That *other* writer and his *other* outdated guidebook

So. This.

A new book has come to my attention. It's a humorous memoir by a writer who traveled around a continent using only "the guide that started it all." Hilarity ensues. Lessons are learned. History is explored. So much has changed. So little has changed. And so on. Stop me if this sounds familiar.

Nope, that's not my book. That's some OTHER guy who did the same thing I did, but touring Southeast Asia with a 1975 copy of Lonely Planet. His name is Brian Thacker and his book came out, uh, two weeks ago. It's called Tell Them to Get Lost: Travels with the Lonely Planet Guide that Started it All. From the book synopsis on Thacker's web site:

When Tony Wheeler wrote Lonely Planet's first-ever shoestring guidebook, South-East Asia offered 'cheap and interesting travel without the constantly oppressing misery of some of the less fortunate parts of Asia'. Certain 'hotspots' in the region attracted the tourist crowds, but there were many 'untouched places' too.

So have Tony's recommendations stood the test of time? Just how much has South-East Asia changed since the Wheelers ambled through the region in flared pants? Brian Thacker decides to retrace Tony and Maureen's footsteps through Portuguese Timor, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos and Burma using the original 1975 South east Asia on a Shoestring as his only guidebook.

Part of me wants to read this right now, because it sounds hilarious and insightful, etc. The other part of me ... the other part of me wants to go test the structural integrity of his wall by giving it some massive smacks with his cranium. But I presume there's plenty of room in this nascent genre for both of us.

To be clear, I'm more amused by this coincidence than annoyed. It was inevitable that someone else would also have the--if I may say so--great/bad idea to travel in this willfully-misguided way. Brian Thacker, I hope we meet someday and have the chance to swap outdated-guidebook stories. And when we do, you're buying the beers.

Explorers, tourists, and "mere travelers"

I've finally started reading David Grann's The Lost City of Z (thanks to Jason for the loan), about the early 20th-century British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest--which becomes Grann's own--for the fabled city of the title, which is supposedly hidden in the Amazon jungle. A phenomenal read so far.

Because of the way my brain is wired right now (two weeks to finish a book!), this section jumped out at me:

As Jack and Raleigh [Percy Fawcett's fellow-expeditioners] now excitedly stepped on board the ship [to South America], they encountered dozens of stewards, in starched white uniforms, rushing through the corridors with telegrams and bon voyage fruit baskets. . . . The conditions bore little resemblance to those that had prevailed when Fawcett made his first South American voyage, two decades earlier . . . Now everything was designed to accommodate the new breed of tourists--"mere travelers," as Fawcett dismissed them, who had little notion of "the places which today exact a degree of endurance and a toll of life, with the physique necessary to face dangers."

Emphasis mine. I like Fawcett's implied distinction: not between "travelers" and "tourists" (and, yes, enough with that) but between "mere travelers" (that is, tourists) and those on true expeditions. That, I think, is a worthwhile distinction. And, yes, those people doing that race in Antarctica are still "mere travelers"--at least until they start doing some research or show some purpose higher than bragging rights.  

Don't go there

I. Must. Read. This. Book.

More info.

Also, The New Yorker's "Book Bench" blog, in an interview with author Catherine Price, claims that there's "a trend in anti-travel books" like this one. Uh-oh. Pleasepleaseplease don't let this peak before Spring 2012. My release date suddenly seems waaay too far off.

[UPDATE: Book Bench cites only two examples of this trend: (1) Doug Lansky's The Titanic Awards (published by Perigee, as my book will be!) and (2) this May 2010 article in the New York Times, the lead paragraph of which does indeed say that this season’s most interesting travel books have gone into staycation mode. But when you read the article, this turns out to be 100 percent false. The books are indeed about people who stay in one place--but in every case, it's an exotic place to which they've moved. By that definition, staycation lit includes A Year in Provence and Driving Over Lemons and Under the Tuscan Sun and A Moveable Feast. This sort of book is nothing new, I promise, even if you're desperate to find the timely angle. Note to the New York Times: if you go to a far-off locale, if you journey away from the place that you call home, that is by definition not a staycation. ... In other words, I don't think we have a trend. Yet. I hope.]

