For most of humanity’s history, our tallest mountains and in particular Mount Everest have been realms entirely separate from those on earth. In ancient times, gods were believed to reside on these peaks.
I went to Kyoto in the spring, for the first time since the pandemic, and the transformation from previous times I've been there was astonishing. Kyoto has always had a lot of domestic tourism, but a post-covid resurgence and the addition of a lot of foregin toursts seems to have tipped the balance. The central bits and some of the couple of high profile sites I went to were utterly rammed, to the point of being unvisitable. It's tricky because I have no special right to the city and in a sense it is great that more people get to see what are fantastic historic places, but it really feels like no one is really experiencing them beyond a very shallow postcard picture.
What I would say, is that the drop off in traffic from the 5 or so most famous sites to the next set of (frankly equally historic & significant & beautiful) places was amazing. Over in the west side of town there was no sense of tourism at all, and plenty of amazing temples were very quiet. I think that there is a sense that the Instagramization of travel has given us all much wider horizons, and yet we all end up going to the same limited number of places.
I would also say that Westerners have been bemoaning the claim that Japan was much nicer 10-20 years ago since about 1870, so take my grumbling as part of a long tradition.
I would love to go to Japan but only to see the cherry blossom time,but I can also watch an excellent YouTube channel dedicated to that. Same in France. Instead of queuing hours to get in The Louvre get a train ride to Rouen and go in the Musee des Beaux Arts there,huge art collection,as good s what must be in The Louvre any day,no queues and it's free. And Rouen is a lovely town of amazing history too.
A small deviation from the most common location/time/activity/method/etc. can take >90% of the load off. For example, everyone tries to summit Everest as soon as the weather window opens up - waiting just a day or two clears the line and all the competent Western groups do this already. And if you want the old school experience, then do a winter summit or an obscure/new climbing route (just be okay with 30% fatality rates, also part of the old school experience).
The same principle applies for less exotic activities. Go in the shoulder season or off-season, do the 5th most popular museum in a major city, or go to a regular town and remote work from there for a few months. The important thing is to avoid anything in top search results and listicles. This should work until 2050 or so when another 3 billion will be rich enough to travel.
100% agree! Always travel in the off season and whilst you're at it leave the guidebook behind, use a paper map and ignore all restaurant recommendations
Can you "discover" Petra any more? Nope; Petra has already been discovered! But can you find something astonishing pretty much anywhere, if you open your mind to it? Yup. Several others here have made comments to this effect already. Of course, your "discovery" might not be something that makes for an impressive Instagram...
This is a beautiful, thoughtful piece, as far as it goes. But there's a certain snobbery to bemoaning the fact--as some have in the comments here--that everyone can do and see things that were once difficult or rarified. Other people and places don't exist for us to congratulate ourselves for having located them.
And there's of course also a reverse snobbery to the celebration of ultrademocratized travel and culture consumption. It's the standard paradox that applies to everything: people make it, people ruin it.
I resonate with this a lot. Very well-stated predicament.
My thoughts turn in a direction similar to Luke’s comment above: this weekend I had the joy of hosting a native plant ecologist at my home in Indiana. Spending a few mornings and evenings sitting in my back yard in her company added dimension upon dimension to my presence in the place I live. Between the invasive ornamentals and patches of mowed grass I can now see the redbud sapling spawned from the one next door; the black locust shoots revealing an underground root network spanning neighboring fences; the family of robins nesting low in a 40-year-old pine; the wild blackberry near the fence wrapped in poison ivy that they feed on; deadly nightshade creeping across a sea of barren ornamental grass; the pink-striped insects that nestle inside milkweed; spiders fastidiously rebuilding webs every hour—and can begin to squint at the delicate interdependence of all these lives, tastes, habits, and needs persisting through the Truman Show set of lawns and asphalt that we humans inhabit, oblivious.
While she was here we visited a nearby convent of Catholic sisters who have safeguarded some of the only unspoiled prairie left in the Midwest—land kept intact in its condition before European contact. We both teared up when we saw it: a meadow of grass with a texture I’ve never seen outside movies, spread out below an 80-foot embankment. It was the first time I’ve ever actually seen the place I’m from. A portal has opened up for me to a world that’s quiet, devoid of crowds, just under our feet and over our heads, accessible from anywhere, there for the noticing.
If you haven't already, I strongly recommend you check out Gerald Murnane's novel Inland. It has a lot of beautiful stuff to say about prairies (if you can bear some postmodern trickery in your fiction).
I think you're totally right. I actually often think that one of the places I feel I 'travel' the most and have new and unique experiences is in non-coastal USA.
