9 ms·

I visited Spain last year after studying the language seriously for several years; overtourism spoiled many of my experiences. I literally fled a cathedral in G

I visited Spain last year after studying the language seriously for several years; overtourism spoiled many of my experiences. I literally fled a cathedral in Granada because the crush of bodies was giving me a claustrophobic panic attack. From my perspective as an independent traveler, the guided busloads are the most obnoxious because they do everything in unison. If you also want to do the thing the 250 bus-people are all doing right now, forget about it. Sad to see the same thing happening on Everest. If I saw that line, I would immediately turn around. When I was younger I thought travel was important to me. But after doing it a bit, I've realized travel isn't what I thought it was. It isn't that exciting and it's not some kind of achievement, other than the achievement of having enough disposable income to make it happen. The people who create things worth visiting--whether that's art or food or buildings or whatever--are people staying where they are and investing in their communities. I want to be one of those people, not the rich jerks taking up space and contributing nothing to the scene.

DonHopkins 7y ago
It even goes meta. There are coffeeshops in Amsterdam that guided tour groups regularly pass by outside to stare in the front window and observe other tourists smoking weed. Maybe the answer to sex tourists in the Red Light District is sex tourist tourists who rudely point and take photos.
- fouronnes3 7y ago
  This is a great idea for a comic in the style of smbc. First two panels are your comment, the second panel is "Pretty soon the meta-tourism got out of hand" <drawing of a tourist^5>. The final panel is the entire human population as a directed acyclic graph of tourists^n, and a small group named "the resistance" is looking for the single "tourist zero" a.k.a tourist^0 so they can murder him and end the tourist singularity.
  - jboggan 7y ago
    I'd read this book.
  - 4e1a 7y ago
    I read "smbc" as "xkcd" and immediately aggreed with your comment.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      This style is much more in line with what SMBC writes.
      - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        The topic is more SMBC. Both XKCD and SMBC routinely do X^absurd type comics.
      - ctrager 7y ago
        Thank you for introducing me to smbc. I kept hitting the "RANDOM" comic button and hit this one, which is meta like the speculative one: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2015-01-28 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2015-01-28
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
TomK32 7y ago
A Chinese company recently invaded Switzerland with 12 thousand of its employees. It's just made. I'm happy the little valley I come from is still ignored by the masses despite a long and mixed history with tourism. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/schweiz-chinesen-1.4454753 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/schweiz-chinesen-1.4454...
- anc84 7y ago
  If you even have to use such rhetoric, at least get it right. These people were invited by the US company Jeunesse Global. Says so in your link.
pizzabearman 7y ago
Travelling doesn't mean having to visit all the tourist sites. You can travel anywhere and get a much more genuine experience by not going every tourists destination. You will have such a better experience. Especially like in your case if you studied/know the local language.
- nexuist 7y ago
  Yes, I feel like it's a bit selfish (no malice intended towards the parent poster) to complain about tourists being everywhere when you yourself are a tourist who also wants to see the sights. Obviously you're not going to be the only person in the world who wants to see something cool in a foreign country. I think you're spot on. Consider the tourist-y American cities - New York, Boston, LA, Chicago, SF, etc. - most of the city dwellers have no care for the tourists because they don't spend all of their time next to attractions. They go to work, they go to school, they go to parks, etc. All of these are different in different places, and worth looking at themselves! It doesn't need to be on a brochure or part of a guided tour to be rich with history and purpose. And often, venturing out from the "golden path" leads to a healthy dose of reality (valuable!) when you see how normal people operate outside of the tourists spots.
  - usrusr 7y ago
    That's pretty much how I do tourism: go to a high tourism city/region (where the local culture has already learnt how to deal with it), then ruthlessly demote every popular "must see" to a "might see" and see what else is there. Some "must sees" will still be visited, but in a purely opportunistic manner. Turns out the colosseum isn't a complete waste of time if you randomly passed by at a time when there wasn't any queue at all, but if that does not happen there's no shortage of other things to see.
  - CPLX 7y ago
    I have lived in downtown Brooklyn for about 20 years. I live in Brooklyn Heights and my company is in Dumbo, and I walk by the Brooklyn Bridge on the way to work every day. There used to be a handful of adventurous tourists who would walk across from Manhattan and look around. Now the Brooklyn waterfront is on every single visitor’s wish list and it’s packed with people and selfie-taking nonstop, and almost overwhelming during busy summer periods. I think it’s great. The Brooklyn Bridge and the skyline are stunning and I feel lucky to have this view every day and I’m glad more people are getting to see it. When I go visit the places they live and look at their great views I don’t feel bad about that either.
Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
