The Authoritative Guide to Being an Expert Tourist (vol. 1)

Congratulations on advancing this far, young tourist. You've done well.

You have mastered the Security Line Rumba, that dance of slipping off your shoes and emptying your pockets while pirouetting to avoid the trio of hungover conventioneers whacking you with their carry-ons as they try to dig out their laptops.

Your internal Irish Pub radar is so well-honed that you can smell the Guinness and County Cork tchotchkes from three miles away.

You have perfected the Goofy Tourist Picture Pose, every bit as ridiculous and labored as a supermodel's pout-strut, but accessorized so much more creatively, with the Eiffel Tower as a hat or Manneken Pis pee(r)ing over your shoulder or Mary Tyler Moore as your bronzed arm-candy (see fig. 1). (See further reading section below.)

Fig. 1

But those were just the basics. You have proven your interest and commitment. Now you must prove yourself. It is time to move on to the Advanced Touristing Techniques. And I, your Touristing Guru Master Expert Dude, am here to help. Master just a few more skills, young camera-toting, globe-trotting, guidebook-waving grasshopper, and you, too, will be able to call yourself a true Advanced Expert Tourist.

This will be an ongoing set of lessons--the wisdom of the ancients cannot be explained in a single blog post, nor can true proficiency be attained if your focus is not pure and constant. I ask--nay, implore--you to begin practicing forthwith and to dedicate yourself to the cause with singular vigor. More lessons will follow shortly.

TODAY'S LESSON:

Get out of the way or join the dance: Two methods of interacting with other camera-toting tourists.

Method 1: The camera-duck/tourist-pivot
The scenario: You're walking through a busy tourist area and you spot someone seemingly staring--hard--into space, a big, cheesy grin affixed to his or her face.

Rookie mistake: After staring hard at the person, trying to determine what that demented Jack Nicholson-in-The Shining grin is all about (and whether or not you should be sprinting away), you realize that said person is posing for a picture. You stop abruptly so as not to walk into the frame, but your halting, flustered demeanor makes the poser and the photographer both become self-conscious, and the poser starts to apologize just as the camera shutter clicks, necessitating a do-over or ten. The spontaneity is lost, the moment ruined, and it's all your fault.

Advanced technique: After much time on the tourist trail and much practice spotting the assorted and multitudinous but not-very-elusive breeds of photo-posers, you will hone your vision and instinct and be able to spot them from a minimum of twenty strides away. Pretend you don't see them but stay out of the frame. Don't break stride, don't make eye contact, just duck or pivot around them.

Recommended practice: Ducking and/or pivoting without breaking stride. I suggest at least five reps of ten pivots and fifteen walking-ducks per day.

Guidebooks of doom and the new Chinese Grand Tourists

These links are a bit old, but still of note: 

1. Guidebooks to Risky Attractions Stir Up Trouble in Paradise

The Wall Street Journal reports that in Hawaii, too many tourists are doing dangerous-slash-stupid things based on guidebook recommendations. So many, in fact, that the state legislature is considering a law to "hold Hawaii guidebook writers personally liable for deaths or accidents at spots they recommend."

I think it bears repeating: the best guide is some common sense. 

2. The Grand Tour: Europe on fifteen hundred yuan a day (from The New Yorker)

There's that old headline trope again: Europe on [monetary amount] a day, the cheap journalism cliche that originated with, of course, Europe on Five Dollars a Day, and now just won't stop. In any case, though, this article offers an interesting insight into the newest generation of Grand Tourists. Many of the points and anecdotes are similar to those in the Economist article from last year about Chinese Grand Tourists, although it's still fertile ground for storytelling. 

In the front row of the bus, Li stood facing the group with a microphone in hand, a posture he would retain for most of our waking hours in the days ahead. In the life of a Chinese tourist, guides play an especially prominent role—translator, raconteur, and field marshal—and Li projected a calm, seasoned air. He often referred to himself in the third person—Guide Li—and he prided himself on efficiency. “Everyone, our watches should be synchronized,” he said. “It is now 7:16 p.m.” He implored us to be five minutes early for every departure. “We flew all the way here,” he said. “Let’s make the most of it.”

As long as the demographics of tourists keep changing--that is, as long as more people from more places and more backgrounds start traveling--the tourist trail will continue to evolve, to have fresh stories, to retain an intrinsic newness and intrigue. Each person, each culture passing through, leaves its own mark.  

A guidebook for the forgotten tourists

This article from the Times is several months old, but new to me:

For almost three decades beginning in 1936, many African-American travelers relied on a booklet to help them decide where they could comfortably eat, sleep, buy gas, find a tailor or beauty parlor, shop on a honeymoon to Niagara Falls, or go out at night. In 1949, when the guide was 80 pages, there were five recommended hotels in Atlanta. In Cheyenne, Wyo., the Barbeque Inn was the place to stay.

The story also provides an interesting example of guidebook as snapshot of a particular historic and cultural moment--because they are, in a sense, a how-to manual for everyday life, they can provide all kinds of unvarnished insights into the cultural norms of an era ... for better or for worse. In this case, the Times headline gets at the underlying story: "The Open Road Wasn’t Quite Open to All." Read the whole article here.

On a related note, one interesting thing I learned in my book research was that, even through the 1950s and 1960s, there was a strong tradition of middle class African-American tourists traveling to Europe not just to see the sites but because they knew they would encounter less racism, and be able to travel more freely, across the Atlantic. For more on that ... you'll just have to wait a year for the book (and then turn to the Vienna chapter). Or check out Christopher Endy's Cold War Holidays.

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.