Reading list: THE TOURIST

Just finished reading The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class by Dean MacCannell (1976). It's an academic book with a light touch and a lot of surprisingly playful prose mixed in with the theoretical bits and the name-checking of Emile Durkheim and Claude Levi-Strauss.  If you're interested in the sociology of travel, even just on a general rather than theoretical level, I really can't recommend this book enough.

MacCannell has a knack for expounding on some of the complicated issues around tourism with a concision and balance that I envy. Take the matter of whether or not tourism is implicitly good for the preservation of culture. I've been thinking about rather a lot--it's clearly an important issue, one that is central to the ethics of and reasons for travel. I can tell you that keeping an entire town under glass, artificially stuck in time for the amusement of visitors, is bad; I can tell you that maintaining longstanding cultural traditions is, in general, good. But I've never been able to articulate where I think it's appropriate to draw the line between what is "good" preservation of culture and what is "bad." MacCannell, though, nails it:

The common goal of both ethnography and tourism is to determine the point at which forced traditionalism ceases to base itself on the truths of day-to-day existence and begins to crystallize as a survival strategy, a cultural service stop for modern man [by which MacCannell means the observer--the tourist].

Right. When it's about being entertainment for outsiders, about conforming to their expectations of how you should live rather than living the life that you would have without their interference, that's where it becomes objectionable.

I was also pleased that MacCannell is very much of the "let's face it, we are all tourists" view--in fact, he uses those exact words, quoting a student of his, "a young man from Iran dedicated to the revolution," who then emphasized his point "dramatically in a hiss: 'Even I am a tourist.' " MacCannell tweaks those who fall into the cheap and false dichotomy of "tourist" vs. "traveler" and points out the futility of the quest of the traveler--and the "modern man" in general--for authenticity. These comments ring particularly true today, thirty-four years after he wrote them, and seem all the more insightful, even prescient, given that they were written before the full-fledged influx of theme parks, interactive museum displays, and infotainment, and other ways that reality and amusement increasingly blur together in what MacCannell terms "staged authenticity."

One of his best lines on the subject--which, again, seems prescient and twenty-first-century in its postmodern view and snarky tone--comes on page 155:

For $200,000, one can buy an "authentic" French country home on Philadelphia's Main Line. The modern world institutionalizes spuriousness in the values and material culture of entire wide areas of society. Puritans, liberals, and snobs call it "tacky" when anyone can afford it and "pretentious" when it is dear. Pretension and tackiness generate the idea that somewhere, only not right here, not right now, perhaps just over there someplace, in another country, in another life-style, in another social class perhaps, there is a genuine society. The United States makes the rest of the world seem authentic; California makes the rest of the US seem authentic. 

To be clear, MacCannell is at pains to note--as I try to do as well--that the "inauthenticity" of much of the tourist experience is manifestly problematic. It can, and all to often does, distort our understanding of the culture, and detrimentally affect the culture itself. But there's no one pure way of travel that avoids this--we are, indeed, all tourist, all guilty of our own sins and our own self-delusions about the cultures we visit, as well as our leaving our own imprint, for better or for worse, on the places we visit.

[CONTINUED after the jump]

Three's a trend

Zeitgeist! Others are hopping on the "old guidebooks make for interesting trips" bandwagon.

1. Today in the New York Times travel section: Simon Akam tours Britain with a 100-year-old Baedeker book.

2. A couple of weeks ago, on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," Andrei Codrescu had an essay about finding a 1911 European guidebook. He muses:

Instead of going to places sold now to tourists, why not use the old travel books as guides and go one way or another to the places where European explorers, from Sir Richard Burton to Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould went? And not only them. One could spend a fruitful year in search of places once featured in old city guides, like the famous New Orleans city guide written during the Great Depression by writers of the WPA.

I've said before that I think willful ignorance might be the next hot travel trend, but I never thought that writers for actual respectable news outlets would be so absurd and foolish hip and sophisticated as to follow my lead (presumably inadvertently; I have no delusions that I'm an actual trend-setter) and use a seriously-outdated guidebook. Go figure.

And, actually, I rather like the idea of this becoming a genuine travel trend. I'm imagining hordes of tourists waving around various yellowed tomes, hopelessly lost but enjoying every moment.  I can support that--and I can certainly think of sillier travel trends. When we get to the point where there are guidebooks to help you figure out what old guidebook to use when you go abroad, that's when things have gone too far.

[Thanks to Eva Holland at World Hum for tipping me off about the NPR story.]