Have you tried visiting the north of Spain? I'm from Galicia, in the northwest. Fantastic food, culture, monuments, nature, and no overtourism except perhaps in Santiago de Compostela in the peak season. The same can probably be said about Asturias, Cantabria or León. Most foreign tourists come to Spain attracted by the Mediterranean beaches, sunny climate, and stuff like flamenco or bullfighting, which are southern or eastern Spanish things. The north and northwest are highly underrated (of course I might be biased, but pretty much everyone that comes here from abroad tells me that as well). Come fast, before the high-speed rail lines connecting Madrid to several cities in the north and northwest are finished in 3-4 years from now. I cannot guarantee the situation will hold after that, my intuition is that bad infrastructure is a major reason for the relatively little attention these areas attract.
- CPLX 7y ago
  Not sure if you’re talking about San Sebastián and the Basque Country but they are far from unknown or underrated. They are, however, absolutely incredible places to visit.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
    I deliberately excluded the Basque Country because it is better known, and does have some overtourism problems (indeed amazing places, though!)
- FabHK 7y ago
  Asturias is fascinating, and, as you said, does not conform to stereotypes about Spain at all. Except, well, the food is as delicious as elsewhere in Spain :-)
- clydethefrog 7y ago
  I am happy to hear this - I will be visiting Gijón next month. Maybe a bit off topic, but do you have any recommendations?
TelmoMenezes 7y ago
In my experience, it is incredibly mind-expanding to live for some time in another country (or countries). Really live there, have a job, rent a house, make friends, etc. It is a process of detribalization, that can help you understand better who you are, what part of you is just an artifact of the culture you were brought up in, which parts you like to keep and which parts you would like to revise. Not less importantly, it gives you empathy for "the other". It makes you understand how similar we all are at the core and, paradoxically, how diverse our behaviors and viewpoints can be. And it makes it harder and harder to believe that you, specifically, were born in the place with the correct behaviors and the correct viewpoint. Tourism is a farce. I guess it gives you the social status points of going through a challenge, without actually facing any difficulties or learning anything. You can have your photo in front of the Eiffel Tower, or that cute Buddhist Temple, or whatever. Maybe use that super expensive camera you bought as a toy (god forbid you use it to do something different, something that hasn't been done before by one million people just that week). Tourism itself is a paradox: its gaze destroys the very thing it wants to look at. The Ramones could no longer rent an apartment in Brooklyn. Struggling painters could most certainly not afford to live in Paris these days, Montmartre or otherwise. Punk Rock in London? Only if you have a banking job on the side... The old ladies who sang fado from windows in old Lisbon neighborhoods had to move to the suburbs, because Madonna arrived with her entourage and every rich kid wants a piece of that "genuine" action on their Instragram. Be a traveler, not a tourist!
- kortilla 7y ago
  You can do that by moving any distance that forces you to recreate your social circle (i.e. even 100 miles). You don’t need a language barrier and a currency barrier to force you to reflect. You just need to leave your echo chamber.
  - TelmoMenezes 7y ago
    Echo chambers are like Russian Dolls. Maybe you are satisfied with just opening the first one. It's up to you, no right answers! But it is definitely not the same to move to another city in your own country or go somewhere else where social norms and language are fundamentally different.
spanxx 7y ago
The same can be said for all famous cities during tourist season. Now, I assure you that if you go there on November (for example), most places aren't going to be much crowded.
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y ago
With regards to your disenchantment with travel, that's a pretty unusual band interesting perspective. Thank you. Probably the true value of travel is not what you go to see, but the new knowledge and reflection about where you came from.
wallace_f 7y ago
You could try intentionally visiting places in off-season. I've spent years travelling the globe on a budget, and I've learned this. You can travel even in the most expensive places like Japan for 10-30$/day if you know how to do it, and still have most every experience you want to have except for conspicuous consumption. I actually do agree with you that travelling has a lot or drawbacks--and I never would have travelled for this long if I wasn't a refugee running from bad things--but when I read someone say they gave up on it, it makes me sad. It has been an enlightening and beautiful part of my life.
Iv 7y ago
Advice that is likely to work in most European places: know when is the tourist season. Visit famous places when it is not. During the tourist seasons, there are no shortage of very interesting places outside the crowded ones. Vaux-le-Vicomte, which was the model for Versailles, is virtually unknown and a really nice visit. When crowd traffic jams happen in front of Mona Lisa in the Louvres, the medieval art sections, two stories above, are almost deserted despite very interesting pieces. Everybody wants to see Notre Dame, but there are about 100 monumental cathedrals in France.
- daemin 7y ago
  Thank you for that recommendation! I knew about the Louvre where people crowd around the small painting but there's so many other things to see. Did not think about finding an alternative for Versailles.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Similarly, Pompeii is overcrowded while Herculaneum is merely averagely busy and Villa Poppaea is deserted. All within a short drive of each other at Naples.
  - PuffinBlue 7y ago
    And you can go further afield for a similar experience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrenchiemsee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrenchiemsee I've been there, it's pretty amazing, shame he ran out of money to finish it off!
- yifanl 7y ago
  The problem with any advice to avoid the tourist crowds is that it doesn't scale. If everyone avoids tourist season, then you've just made tourist season year-round ;)
  - drukenemo 7y ago