On the road with Chinese Grand Tourists

The Economist has an interesting, amusing, and astonishingly in-depth profile of some of the newest Grand Tourists: 

A sketch map of the Chinese grand tour must begin in France, the country seen as offering all the essential European virtues: history, romance, luxury and quality. Paris shops such as Louis Vuitton are essential stops: witness their Mandarin-speaking staff. In 2009 Chinese tourists passed Russians as the highest-spending non-European visitors to France, according to a survey of duty-free shops. The south of the country is also popular, thanks in part to widely available translations of Peter Mayle’s book “A Year in Provence” and in part to a slushy Chinese television mini-series, “Dreams Link”, which was filmed amid the lavender fields and walled citadels of the Midi.

Read more. 

Quote of the day: a tourist is a tourist as a skunk is a skunk

From Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana:

“Alors, qu'est-ce que vous êtes, Monsieur?” 

“Je suis homme.” 

“Quoi?” 

“HOMME.” 

“Je comprends. Touriste.” 

Even “voyageur” is obsolete; and with reason: the word has a complimentary air. The traveller of old was one who went in search of knowledge and whom the indigènes were proud to entertain with their local interests. In Europe this attitude of reciprocal appreciation has long evaporated. But there at least the “tourist” is no longer a phenomenon. He is part of the landscape, and in nine cases out of ten has little money to spend beyond what he has paid for his tour. Here, his is still an aberration. If you can come from London to Syria on business, you must be rich. If you can come so far without business, you must be very rich. No one cares if you like the place, hate it, or why. You are simply a tourist, as a skunk is a skunk, a parasitic variation of the human species which exists to be tapped like a milch cow or a gum tree. 

At the turnstile, that final outrage, a palsied dotard took ten minutes to write out each ticket. After which we escaped from these trivialities into the glory of Antiquity.

The best of touristic intentions ...

They're the classic antidotes to tourism as usual: packaged tours that combine travel with doing good. Ecotourism gives insight into fragile ecosystems and cultures in transition by providing many of the trappings of standard tourism in a more sustainable package. Dark tourism (a.k.a. grief tourism) provides ostensibly worldview-expanding looks into favelas and former concentration camps and the, well, darker side of life. And voluntourism ... well, the punning name should be self-evident.

All certainly laudable in concept. The intentions are good, and often the results are, too. Buuuut ... just as there's nothing inherently wrong with doing the standard-issue Grand Tour, there's also nothing inherently better about trying to save the world in your two weeks of vacation. Sometimes, alas, you can do more harm than good. NPR's "All Things Considered" tackled the topic of voluntourism today and had some interesting observations:

But in South Africa, some researchers now claim that foreign visitors aren't actually helping the children they work with. In fact, they might be harming them.

The South African government has expressed concern about so-called AIDS orphan tourism, and the Department of Social Development recently said that it will study the issue.

... The psychological literature talks about attachment theory — very young children are programmed to build attachments," she says. "And so, you've got these sort of repeated abandonments — first with young children whose parents may die of AIDS. And then they go to live in an orphanage where you often have high staff turnover."

The process continues when well-meaning tourists come to volunteer their time, she says.

"And then you've got tourists that are coming as sort of the third wave of this abandonment. Children are left behind to remember a series of these foreigners who come in and then leave them there," Norman says.

Keeping a low profile in Europe: deja vu all over again

Sigh. This is one thing I'd really rather not be timely about.

A few days ago, I mentioned some travel advice from 1954 that felt all too current:

Girson's advice to travelers should also feel familiar, every bit as timely and spot-on for today's world. Don't be held back by your fears and the headlines. Go anyway. But be smart about it. A traveler can go pretty much anywhere, "providing she uses her head and doesn't try to be a smart aleck."

And now, today, there's this (via NPR):

U.S. Alerts American Travelers In Europe

The Obama administration on Sunday warned Americans of potential terrorist threats in Europe and urged them to be vigilant in public places, including tourist spots and transportation hubs.

A State Department travel alert advises U.S. citizens living or traveling in Europe to take more precautions about their personal security. The alert is one step below a formal travel warning advising Americans not to visit Europe.

Finding the new on the beaten path (it's easier than you think)

“The traveler, then, was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure-seeker.The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sight-seeing.' ” -- Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image

I know, I know. I've already said I'm done with the whole "traveler" vs. "tourist" thing. But as I went back through my notes from The Tourist, I rediscovered the Boorstin quote at the top of this post, and I was struck that this is a common sentiment: proper travel is active, while shallow/inferior/cliched travel is passive.

I'll put aside for the moment the fact that passive travel has its place, that cruises and Disney World and time-shares provide a much-needed, all-inclusive escape for so many over-worked people who want to use their hard-earned two weeks of vacation time on some rejuvenation. Another post.

What interests me most, at the moment, is that if you go by the active/passive definition, then the destination is irrelevant. If mindset is all that matters, you can go to Disney World as a traveler and to the most remote parts of the globe as a tourist.

In Berlin, Lee and I took a walking tour of the city. It started at a Starbucks by the Brandenburg Gate. As we waited for the tour to begin, we watched street performers and trinket-hawkers do their thing, as you'll see anywhere on the tourist trail. Our tour group was mostly backpackers in their twenties (like us), and I'll confess to expecting, almost hoping for, some stereotypical stoner-hippie-"I'm not a tourist" types. It would have made hilarious fodder for the book.

I came up empty. Everyone was inquisitive and engaged, peppering our guide with questions and genuinely interested in the landmarks and history.

In the most fundamental sense, we were sightseers, surveying the landmarks of the city in whirlwind fashion and taking absurd amounts of photos. I even did the tourist thing and got my passport stamped at Checkpoint Charlie. ... But I did that because I wanted to talk to the guy selling the stamps. He was wearing an American military uniform from World War II, but I had a pretty good hunch he wasn't American or, for that matter, originally from Germany. I figured he had some interesting stories, maybe even some insights into tourists or tourism or the Berlin's split personality of both commemoration and commercialization. ("I'm from here, of course," he said, taking offense when I asked where he was from. "Right, sorry!" I replied. A few minutes later, he added, proudly, "I've been here six years!")