Reading list: crunching the numbers

Hey, the US Office of Travel & Tourism Industries just released the outbound tourism figures for 2009! Are you as excited about this and totally pumped up to start analyzing the numbers as I am??

No? Huh. Well, your loss.

The key figure is -4 percent--that's the change in travel from the US to Europe from 2008 to 2009. No surprise there, given the state of the economy. Total amount of US citizen air traffic to Europe was precisely 11,929,977 (note that this is the number of airplane trips, so if you flew to Europe two times, you count twice; if you went by boat, you count not at all, and ditto if you're not a passport-wielding citizen).

In other news, I recently finished reading Pico Iyer's The Global Soul, about which I'll offer a full review sometime soon. Short version: being born in Culture A, raised in Culture B, and now living in Culture C makes it difficult to feel at ease. Also, globalization creates a cultural dissonance-slash-fusion that is at once beguiling and bewildering. Obvious, self-evident? Okay, sure, maybe. But Iyer's commentary seems awfully prescient and impressive considering that it dates to 2000, before Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and much of the internet as we know it transformed how we communicate and how we both create and consume culture.

Next on the reading list (forgive the non-MLA-approved citation methodology below):

• Worldwatch Institute Paper 159: Traveling Light: New Paths for International Tourism (Lisa Mastny, Ed.; 2001)
• What is the Impact of Tourism? (Roman Espejo, Ed.; 2009)
• The Travel Industry (Gee, Makens, and Choy; 1989)

... and two that I read a long time ago but need to revisit:

• The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Dean MacCannell; 1976)
• Tourism in History: From Imperial Rome to the Present (Maxine Feifer; 1985)

Note the dates on those sources: most are at least twenty years old, the exceptions being the two shortest and most esoteric ones. Most of the other books I've found about tourism (e.g. Paul Fussell's Abroad) were also published somewhere between 1970 and 1990. I find this most curious because, if anything, the subject has gotten only more complex and interesting with the rise of eco-tourism, grief tourism, and heritage tourism (etc.), plus the indescribably immense impact of the internet on our ability to plan our trips and keep in touch while we're abroad. Seems like now would be a great time for another influx of tourism-examining books. So where are they? (That's a serious question, by the way, not just an excuse for me to say, "Gosh, maybe I'll just have to write such a book myself! Oh, wait, I'm already doing that! Look at me being all timely and zeitgeisty!" Honestly: Where are the real books by the real journalists?)

Any suggestions for tourism-related books I should read? Especially newer ones that I may have missed? Let me know! Comment below or e-mail me at doug@douglasmack.net.

Reading (and listening) list

Hey, you know who was on the CBC's Q radio show on Monday? Usher. You know who was on today? Me. Thus ends the list of things I have in common with Grammy-winning pop stars.

The subject of my chat with host Jian Ghomeshi: travel. Specifically: why I like the beaten path, why I take not-so-flattering photos, and other topics you might have heard once or twice on this here blog. And I defended tourists. Yes, you. All of you. You're welcome.

Click here to listen to the podcast. (Look for the Q podcast listing for Shirin Neshat, the more famous person who was also on today.  My segment starts around the 41-minute mark.)

In other news, Lee suggested that I start posting some of my reading list as I do background research for the book. The man's full of good ideas. (For those just joining the fun, such as anyone who came here after hearing me on the CBC [hello], click here for an introduction to Lee and to judge for yourself the truth of the preceding sentence.) 

So, I will. Before I get to the books I've read, or plan to read, here are some good, pertinent articles that I've read lately. (I'm skipping ones that I've already linked in other posts.) 

Twilight of the Travel Guidebook? by David Page on Travelers Notebook (via World Hum)
Page, a guidebook writer himself, notes that smartphones, combined with web sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, have begun to make guidebooks obsolete. I see his point, although I do think that that most people still appreciate the curated-by-an-expert aspect of guidebooks, not to mention the fact that we're still a ways from being able to get reliable cell phone service everywhere (to which I say: thank goodness).

Tourist Traps Worth a Visit by Peter Jon Lindberg in Travel + Leisure
Lindberg is up for a National Magazine Award this year, and this was one of the nominated columns. The headline kind of says it all, and Lindberg takes what in lesser hands could be a contrarian-but-not-insightful rant and makes it pretty darn convincing, layering on one astute (and often amusing) anecdote after another to build his case.