    Not really, as many people are tied to school summer break schedules, especially families.
hibbelig 7y ago
> Sad to see the same thing happening on Everest. If I saw that line, I would immediately turn around. Unfortunately, in this picture, turning around meant to go back up, towards the summit.
csomar 7y ago
Most of the world is unexplored by tourists. Your comments are only valid for "some" touristy hot spots. If you like tourism, stop focusing on the mainstream. The Philippine, for example, has lots of unexplored territories that are "accessible" (relatively speaking) and has pretty much no or very little tourists. I was in some small town in the Philippine last year. Got into a pizza restaurant and there was a mini-event the locals made where they danced and singed. That's some genuine experience. You can have lots of these because most people are going with the flow.
pjc50 7y ago
We could really do with better words to distinguish between "wanting to go to a place or have an experience because someone else has done it", "wanting to do X in order to show it off to other people", and "wanting to do X in order to bring about a change in yourself" - because the latter in order to be authentic has to be genuinely unique. Travel can broaden the mind, but only if you let it, and most of the ways in which it does are through giving you unexpected things, good or bad. The more tightly you plan, or buy a package in order to remove uncertainty, the less serendipity you get. You can't order a surprise for yourself. Given this philosophy, I felt bad about allowing a tour company to plan my South American trip rather than booking dozens of transfers myself, but in the end serendipity worked anyway and somehow we ended up with two of us on an itinerary clearly designed for larger groups. Speeding across Lake Titicaca on a catamaran to ourselves remains a peak experience. Later on we got to Machu Picchu, which really is reaching critical levels of self-destructive tourism: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/may/15/archaeologists-outraged-over-plans-for-machu-picchu-airport-chinchero https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/may/15/archaeologist... (There is also something to be said for both straightforward hedonism and the "precision relaxation" of people who go to the same hotel for 20 years to order the same drinks, but neither of those really needs or deserves to be allowed to ruin a local community or natural wonder in order to make it happen.)
- CaptainZapp 7y ago
  Given this philosophy, I felt bad about allowing a tour company to plan my South American trip rather than booking dozens of transfers myself If you're very lucky you can wind up with the best of both worlds. I've been on an organized three week trip to Peru, which was nothing short of mind blowing. The thing is that my sister in law is Peruvian, owns a house in Lima, worked at the presidents palace (which we were able to visit on short notice) and has a lot of friends and family around the country. So while she had some of things organized (you partially must. You can't spontaneously visit Machu Pichu [which was a bit of a disappointment, but I digress]). But she had those parts, which needed to be pre-planned organized by local travel agents and tour operators. Obviously, knowing the language, the people and the place was extremely valuable for that. So, despite that it was essentially a "package tour" it felt like totally individualized travel. While some of the elements certainly can be booked as part of a packaged tour I don't think it could have been done with such quality and insight without the local knowledge. Another thing, which I found can be immensly valuable is hiring a local guide. A guide and car in Siem Reap (Cambodia) hit me with about 30$ a day (& tip). Sure, you can visit Angkor Wat by booking a tuk tuk, buy a guide book and head off on you own. But you'll have to make sense of a temple installation scattered around 400 km/2 on your own. Having a guide on my side opens doors to places, which I would never have been able to do on my own. Let alone of getting all the background on country, poeple and (yes) politics.
telesilla 7y ago
If you want to enjoy the kind of travel that a generation ago was possible, you have to do a little more effort and seek out those beautifully hidden places that the entire world doesn't know about yet. It's worth the hunt.
- throw0101a 7y ago
  > [...] little more effort and seek out those beautifully hidden places that the entire world doesn't know about yet. And then keep your mouth shut, as well as not post any pictures or videos publicly.
openfuture 7y ago
Clearly you have never hitchhiked across a continent. Tourism is a plague but travel will always be a significant human experience.
arien 7y ago
Sometimes you have to trade up some part of the experience to be able to enjoy it. I travel by cruise (and trains) a lot, but I do mostly on small ships and off season. It's cheaper and I get to avoid the masses. It's very enjoyable and has its own perks. I spent a month in Japan a few years ago, at the beginning of the year instead of the Golden Week when everybody goes and visited all over the place. No queues, no massive amounts of people (well, Tokyo is Tokyo), no stress. Sure, I missed the famous cherry blossoms, but to be able to visit e.g. Himeji castle and be in a room almost by myself contemplating was worth it. Had many experiences like this everywhere. I really enjoyed that trip and left feeling that Japan was even better than I imagined.
voidmain0001 7y ago
If you want to flex your language muscles but still get an interesting cultural and historical experience try the less popular Central American countries like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador or Nicaragua. I lived in HN for 3 years, and if you avoid the island of Roatan you will be fine. Of course, the majority of Central Americans fleeing to the USA right now are from Guatemala and Honduras so buyer beware.
retube 7y ago
> If I saw that line, I would immediately turn around. Not if you were £30k in the hole for the trip!
- darth_skywalker 7y ago
  It isn't rational to base decisions off of sunk costs.