I can't help but think--and perhaps this is a bit of smugness creeping in, but I hope not--that we were, in fact, more actively aware of where we were (geographically, culturally, historically, and otherwise) than people who go on a package tour of Antarctica or see Thailand as a never-ending party fueled by mystery booze and banana pancakes. 

In every city, Lee and I wandered until we got lost and then we wandered some more. We asked locals for directions. We chatted with souvenir vendors and bartenders and others who saw the tourist experience from the other side. We stopped to read the historical markers. Granted, we weren't settling down for a year or even weeks. Ours was a whirlwind tour. We didn't meet a lot of the Authentic, Eccentric Locals (TM) who populate so many travel memoirs. But we did our best to get a sense of the culture and the city in the short time we were there. We were tourists, no doubt, but we were active, always searching for what was beneath the surface. Does that make us "travelers"? Are the pursuits of pleasure and adventure mutually exclusive? To the latter question, at least, I'd say no.

Lee and I weren't outliers. As we saw on that walking tour of Berlin, plenty of "tourists" are active. Plenty of them are there precisely because the beaten path is full of stories. (I've said it before: avoiding somewhere just because there are lots of people there is just as absurd as going somewhere because other people are.) Many tourists--not all, but a whole lot of 'em--are pretty damn interesting. Case in point: Jian from Malaysia, who was also on our Berlin tour. He was taking the long way  home after getting his degree in England, and for him the Grand Tour was the fulfillment of a dream. He'd put in extra hours at his job as a waiter in London to save up for it. Or there was Sally, an American law school student also on that tour, who told me about all the books I should read about Berlin's history. Shall I go on? Point made?

There are plenty of stories to tell on the beaten path. You might need to put in some extra effort to find them, but they're there, if you're willing to ask around and talk to people. People have stories; places have stories. To take a walking tour of Berlin--and then to keep exploring the city on your own--is to see living history. To take in the sights of Rome--assuming you do your reading and ask your questions--is to learn why this stuff is important and cool, to understand the very good reasons why this path is so beaten. It may not be more active in the physical sense than, say, meditating in a hermit hut or climbing a mountain, but I bet it tells you more about history and (a specific) culture.

The point is this: if travel is all about the journey, not the destination, as the aphorism has it, then we have to concede that the beaten path can be every bit as interesting as the road less traveled, that in the midst of the ostensibly tacky environs of so-called tourist traps, we can find the new, the foreign, the surprising, the delightful.

Another aphorism: life is what you make it. The joy of travel is sometimes hiding in plain sight. Find it.

Happy World Tourism Day!

No, seriously.

To celebrate, go take several dozen photos of a nearby landmark and refer to yourself as a "traveler."

Do guidebooks create the beaten path?

I have a recent edition of Rick Steves Europe Through the Back Door. Here's what it says on the back cover: “Avoid crowds and tourist traps . . . Discover off-the-beaten-path towns, trails, and natural wonders.”

But as anyone who has followed the insider knowledge of such guidebooks can attest, by the time you get to one of these hidden gems, you'll find a dozen other tourists already there, each one bearing your same guidebook and the glum expression that says, "This is not what I was promised."

You know that famous Yogi Berra line, "No one goes there; it's too crowded"? With guidebooks, we get just the opposite phenomenon: everyone goes there because it's not crowded.

This is nothing new. A 1963 profile of Arthur Frommer in Time included the following anecdote:

Last week in Paris one proud hotelier told Frommer: "It is your book which bought this elevator." But the new lift meant higher rentals, and Frommer sadly made a note to drop the hotel from the next edition. 

Or there's this, from the 1966 edition of Let's Go: The Student Guide to Europe (and which serves as a reminder that the snarkiness of youth is timeless):

In the low-cost field the most popular guide is Frommer's Europe on $5 a Day, which has become so widely circulated among American tourists that you will generally find them sitting on top of each other in the hotels and restaurants recommended.

The most telling example of a guidebook's impact on a place is, I think, one that involves Frommer's rival Temple Fielding, he of the raffia basket carry-on and the portable record players and the mink-covered beer can opener. Such was the impact of his guidebook that, according to John McPhee's 1968 New Yorker profile, "A waiter's strike in Italy was postponed when leaders of the national waters' union were informed that Fielding was in the country."

The guidebook effect extends way off the beaten path, too. In Getting Stoned With Savages, J. Maarten Troost travels to the South Pacific island of Malekula, where he meets a man while walking through the forest:

"I am George," he said curtly. "Do you have a Lonely Planet?"

I did indeed have a Lonely Planet guide to Vanuatu. We had brought it out from the U.S. Remarkably, they had a chapter on Malekula, which I had read thoroughly, highlighting all the references--and there were many--to the dangers posed by sharks.

"Turn to page one-fourteen," he said. "Do you see?" He jabbed at the page. "That's me."

The entry to which he referred read, in its entirety: "In the village on Wala Island, George's Guestroom  is small, for one or two people."

And have you read Eat, Pray, Love? Don't lie. You're reading a travel blog. I'm just going to guess, then, that you've either read or intentionally avoided Elizabeth Gilbert's gazillion-copy-selling spiritual self-help tract masquerading as travel writing. Just a hunch.

Anyway. So she goes to Bali. To (proper-noun) Love. But she's not quite done with the praying and the physical health stuff, either. Gilbert befriends a healer named Wayan, and decides to help her out--in part so that Wayan can reach that eternal goal of the tourist-area business owner: a listing in a prominent guidebook.

If she had a home, she could finally be listed in Lonely Planet, who keep wanting to mention her services, but never can do so, because she never has a permanent address that they can print. 