I really enjoyed this - a fantastically well articulated exploration of an interesting question.
I appreciate it’s not really the same… more a substitution. But I have found that sense of wonder and fabulous new worlds more in recent years through depth, rather than far flung breadth.
Not living somewhere else to get more depth, but exploring it where I already live. Learning about the soil and the unexplored worlds beneath my feet, researching the local history I only had a vague sense of, observing the details of the lives of the non-human locals I live around.
The first time I read about the sheer number of nematodes, or heard about mycorrhizal fungi, it felt so alien and fascinating. I wanted to explore and become so familiar with it that I could understand the life of a springtail or the 16th century lead miner who drank in the same local pub as me.
Maybe an impossible task!
I guess what I mean is perhaps the same as a few other comments. Is the difference between a traveller and a tourist an attitude, and a desire to really experience and understand, not just to have been?
This is a great article. I think the key these days isn't to just go an see something. The key is to go and challenge yourself - learn the language, hike a forest (even a few miles from home), go on a long trail. Backpacking can be the new exotic. The effort of getting to Japan may be much more accessible than it was, but the effort of learning Japanese is something you most likely won't master in your time there. But the act of trying will give you a greater appreciation of Japan and its culture, right?
Also - rather than try to visit a new place, maybe try to live in a different place? That is much harder - and we shouldn't look down on anybody who can't. A surgeon from SD has incredible responsibilities, and so if he wants to trek Everest, that's cool. But if you're looking for the joy of being something different than a tourist to Petra, why not spend a year living in a place like Jordan? Or, if that's intimidating (I'll admit that I don't know how I'd go about doing that in that particular country), then do it somewhere else where you'd feel comfortable.
There are still mysteries around the world, different ones for every person to uncover for themselves uniquely. While the distance is much less, the challenge can still be there for those who want it :)
Came here to say this. Local everyday life is still so much different, especially in rural parts of many countries. You can’t fully get away from combustion engines or the internet almost anywhere anymore, but daily life, community and local culture will still surprise you if you go live somewhere or even just visit for a longer period of time. Potentially a self-enforced slowness that isn’t automatic as it was in the days prior to cheap and easy air travel, but effective in my experience. Also, generally if you go one or two steps off the beaten track you can still find places all to yourself. Even in busy popular tourist cities, just wandering around on foot is a great way to get away from tourist traps and find more unadulterated local culture. A friend and I walked all the way around one of the ancient walls of Istanbul a few years ago, which isn’t even *that* far off the beaten path, and we had some super fun encounters with local kids playing, moms cooking, and generally getting a peak into more local life, including lots of surprised stares to find some clearly non-Turkish ladies walking around.
I think there's a lot of truth in what you're saying, Ned. I'm travelling at the moment. I'm in Zanzibar having spent the last two and a half months on the mainland of East Africa. Everybody has done the same excursions, they've stayed in the same hostels and they've met the same locals.
At the same time, I feel like the sense of adventure that travellers like Thesiger experienced was partly down to the lack of global context that 'locals' would've had. He was the all-knowing traveller, learning about cultures and taking this knowledge with him, from one uninformed tribe to the next. Now we have Masai warriors making TikToks and the Chaga are selling Kilimanjaro coffee at Soho prices.
The combustible engine has made the world physically smaller, but it seems as though our internet age has virtually shrunk our world, granting us all access to the same knowledge pool. This is probably also responsible for stealing some of that "traveller magic", don't you think?
I think you’re completely right! I’ve noticed this myself having gone to India throughout my whole life I’ve seen how many years ago there was a great interest in something new but now everyone has 5G phones even if the village still doesn’t have good electricity
I hear what you are saying, bur believe the difference between a traveller and a tourist - a tourists flys in and flys out taking snaps to prove their visit, whereas a travelling lives in the community, joins into community activities and learns their language, customs and makes connections along the way.
At the other end of the spectrum: if you do find somewhere sufficiently "off grid" to go, you're likely to be sharing your train carriage with some nightmare danger tourism YouTuber (and part-time sex tourist), e.g. Miles Routledge, Harold Baldr.
I very much agree. In my experience, aside from the obvious of avoiding capital cities and attractions featured on Lonely Planet, the key to being a traveller rather than a tourist is more about "how" than "where". Hiking, hitchhiking, riding in marshrutkas/shared taxis (rather than planes, trains and Intercity buses) will still in many parts of the world lead you to authentic, spontaneous experiences with locals.