DonHopkins 7y ago

It even goes meta. There are coffeeshops in Amsterdam that guided tour groups regularly pass by outside to stare in the front window and observe other tourists smoking weed. Maybe the answer to sex tourists in the Red Light District is sex tourist tourists who rudely point and take photos.

fouronnes3 7y ago
This is a great idea for a comic in the style of smbc. First two panels are your comment, the second panel is "Pretty soon the meta-tourism got out of hand" <drawing of a tourist^5>. The final panel is the entire human population as a directed acyclic graph of tourists^n, and a small group named "the resistance" is looking for the single "tourist zero" a.k.a tourist^0 so they can murder him and end the tourist singularity.
- jboggan 7y ago
  I'd read this book.
- 4e1a 7y ago
  I read "smbc" as "xkcd" and immediately aggreed with your comment.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    This style is much more in line with what SMBC writes.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      The topic is more SMBC. Both XKCD and SMBC routinely do X^absurd type comics.
    - ctrager 7y ago
      Thank you for introducing me to smbc. I kept hitting the "RANDOM" comic button and hit this one, which is meta like the speculative one: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2015-01-28 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2015-01-28
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

TomK32 7y ago

A Chinese company recently invaded Switzerland with 12 thousand of its employees. It's just made. I'm happy the little valley I come from is still ignored by the masses despite a long and mixed history with tourism. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/schweiz-chinesen-1.4454753 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/schweiz-chinesen-1.4454...

anc84 7y ago
If you even have to use such rhetoric, at least get it right. These people were invited by the US company Jeunesse Global. Says so in your link.