As it turns out, Lonely Planet was not the book that really put Wayan on the tourist trail. That, of course, fell to . . . Eat, Pray, Love.  From Time last month:

Wayan, an outspoken Indonesian healer of dark beauty and another of Eat, Pray, Love's personalities, was, with her young daughter and two adopted orphans, once on the verge of eviction. Now a staff of well-built men churns out her healthful Vitamin Lunches for calling travelers. From January to March of 2006, 237,260 foreign tourists stopped by Bali. Since then the number has swelled steadily, and in the same three months of this year, there were 551,186 visitors to the island.

While precise figures are not yet available, industry observers from the Denpasar Tourism Academy have confirmed that the island has been repopulated by tourists looking to develop their spirituality. . . . "It's a thing we want to promote because those activities bring peace to mind," says Nyoman Suwidjana, deputy chairman of the Bali Tourism Board. "And Bali loves peace."

Emphasis mine. Just in case you missed the irony. 

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.

In defense of the beaten path

In the wake of my appearance on CBC Radio's Q, I've started to realize that some people have me pegged as "the guy who defends tourists." While there's some truth to that, and while I don't mind playing that role to a certain degree, I want to be clear that I don't think that tourism is inherently good. Or, for that matter, inherently bad. Read any random sample of this blog and you'll see that I have incredibly mixed feelings about tourism, tourists, and the effects thereof.

Having said that, allow me to now, yes, defend the beaten path in three ways. (Basically, these are the talking points I wish I'd raised, or elaborated upon, during my interview.)

1. You meet some interesting people in the Tourist Culture
As discussed previously, there's a distinct Tourist Culture, with its own dress code (khaki travel pants, sensible shoes), its own literature (guidebooks, obviously), its own cuisine (the Irish Pub), its own rituals ("Scusi, could you, por favor, mein camera ... take foto? Merci bonjour?").  The Tourist Culture includes people from all over the world, which means that you may well encounter a family from India while traveling in Finland (over 50,000 Indian tourists go there every year) or a few of the two million Chinese who visit Europe annually, or the diverse group Lee and I met on our beer tour in Munich, which included dedicated drinkers history buffs from Japan, South Africa, England, Argentina, and the US. In Berlin, also during a tour, we met a young guy from Malaysia who had been working in London and was heading back to Malaysia, by way of his own long-planned, much-saved-for Grand Tour.

These are the types of people you meet in the Tourist Culture: interesting people from all over the world.

Truth is, you're not going to just parachute into another culture and fit right in with the locals, no matter how hard you try, no matter how carefully you plan your attire or try to study the language. You're an outsider. That will be obvious to them. And no matter how eager you are to interact with them, they probably don't want to interact with you--they just want to go about their daily lives, danke, and not be bothered by this stranger who's come to stare at them and mangle their language and ask to see how the Authentic Local Thing is done. No, it's the other people like you, the other outsiders, who are most likely to strike up conversation with you. You're a kindred spirit. And, truly, you'll find that a lot of those people are--like you--actually pretty damn interesting and, gosh, not the clichéd shallow, tacky tourists of stereotype.

So, no, you probably won't meet a lot of hobbled, cloaked-in-oh-so-native-garb grandmotherly types if you stay on the beaten path. You won't encounter many of the eccentric characters who populate the year-in-a-remote-village memoirs that have become such a cliche of travel writing. And, sure, fine: it's a shame that you won't meet those Authentic Individuals™. But you will meet all kinds of other people who will be more than worth your while. And maybe, just maybe, you'll become friends and keep in touch, and they'll invite you to visit them in their homeland--allowing you to get off the beaten path and get a local's perspective, precisely because you didn't do that last time around.

2. Travel is not about bragging rights
There's a prominent travel blogger who says he's a "one-man National Geographic." There are lots of other travel bloggers and writers and just-plain-travelers who boast of how many countries they've visited, like there's some kind of lifetime merit badge that they're trying to earn.

What's the point of such boasts, though?  At their base, aren't they just statements of status and privilege and an admission of a myopic, self-absorbed worldview that mistakes accumulation of passport stamps for open-mindedness and intelligence? Is this not like the kids in high school who thought their entire self-worth was dependent on how many decals were on their letter jackets?

I don't know how many countries I've visited. Sure, I could figure it out. But I just don't care. I don't travel so that I can place-drop in conversation. Similarly, I don't seek out the lowest-price hostel--or, for that matter, the highest-price hotel. I look for--wait for it--the place that best fits my own personal needs in terms of budget, safety, and location (meaning, of course, proximity to a bakery). Which, by the way, might change on a day-to-day basis--some days, I want to save money and don't mind a bit of discomfort; others, I desperately need a hot shower and a good night's sleep on clean sheets.

Travel seems to have become a status marker of sorts, with specific travel attitudes and methodologies as carefully calibrated as attire worn on a first date. It's a chance to show the rest of the world--or at least blog readers and Facebook friends--what kind of person said traveler wants to be.  That, to me, is absurd. (Um, pay no attention to the fact that you're reading this on a blog by a person who would love for you to think of him as at least mildly witty and semi-intelligent. Pay. No. Attention.)

It's absurd when it means visiting only the most famous cities and landmarks, hewing only to the instructions of  the latest Fodor's. It's equally absurd when it means avoiding any cities or landmarks for the specific reason that they're popular. (Most absurd of all, though, is anyone who uses The 1,000 Places To Go Before You Die as dogma.) Seriously, I thought we all learned this by the time we were teenagers: sometimes the crowds are right, sometimes they're wrong--you have to find your own path, and that's going to be a mix of the popular and the unpopular.

Travel is not about bragging rights. It's about exploring, learning, and trying to understand the new. It's about enjoying the bounty of weirdness and wonderfulness of the planet--some of which just happens to be located on the beaten path.

