Part of this is about sheer volume: the number of people crossing an international border as tourists (rather than displaced people or migrants) in 2023 was 1.3 billion, which is not only a complete bounceback post-Covid, but an almost 25-fold increase since the 1950s...
When you look at anti-tourism movements as a whole, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that travel is one of those nice things we no longer deserve. But into that sorry picture steps the travel journalist Paige McClanahan with her book The New Tourist. We can still travel, she says, and more than that, it’s important that we do; we just have to get a lot better at it.
The old kind of tourist, she writes, is “a pure consumer who sees the people and places he encounters when he travels as nothing more than a means to some self-serving end: an item crossed off a bucket list, a fun shot for his Instagram grid, one more thing to brag about to his peers”. The new tourist, by contrast, is humbled by the unfamiliar, not unsettled by it, she “embraces the chance to encounter people whose backgrounds are very different to her own, and to learn from cultures or religions that she might otherwise fear or regard with contempt”. Maybe that doesn’t sound groundbreaking – in brief, when you’re away, try being your best self – but it cuts to the heart of a book that is part a modern history of international travel, part manifesto for it...
The first chapter of The New Tourist goes back to how we got here: 50 years ago, when newlyweds Tony and Maureen Wheeler set off from the south of England to drive to India. They weren’t the first to try the hippy trail, but they were the first to launch a publishing empire off the back of it: Lonely Planet. Many of us who took our first trips as adults holding one of these guides will remember the sensibility of them: it was all about budget travel, getting in and out of a place on a fiver. The Wheelers changed the terms of tourism entirely – the true traveller didn’t waltz in like Lady Muck, paying top dollar for everything. This new kind of tourist liked to be called a “traveller” and went to out-of-the-way places, craving the authenticity of the locals’ experience, not luxury.
But this had its downsides, namely that these “travellers” had the same footprint but a lot less money. No offence – and this is my opinion, not McClanahan’s – the Wheelers made an absolute fortune off performative non-materialism and lauded being “off the beaten track”, while beating every track so hard you could see the tracks from space.
Lonely Planet guides, by the turn of this century, had become more about the high end, but there is a broader tension, which McClanahan exemplifies with Bhutan – where you pay a really sizeable visitor sustainable development tax of $100 a person every day – versus Nepal, the “backpacker’s superhighway”. “In Bhutan,” she says, “you had to come with an organised tour and had to be led by a local tour guide. They were very explicitly going for lower volume, higher quality tourism.” She felt plugged in to Bhutan, “saw villages that felt untouched” (tourism in Bhutan has existed, in tiny numbers, since 1974); Nepal, heaving with visitors, didn’t come close, “although the landscapes were beautiful, of course”. It would be crude, though, to make that into a creed that you should only travel if you’re loaded. Maybe, rather, it means start by going to places where they want you.
by Zoe Williams, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Park Guell in Barcelona. Josep Lago/AFP/Getty Images