pizzabearman 7y ago

Travelling doesn't mean having to visit all the tourist sites. You can travel anywhere and get a much more genuine experience by not going every tourists destination. You will have such a better experience. Especially like in your case if you studied/know the local language.

nexuist 7y ago
Yes, I feel like it's a bit selfish (no malice intended towards the parent poster) to complain about tourists being everywhere when you yourself are a tourist who also wants to see the sights. Obviously you're not going to be the only person in the world who wants to see something cool in a foreign country. I think you're spot on. Consider the tourist-y American cities - New York, Boston, LA, Chicago, SF, etc. - most of the city dwellers have no care for the tourists because they don't spend all of their time next to attractions. They go to work, they go to school, they go to parks, etc. All of these are different in different places, and worth looking at themselves! It doesn't need to be on a brochure or part of a guided tour to be rich with history and purpose. And often, venturing out from the "golden path" leads to a healthy dose of reality (valuable!) when you see how normal people operate outside of the tourists spots.
- usrusr 7y ago
  That's pretty much how I do tourism: go to a high tourism city/region (where the local culture has already learnt how to deal with it), then ruthlessly demote every popular "must see" to a "might see" and see what else is there. Some "must sees" will still be visited, but in a purely opportunistic manner. Turns out the colosseum isn't a complete waste of time if you randomly passed by at a time when there wasn't any queue at all, but if that does not happen there's no shortage of other things to see.
- CPLX 7y ago
  I have lived in downtown Brooklyn for about 20 years. I live in Brooklyn Heights and my company is in Dumbo, and I walk by the Brooklyn Bridge on the way to work every day. There used to be a handful of adventurous tourists who would walk across from Manhattan and look around. Now the Brooklyn waterfront is on every single visitor’s wish list and it’s packed with people and selfie-taking nonstop, and almost overwhelming during busy summer periods. I think it’s great. The Brooklyn Bridge and the skyline are stunning and I feel lucky to have this view every day and I’m glad more people are getting to see it. When I go visit the places they live and look at their great views I don’t feel bad about that either.

Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago

Have you tried visiting the north of Spain? I'm from Galicia, in the northwest. Fantastic food, culture, monuments, nature, and no overtourism except perhaps in Santiago de Compostela in the peak season. The same can probably be said about Asturias, Cantabria or León. Most foreign tourists come to Spain attracted by the Mediterranean beaches, sunny climate, and stuff like flamenco or bullfighting, which are southern or eastern Spanish things. The north and northwest are highly underrated (of course I might be biased, but pretty much everyone that comes here from abroad tells me that as well). Come fast, before the high-speed rail lines connecting Madrid to several cities in the north and northwest are finished in 3-4 years from now. I cannot guarantee the situation will hold after that, my intuition is that bad infrastructure is a major reason for the relatively little attention these areas attract.

CPLX 7y ago
Not sure if you’re talking about San Sebastián and the Basque Country but they are far from unknown or underrated. They are, however, absolutely incredible places to visit.
- Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
  I deliberately excluded the Basque Country because it is better known, and does have some overtourism problems (indeed amazing places, though!)
FabHK 7y ago
Asturias is fascinating, and, as you said, does not conform to stereotypes about Spain at all. Except, well, the food is as delicious as elsewhere in Spain :-)
clydethefrog 7y ago
I am happy to hear this - I will be visiting Gijón next month. Maybe a bit off topic, but do you have any recommendations?