3. The beaten path is already beaten. So don't go beating more paths. 
There's also the argument--which I made on Q--that following the tourist trail is the truest eco-tourism, the greenest and most ethical option, because those places already overrun and McDonaldized and otherwise ruined. You're staying on the sidewalk, not trampling the fragile flowers of the untouched, untouristed places. I'm not sure I'm convinced of my own argument here, actually (feel free to argue pro/con in the comments). I don't want it to be true--that would kind of break my heart. But I fear that it just might be absolutely correct.

Tourist photos, tacky and otherwise

You may have seen my photo series Not-So-Flattering Views of Famous Landmarks (and, by the way, if this book thing doesn't work out, my Plan B is to license those pics to Design Within Reach, because I think they'd make for great bleak-but-quirky hipster home decor).

For more travel photos in a similar vein, I'd like to direct your attention to the blog Tacky Tourist Photos. These guys get it--the ridiculousness of the traveler vs. tourist argument; the joy of visiting famous places and doing cheesy things, no matter how much of a cliche they are; the innate humor of photo-jacking "The Last Supper" at a wax museum in Branson.

Unlike a lot of the "zany photos of ___" blogs out there (see: LOLcats, Failblog, Unhappy Hipsters, etc., etc.), TTP isn't simply an excuse for self-aware, snarky, and/or oh-so-clever commentary.  The tone is just about right: gentle mockery. Here's what they have to say for themselves:

We know that “tacky” has a negative connotation amongst the dictionary-reading public. But we consider “tacky” to be a good thing.

We liken it to “kitschy.” The reason we did not call this project Kitschy Tourist Photos is because it would kill the alliteration.

We love to connect with other travelers not afraid to act a little goofy sometimes and who do not take themselves too seriously.

Curator Darren Garnick, by the way, is the guy who wrote the previously-mentioned (and decidedly not tacky) essay about badly-behaved tourists at Auschwitz. I love that he has serious world traveler cred (the guy's been to Vanuatu. Have you been there? Could you even find it on a map? Yeah, I didn't think so.) but still enjoys taking cheesy tourist pics.  

And with that, I present to you a few of my own photos, in a series that I will call, in the spirit of the pretentious artwork titles at the already-mocked Venice Biennale: "Untitled. (The Traveler.) (In Famous Places.) (With A Book.) (That is Very Old.) (And Outdated.) (Part I)"

Mozart memorial, Vienna

Museumplein, Amsterdam

Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen

The Forum, Rome

Piazza San Marco, Venice

[Just don't feed the pigeons in Venice. You might get hit with a 500-euro fine.]

Always the other chap: notes on tourists

1. I AM, YOU ARE, WE ARE TOURISTS
Tourist or traveler: Which are you? Actually, don't answer that. Because to be perfectly honest, I don't care. I'm sick of this conversation. It's the travel equivalent of debating the work of Sartre and Heidegger and Kierkegaard: boring, pretentious, obnoxious. Who am I, fundamentally? Am I intrinsically good? Evil? Do I have any real autonomy, or am I just like Neo in "The Matrix," a body stuck in a virtual world? In the words of Keanu, or maybe Plato, Whoa.

Talking about such matters at length--either existentialism or the traveler/tourist dichotomy--only makes you sound like a pretentious wanker, no matter what your stance.

I pretty much agree with Eric Weiner, who calls out the "I'm a traveler, not a tourist" crowd in a new essay on World Hum, "Why Tourism is Not a Four-Letter Word":

Travel snobbery is rampant, insidious, and, frankly, annoying. Everyone fancies themselves a traveler, not a tourist. But that’s a lie. The fact is we’re all tourists. Yes, even you, travel snob. Now get over it. 

But I also know that Evelyn Waugh definitively covered this territory in the 1920s, with his immortal quip, "The tourist is always the other chap." And to me, there's not much else anyone can say. End of the conversation. We're all tourists.

So, yes, I trust we can all agree: Clearly, tourism can help destroy a culture. Clearly it can help preserve it, or at least an exaggerated, theme park version of it, as Weiner points out, and as I noted in my post about Munich. (UPDATE: for a compelling, convincing commentary on the culture-"preserving" effects of tourism, check out this essay on Matador by Sarah Menkedick.) Tourism and travel are neither inherently good nor inherently evil, and the debate is unresolvable ... so, lordy, enough already. Can we please just move on and all agree to stop this silly philosophical conversation about terminology? Travel well. Keep an open mind. Respect other cultures. Don't be a jackass or an imperialist. End of discussion. Thanks and good night.


2. NEUROTIC INTERLUDE
Except . . . even after I've said that, even as I realize that this post should end right there, even as I realize that any editor who reads this will instinctively reach for the red pen to cross out everything that follows . . . I can't resist adding further commentary, because as aggravating as I find this conversation, it's also irresistible.


3. A TALE OF TWO GUIDEBOOKS
I need to point something out. You know who isn't afraid of the term "tourist"? Arthur Frommer. Here's how he opens Europe on Five Dollars a Day:

This is a book for American tourists who
a) own no oil wells in Texas
b) are unrelated to the Aga Khan
c) have never struck it rich in Las Vegas
and who still want to enjoy a wonderful European vacation.

Hard to imagine that first line in Lonely Planet. Even harder to imagine in a modern guidebook is this blurb, from Travel Magazine, printed on the back of E5D: “The mere possession of EUROPE ON $5 A DAY must become the conspicuous mark of a traveling American from now on.”

Conspicuous mark?  Actually, that doesn’t sound like a selling point at all, at least not to the modern reader.  To the twenty-first century traveler, the blurb basically translates to, “Buy this book and you’ll stand out like the stereotypical Ugly American tourist you are, you sad, pathetic loser.”

