner--places that take hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches and the like and remix them, often with high-end ingredients. There's a parallel phenomenon of street-food fusion, such as the Los Angeles food-truck phenom Kogi, which serves Korean barbecue tacos.

I think it's time for the travel world to follow suit, to embrace the familiar but in unfamiliar ways, to find the new angle on the old cliche. One of my favorite things about traveling on the beaten path is that it's the crossroads of the world--you meet people from the Official Local Culture but also immigrants who live there now and tourists from all over the globe. In Brussels, you can eat frites and doner kebabs with EU officials, Malaysian tourists, and Algerian-immigrant locals (to be sure, this particular scene is possibly an idealistic  pipe dream ... but then, so are most of the touristic visions of Provence or Bali). The New Old World ain't just churches and museums and stuffy restaurants, so don't treat it like a static, monolithic place.

Or there are the places that have stood the test of time, becoming tourist traps, yes, but gloriously so--the Hofbrauhaus in Munich, Casa Botin in Madrid, landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum. These are places with stories and history; there's a reason they're iconic, there's a reason people go there. And that's one of the other things I love about the beaten path: that sense of being part of something collective, of trying to understand the reasons why so many people come here. What is that history? What are those stories?

I could go on, but the Madrid chapter is calling me and, well, you probably take my point by now. If there's one theme I harp on throughout this blog, perhaps too much, it's this: there are plenty of stories left to tell on the beaten path, because it's always evolving, developing unexpected contours and detours and landmarks. It might take some extra effort to find those interesting things, but they're there, all over, sometimes hiding in plain sight.

So if you're reading this, travel magazine editors, there's a story for you. And please stop with the authenticity-hype. I can think of a few tourists in Antarctica who will soon be deeply regretting that they didn't stay on the beaten path.