TelmoMenezes 7y ago

In my experience, it is incredibly mind-expanding to live for some time in another country (or countries). Really live there, have a job, rent a house, make friends, etc. It is a process of detribalization, that can help you understand better who you are, what part of you is just an artifact of the culture you were brought up in, which parts you like to keep and which parts you would like to revise. Not less importantly, it gives you empathy for "the other". It makes you understand how similar we all are at the core and, paradoxically, how diverse our behaviors and viewpoints can be. And it makes it harder and harder to believe that you, specifically, were born in the place with the correct behaviors and the correct viewpoint. Tourism is a farce. I guess it gives you the social status points of going through a challenge, without actually facing any difficulties or learning anything. You can have your photo in front of the Eiffel Tower, or that cute Buddhist Temple, or whatever. Maybe use that super expensive camera you bought as a toy (god forbid you use it to do something different, something that hasn't been done before by one million people just that week). Tourism itself is a paradox: its gaze destroys the very thing it wants to look at. The Ramones could no longer rent an apartment in Brooklyn. Struggling painters could most certainly not afford to live in Paris these days, Montmartre or otherwise. Punk Rock in London? Only if you have a banking job on the side... The old ladies who sang fado from windows in old Lisbon neighborhoods had to move to the suburbs, because Madonna arrived with her entourage and every rich kid wants a piece of that "genuine" action on their Instragram. Be a traveler, not a tourist!

kortilla 7y ago
You can do that by moving any distance that forces you to recreate your social circle (i.e. even 100 miles). You don’t need a language barrier and a currency barrier to force you to reflect. You just need to leave your echo chamber.
- TelmoMenezes 7y ago
  Echo chambers are like Russian Dolls. Maybe you are satisfied with just opening the first one. It's up to you, no right answers! But it is definitely not the same to move to another city in your own country or go somewhere else where social norms and language are fundamentally different.

spanxx 7y ago

The same can be said for all famous cities during tourist season. Now, I assure you that if you go there on November (for example), most places aren't going to be much crowded.

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y ago

With regards to your disenchantment with travel, that's a pretty unusual band interesting perspective. Thank you. Probably the true value of travel is not what you go to see, but the new knowledge and reflection about where you came from.

wallace_f 7y ago

You could try intentionally visiting places in off-season. I've spent years travelling the globe on a budget, and I've learned this. You can travel even in the most expensive places like Japan for 10-30$/day if you know how to do it, and still have most every experience you want to have except for conspicuous consumption. I actually do agree with you that travelling has a lot or drawbacks--and I never would have travelled for this long if I wasn't a refugee running from bad things--but when I read someone say they gave up on it, it makes me sad. It has been an enlightening and beautiful part of my life.

Iv 7y ago

Advice that is likely to work in most European places: know when is the tourist season. Visit famous places when it is not. During the tourist seasons, there are no shortage of very interesting places outside the crowded ones. Vaux-le-Vicomte, which was the model for Versailles, is virtually unknown and a really nice visit. When crowd traffic jams happen in front of Mona Lisa in the Louvres, the medieval art sections, two stories above, are almost deserted despite very interesting pieces. Everybody wants to see Notre Dame, but there are about 100 monumental cathedrals in France.

daemin 7y ago
Thank you for that recommendation! I knew about the Louvre where people crowd around the small painting but there's so many other things to see. Did not think about finding an alternative for Versailles.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Similarly, Pompeii is overcrowded while Herculaneum is merely averagely busy and Villa Poppaea is deserted. All within a short drive of each other at Naples.
- PuffinBlue 7y ago
  And you can go further afield for a similar experience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrenchiemsee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrenchiemsee I've been there, it's pretty amazing, shame he ran out of money to finish it off!
yifanl 7y ago
The problem with any advice to avoid the tourist crowds is that it doesn't scale. If everyone avoids tourist season, then you've just made tourist season year-round ;)
- drukenemo 7y ago
  Not really, as many people are tied to school summer break schedules, especially families.

hibbelig 7y ago

> Sad to see the same thing happening on Everest. If I saw that line, I would immediately turn around. Unfortunately, in this picture, turning around meant to go back up, towards the summit.

csomar 7y ago

Most of the world is unexplored by tourists. Your comments are only valid for "some" touristy hot spots. If you like tourism, stop focusing on the mainstream. The Philippine, for example, has lots of unexplored territories that are "accessible" (relatively speaking) and has pretty much no or very little tourists. I was in some small town in the Philippine last year. Got into a pizza restaurant and there was a mini-event the locals made where they danced and singed. That's some genuine experience. You can have lots of these because most people are going with the flow.