I find it fascinating that even though E5D came out in 1957, decades after Evelyn Waugh's brilliant quip, Frommer could still use the term "tourist" without shame or irony. When I asked my mom about the subject recently, she laughed and said, of her 1967 Grand Tour, "Of course we were tourists!"

In 1967, one went to Europe purely for the sake of going to Europe. There was no shame in that. Today it seems necessary to have some deeper motivation--to find one's roots, to learn to make authentic Tuscan peasant cuisine, to escape the rat race and live the good life in Provence. Otherwise, prepare for scorn. To tell your friends that you want to see the Eiffel Tower, the canals of Venice, the Running of the Bulls, and other icons of European tourism is to invite scowls, wrinkled noses, long pauses in the conversation, and tentative questions of "You're ... you're kidding, right?" Example: a friend of mine, upon hearing that I was going to Paris, informed me that I should try to go the whole five days without ever seeing the Eiffel Tower, even for a moment, even as speck on the horizon. In fact, in certain quarters, you're deemed an Ugly American if you head to Paris rather than spending your trip trekking through the Alps, herding goats and learning to make artisanal cheeses. (Actually, what are you doing in Europe at all? It's such a total cliche, you Western-centric prick! You should be trekking across Nepal or hanging with Maoist rebels in some war-torn republic.) But when Arthur Frommer penned Europe on Five Dollars a Day in 1957, simply seeing the continent, even the already-overrun landmarks, was still something of a bold excursion into the unknown.

In the fifty years since then, tourism has become a dirty word. Take the blurb on the back of a more recent guidebook, a 2006 edition of Rick Steves' Europe Through the Back Door (whose very title is loaded with "traveler-not-tourist" smugness): “Avoid crowds and tourist traps. ... Discover off-the-beaten-path towns, trails, and natural wonders.”

(But let me once again offer translation services. That quote actually means, "This incredibly popular guidebook, trusted by millions, will lead you to places that no outsider has seen before, certainly not those millions of others who have this guidebook." That's just objectively false.  It's sort of the inverse of the famous Yogi Berra line "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"--by following the advice of guidebooks, everyone goes to the same out-of-the-way place precisely because no one goes there.)

So, yes, something changed between Frommer's first edition of Europe on Five Dollars a Day and now.  Back then, travel was still inherently adventurous--even if you were traveling what's now considered the beaten path. Now? Well, here's proof of how much of a cliche travel abroad has become: when the blog Stuff White People Like began its eponymous inventory, Traveling came in at number nineteen on the list, fittingly sandwiched between "Awareness" and "Being an expert on YOUR culture," and beating out such uber-white things as Apple products, public radio, and microbreweries.

White person travelling can be broken into two categories – First World and Third World.

First world is Europe and Japan, and man, this travel is not only beloved but absolutely essential in their development as white people.

Every white person takes at least one trip to Europe between the ages of 17-29. During this time they are likely to wear a back pack, stay at a hostel, meet someone from Ireland/Sweden/Italy with whom they have a memorable experience, get drunk, see some old churches and ride a train.

What’s amazing is that all white people have pretty much the same experience, but all of them believe theirs to be the first of its kind.

Guilty as charged.


4. THE MORE THINGS CHANGE ...

Finally, for the two of you still reading, I'd like to offer the following Tourism Primer, just so you can see how old this conversation is (and therefore why it's implicitly unresolvable, and therefore we should just kill it already).

Tourism as we know it today traces its roots to the concept of the Grand Tour, beginning with 17th-century British aristocrats who journeyed to the continent ostensibly as something of an informal but dignified academic exercise, but often involving a certain level of timeless tourist debauchery—heavy drinking, sexual escapades, barroom brawls. Think of it as Ye Olde Spring Break. According to Tim Moore’s The Grand Tour—in which Moore follows in the footsteps of the original Grand Tourist, the amusingly crass and eternally unlucky Thomas Coryarte—there were some 40,000 Englishmen on the continent in 1786. In 1851, Thomas Cook initiated the package tour, leading a group from Leicester, England to the Paris Exhibition.

The term “tourist” dates to the late 18th century. The pejorative usage followed shortly thereafter, with Francis Kilvert grousing, in the 1870s, “of all the noxious animals, the most noxious is the tourist.” John Muir complained about day-trippers ruining Yosemite; Thoreau griped about the excessive visitors to Walden Pond; in The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain mocked -- well, pretty much everyone, actually, but he had particularly harsh comments about his fellow foreign travelers.

In fact, complaints about places being overrun with visitors undoubtedly go back to the Stone Age, when, one fateful day, Og and Rrr were relaxing by their fire and a crowd of strangers barged in--presumably wearing cargo shorts fashioned from tiger hides, colorful headgear emblazoned with tacky insignias, and massive rocks on strings around their necks, in anticipation of the invention of the camera--and demanded to see the cave paintings they'd heard so much about. Turning to Rrr, Og let out a series of grunts that roughly translated to, "If it's tourist season, why can't I spear them?"

I jest, but it's actually well-documented that the ancient Romans exhibited the stereotypical boorish behavior of today's tourists. What was the Colosseum, if not a seriously old-school sports stadium--meaning tourist attraction? Nero, infamous emperor of fiddling-in-a-fire fame, had a freaking theme restaurant. Roman travelers bought trinkets and had their own tourist trail, their own sandal-beaten path, as Tony Perrottet documents in his book Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists (there's that word again):

As [Perrottet] retraced the historic route, fighting the crowds and reading two-thousand-year-old descriptions of bad food, inadequate accommodations and pushy tour guides, it became clear that tourism has actually changed very little since Caesar's day.

So. Tourism. Ancient stuff. Complaining about it: also ancient. Complaining about the complainers: well, probably not that much more recent.

A supposedly fun thing I'll be doing next week

I'm back home. Well, for a week. Then I'm off to do what is pretty much the exact opposite of backpacking around Europe: going on a cruise with my parents, sister, brother-in-law, and 14-month-old twin nephews.

On board I will be re-reading David Foster Wallace's famous cruise essay, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (fair warning: link is a massive PDF, but it's more than worth the download and reading time). I think DFW would have appreciated the meta-ness of reading it while on a cruise.

Over the coming weeks I'll also be playing catch-up on the blog, adding some Europe posts that I wrote but then forgot to actually publish, including a few Not-So-Flattering Views of Famous Landmarks.

The neighborhood that tourists forgot

Arthur divides the entertainment section of the Munich chapter into three sections: "for dancing," "for Bohemianism," and "for theatre."

The dance hall, which Arthur recommends "for shy bachelors," was closed, alas--it's now a furniture store. The bar next door, though, offered something for shy bachelors of a type the "girl-watching"-obsessed Mr. Frommer probably didn't have in mind. It's a bondage bar. I'm sure it would have been a cultural experience in all kinds of ways ... but I decided to give it a pass and move on to see what the Bohemians were up to.

These spots were all clustered in the northern part of town, away from the tourist center. The neighborhood is called Schwabing, and Arthur describes it as "the Greenwich Village are a of Munich ... in some respects, it's zanier and more colorful than anything New York offers."

I'll have to research this further, but my hunch is that post-E5D, Schwabing became a bit touristy. It's near the university--always a draw for young travelers--and about a 20 minute walk from the town center. And if Arthur sent the tourists there, they probably went.

Now, though, Schwabing is that rarest of finds: the place that was likely more touristy in Arthur's day, relative to other parts of the city, than it is today. I walked for blocks and blocks, on side streets and the main drag, and didn't hear English spoken once. There were bistros and hip record stores, guys on skateboards, teenagers doing parkour stunts in a plaza by the U-bahn station, and a cluster of old men playing chess on a massive board, with three-foot-high pieces, in an agreeably overgrown park. No t-shirt stores. No guitarists mangling pop songs in hopes of a few tips. It was utterly beguiling.

On Occam Strasse, I searched for restaurants Arthur recommends, and found none. But the street and the neighborhood were just as he'd promised: quiet, funky, hip, Greenwich Village-like.

I sat on a bench in a lush pocket park and pondered how it is that Schwabing retained--or reclaimed--its charm since the 1960s, avoiding being overrun with tourists and the attendant kitsch. I think I figured it out.

One word, a word that is major tourist bait: Oktoberfest.

Maybe you've heard of it. Little festival involving beer and drinking songs and men in lederhosen and women in drindls and beer and pretzels and schnitzel. And beer. As mentioned in the last post, this is why people come to Munich: for beer with a history chaser.

We'll be missing it by a few days, but the shops are filled with t-shirts and beer steins; the beer gardens and roller coasters (!) are being set up a few blocks from our hostel; the air is filled with the buzz of frantic preparation. They get six to seven million tourists every year for this thing. It's huge.

My theory is that Oktoberfest has permanently shifted Munich's tourism center of gravity to the areas around the train station and just to the south.

Oktoberfest started in 1818, so I know it was going on in the 1950s, but Arthur doesn't mention it. My guess (which I'll have to fact-check) is that it just wasn't a touristy thing back then. Probably only locals, or at least only Germans. At some point in the last 45-plus years, though, foreigners started deciding that passing out in gutters was a fun thing to do in one's leisure time, and Oktoberfest became what it is today: Germany by way of Disney by way of Vegas.

Tourists now stick to the south part of town, where there's plenty of beer to keep them occupied. Schwabing remains, or has become again, a placid-but-funky neighborhood.

So thank you, Arthur, for leading me away from the crowds. That's exactly the sort of unexpected delight that I hoped to find by using your outdated information.

How tourism will save the world (sort of)

Eighty-five percent of Munich was destroyed during WWII, but the city still looks old, full of imposing Gothic buildings. How is that possible? Because they rebuilt it to appear pretty much as it had before the way. It's fake historic architecture.

And why would you do that? Tourists. You don't go to Munich to gamble or to sit in the sun, you go to Munich to pretend to appreciate German culture, or at least their beer. You go to sit in massive historic (or faux-historic) beer halls. You go because here you can get drunk and call it a culturally authentic, history-enriched experience.

Yes, there were other reasons to re-build the city as it was--pride, for one. But according to our tour guide, tourism was indeed a major factor.

A lot of the historic sites and restaurants here seem to serve tourists almost exclusively. For starters, there's no way the ridiculous Glockenspiel in City Hall would still be here if tourists didn't love the crazy thing.

So tourists help preserve history and culture! Hooray for tourists! We're saving the world!

... Or maybe not. Obviously, tourism often promotes a particular variety of preservation, an exaggerated, theme park-ish one. Like a frog preserved with formaldehyde, it's kinda deformed and distorted (and foul-smelling). Superficially like the real thing, but not quite 100 percent authentic.

So here's a question for discussion:

Without tourists, would Munich beer halls be:

(A) replaced by modern office buildings or malls, or at least converted to sprawling department stores?
or
(B) packed, per tradition, with thousands of old men wearing lederhosen and singing drinking songs without the slightest trace of irony or snickering in their voices?

Of Checkpoints and Snackpoints

Berlin is an odd town, one that seems confused about and ill at ease with its history.

This is probably in part because it's also a new town--as our tour guide pointed out yesterday, the unified Berlin, sans wall, is still a teenager (it will turn 20 later this year). So it's still gawky and awkward, still testing new things, figuring out its identity, and growing, growing, growing.