pjc50 7y ago

We could really do with better words to distinguish between "wanting to go to a place or have an experience because someone else has done it", "wanting to do X in order to show it off to other people", and "wanting to do X in order to bring about a change in yourself" - because the latter in order to be authentic has to be genuinely unique. Travel can broaden the mind, but only if you let it, and most of the ways in which it does are through giving you unexpected things, good or bad. The more tightly you plan, or buy a package in order to remove uncertainty, the less serendipity you get. You can't order a surprise for yourself. Given this philosophy, I felt bad about allowing a tour company to plan my South American trip rather than booking dozens of transfers myself, but in the end serendipity worked anyway and somehow we ended up with two of us on an itinerary clearly designed for larger groups. Speeding across Lake Titicaca on a catamaran to ourselves remains a peak experience. Later on we got to Machu Picchu, which really is reaching critical levels of self-destructive tourism: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/may/15/archaeologists-outraged-over-plans-for-machu-picchu-airport-chinchero https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/may/15/archaeologist... (There is also something to be said for both straightforward hedonism and the "precision relaxation" of people who go to the same hotel for 20 years to order the same drinks, but neither of those really needs or deserves to be allowed to ruin a local community or natural wonder in order to make it happen.)

CaptainZapp 7y ago
Given this philosophy, I felt bad about allowing a tour company to plan my South American trip rather than booking dozens of transfers myself If you're very lucky you can wind up with the best of both worlds. I've been on an organized three week trip to Peru, which was nothing short of mind blowing. The thing is that my sister in law is Peruvian, owns a house in Lima, worked at the presidents palace (which we were able to visit on short notice) and has a lot of friends and family around the country. So while she had some of things organized (you partially must. You can't spontaneously visit Machu Pichu [which was a bit of a disappointment, but I digress]). But she had those parts, which needed to be pre-planned organized by local travel agents and tour operators. Obviously, knowing the language, the people and the place was extremely valuable for that. So, despite that it was essentially a "package tour" it felt like totally individualized travel. While some of the elements certainly can be booked as part of a packaged tour I don't think it could have been done with such quality and insight without the local knowledge. Another thing, which I found can be immensly valuable is hiring a local guide. A guide and car in Siem Reap (Cambodia) hit me with about 30$ a day (& tip). Sure, you can visit Angkor Wat by booking a tuk tuk, buy a guide book and head off on you own. But you'll have to make sense of a temple installation scattered around 400 km/2 on your own. Having a guide on my side opens doors to places, which I would never have been able to do on my own. Let alone of getting all the background on country, poeple and (yes) politics.

telesilla 7y ago

If you want to enjoy the kind of travel that a generation ago was possible, you have to do a little more effort and seek out those beautifully hidden places that the entire world doesn't know about yet. It's worth the hunt.

throw0101a 7y ago
> [...] little more effort and seek out those beautifully hidden places that the entire world doesn't know about yet. And then keep your mouth shut, as well as not post any pictures or videos publicly.

openfuture 7y ago

Clearly you have never hitchhiked across a continent. Tourism is a plague but travel will always be a significant human experience.

arien 7y ago

Sometimes you have to trade up some part of the experience to be able to enjoy it. I travel by cruise (and trains) a lot, but I do mostly on small ships and off season. It's cheaper and I get to avoid the masses. It's very enjoyable and has its own perks. I spent a month in Japan a few years ago, at the beginning of the year instead of the Golden Week when everybody goes and visited all over the place. No queues, no massive amounts of people (well, Tokyo is Tokyo), no stress. Sure, I missed the famous cherry blossoms, but to be able to visit e.g. Himeji castle and be in a room almost by myself contemplating was worth it. Had many experiences like this everywhere. I really enjoyed that trip and left feeling that Japan was even better than I imagined.

voidmain0001 7y ago

If you want to flex your language muscles but still get an interesting cultural and historical experience try the less popular Central American countries like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador or Nicaragua. I lived in HN for 3 years, and if you avoid the island of Roatan you will be fine. Of course, the majority of Central Americans fleeing to the USA right now are from Guatemala and Honduras so buyer beware.

retube 7y ago

> If I saw that line, I would immediately turn around. Not if you were £30k in the hole for the trip!

darth_skywalker 7y ago
It isn't rational to base decisions off of sunk costs.