Our tour started just inside the former East Berlin, near the Brandenburg Gates. At a Starbucks. Next to The Museum Kennedys.

The presence of these trappings of tourism didn't actually surprise me here, actually. It's a famous landmark; of course there's a museum and a Starbucks nearby.

But for some reason--naivete, I guess--I didn't expect pretty much all of what we saw in East Berlin to look essentially the same. Aside from a few scattered ugly, blocky apartment buildings, it looked exactly like West Berlin: same people, same landscape, same tourist restaurants and non-touristy bistros. If you were to drop me into a random Berlin neighborhood, I probably wouldn't be able to tell you if it were East or West. (And come to think of it, the West part of the city also has its share of regrettable architecture, so even those blocky apartment complexes might not be a tip-off.)

What was even more unexpected, though, was the close--close--proximity of memorials and tourist crap.

There are monuments all over: the Holocaust Memorial, with its haunting field of stone blocks of various sizes, orderly and yet chaotic; the sunken room full of empty shelves on the square where the Nazis burned books; the double rows of cobble stones that trace the line of the Berlin Wall, showing the seam where the nation was ripped apart and is slowly, even now, being sewn back together.

It seems like every few steps, there's a moving remembrance and you keep realizing you're in yet another place that you remember from your high school history class. But the minute you start to reflect on the awful things that happened here, you're distracted: t-shirts, ice cream, postcards coffee, get your photo taken in this American GI outfit, bus tours of the city--board here!
I realize that many historic places have tourist amenities and junk to buy. Even the Anne Frank House has a gift shop and a cafe. Here, though, it seems like every single block has both a monument and a Hard Rock Cafe, and the presence of the latter does rather diminish the somber nature of the former.

Case in point: Checkpoint Charlie. This used to be the main waystation between East and West Berlin. Arthur notes that it is actually quite simple for tourists to visit the East--the Wall is there to keep Easterners in, not others out. Of course, there's not much to see there, none of the wacky, wonderful nightclubs that Arthur raves about in West Berlin. But if you do want to cross the border, not problem: just "register your name with the American MPs at Checkpoint Charlie, tell them the time you plan to return, and if you're not there at that time, they'll take action."

(Let us pause for a moment of thanks that World War III was not begun over a missing American tourist, who simply got lost or was having too much fun in East Germany, and was late to return to the checkpoint.)

The checkpoint is still there. On one side of the street, there's a museum (Checkpoint Charlie Museum, naturally). I didn't go in, but it looks Serious and Informative.

Facing the museum, on the other side of the street, is Snackpoint Charlie, a food court with a Subway, a Chinese fast food stand, and other such establishments. (None of which, by the way, appears to offer cheesily-named foods like a Berlin Wall-dorf Salad or a U-Boat Sub. The kitsch level was disappointingly low.)

Between these centers of heartache and heartburn, in the median in the middle of the street, is a guard house. This is where the actually checkpoint was. It looks pretty realistic, if you can block out the tourists and free-flowing traffic. There's a wall of sandbags; there are two guys in 1960s-era military garb, one holding an American flag, the other bearing the Union Jack of Britain. A third, about twenty feet into East German territory, stands in a tiny hut with a laptop; in front of the hut is a tripod with a camera on top.

Get your photo with the Allied guards. Seven euros and up.

Just don't try to take your own photo of the soldiers. If you do, the American will snap at you in Russian-accented English.

A block away, in East German territory, a long fence along the sidewalk bears a series of signs with a detailed history of the Wall. There are photos, illustrations, and text in multiple languages; it's a moving testament to the tyranny this place has suffered. At the end of the line of signs, there's a new sign, a sandwich board blocking the sidewalk: Ben & Jerry's Sold Here. A few steps on, you can step into a souvenir shop with tacky t-shirts.

I can't express how common this scene is, or how jarring and dizzying. The city can't seem to decide whether it wants to dwell on the past or focus on the future. So it tries to do both. The attitude is "never forget, but don't spend too much time remembering, either."

Today Lee was looking at our map, trying to figure out our trip tomorrow to a former concentration camp. The map is a free one (Arthur's was not very useful, so we had to get a backup at the hotel reception desk); it was printed by a company that runs various tours, the starting points of which are noted on the map.

The pub crawl, for example, starts near the Oranienburger Strasse station. The concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, is at the end of the same train line, close to the Oranienburg station. You could easily do both tours in the same day, and given the tourist map's large ads for each, it seems like that's probably fairly common.

Head this way for the death camp; that way for the party. Or do both. I think that about sums up Berlin.

Of museums, Disney, and falling tourist numbers

The current issue of The Economist has an article about the impact of the global recession on European tourism; one Italian hotel industry official calls the situation "a debacle." Among the signs of gloom:

During the first five months of the year, the number of overnight stays by foreign visitors in French hotels fell by 15.5%. The number of foreigners who visited Spain in the first six months was 11.4% lower than in 2008. The situation is equally grim in Italy, where overnight stays by foreign guests were 11.5% lower in the first half of the year.

So what to do about it? (I mean, aside from hoping that yours truly gets filthy rich in Monaco and then altrustically blows all the winnings in restaurants and hotels across the Continent ... 'Cause that's probably not going to happen.) Well, one top tourism official seems to think that now is the time for ambitious developments and over-the-top plans. You know, because that's worked out so well for Dubai. Quoth The Economist:

Mauro Cutrufo, Rome’s head of tourism, believes the recession is an opportunity to push grandiose new schemes: marinas to match Monte Carlo, golf courses like those in Spain and theme parks to rival Disneyland. That is probably a mistake. However the world’s economy fares, tourists are unlikely to abandon Mickey Mouse in favour of a Roman theme park. But foreigners will always want to visit the Colosseum and the Vatican museums, or make a pilgrimage to Paris to see the Mona Lisa.