100% agree with the point of your post, I would only add: If you know of any place where you can travel without being a tourist, don't comment that on a popular Substack article 😄
I guess much of the adventure feeling is now shifted to actually finding out about these less known locations, enjoying them quietly and guarding them as a precious treasure
I went to Kyoto in the spring, for the first time since the pandemic, and the transformation from previous times I've been there was astonishing. Kyoto has always had a lot of domestic tourism, but a post-covid resurgence and the addition of a lot of foregin toursts seems to have tipped the balance. The central bits and some of the couple of high profile sites I went to were utterly rammed, to the point of being unvisitable. It's tricky because I have no special right to the city and in a sense it is great that more people get to see what are fantastic historic places, but it really feels like no one is really experiencing them beyond a very shallow postcard picture.
What I would say, is that the drop off in traffic from the 5 or so most famous sites to the next set of (frankly equally historic & significant & beautiful) places was amazing. Over in the west side of town there was no sense of tourism at all, and plenty of amazing temples were very quiet. I think that there is a sense that the Instagramization of travel has given us all much wider horizons, and yet we all end up going to the same limited number of places.
I would also say that Westerners have been bemoaning the claim that Japan was much nicer 10-20 years ago since about 1870, so take my grumbling as part of a long tradition.
I had the exact same experience in Kyoto
I would love to go to Japan but only to see the cherry blossom time,but I can also watch an excellent YouTube channel dedicated to that. Same in France. Instead of queuing hours to get in The Louvre get a train ride to Rouen and go in the Musee des Beaux Arts there,huge art collection,as good s what must be in The Louvre any day,no queues and it's free. And Rouen is a lovely town of amazing history too.
There is at least one kind of place you can travel to without being a tourist. A war zone.
Good point!
In the same vein... "The Beach" (Alex Garland's)
But no return.
A small deviation from the most common location/time/activity/method/etc. can take >90% of the load off. For example, everyone tries to summit Everest as soon as the weather window opens up - waiting just a day or two clears the line and all the competent Western groups do this already. And if you want the old school experience, then do a winter summit or an obscure/new climbing route (just be okay with 30% fatality rates, also part of the old school experience).
The same principle applies for less exotic activities. Go in the shoulder season or off-season, do the 5th most popular museum in a major city, or go to a regular town and remote work from there for a few months. The important thing is to avoid anything in top search results and listicles. This should work until 2050 or so when another 3 billion will be rich enough to travel.
100% agree! Always travel in the off season and whilst you're at it leave the guidebook behind, use a paper map and ignore all restaurant recommendations
Slow travel. It's the ONLY way.
Can you "discover" Petra any more? Nope; Petra has already been discovered! But can you find something astonishing pretty much anywhere, if you open your mind to it? Yup. Several others here have made comments to this effect already. Of course, your "discovery" might not be something that makes for an impressive Instagram...
This is a beautiful, thoughtful piece, as far as it goes. But there's a certain snobbery to bemoaning the fact--as some have in the comments here--that everyone can do and see things that were once difficult or rarified. Other people and places don't exist for us to congratulate ourselves for having located them.
And there's of course also a reverse snobbery to the celebration of ultrademocratized travel and culture consumption. It's the standard paradox that applies to everything: people make it, people ruin it.
I resonate with this a lot. Very well-stated predicament.
My thoughts turn in a direction similar to Luke’s comment above: this weekend I had the joy of hosting a native plant ecologist at my home in Indiana. Spending a few mornings and evenings sitting in my back yard in her company added dimension upon dimension to my presence in the place I live. Between the invasive ornamentals and patches of mowed grass I can now see the redbud sapling spawned from the one next door; the black locust shoots revealing an underground root network spanning neighboring fences; the family of robins nesting low in a 40-year-old pine; the wild blackberry near the fence wrapped in poison ivy that they feed on; deadly nightshade creeping across a sea of barren ornamental grass; the pink-striped insects that nestle inside milkweed; spiders fastidiously rebuilding webs every hour—and can begin to squint at the delicate interdependence of all these lives, tastes, habits, and needs persisting through the Truman Show set of lawns and asphalt that we humans inhabit, oblivious.
While she was here we visited a nearby convent of Catholic sisters who have safeguarded some of the only unspoiled prairie left in the Midwest—land kept intact in its condition before European contact. We both teared up when we saw it: a meadow of grass with a texture I’ve never seen outside movies, spread out below an 80-foot embankment. It was the first time I’ve ever actually seen the place I’m from. A portal has opened up for me to a world that’s quiet, devoid of crowds, just under our feet and over our heads, accessible from anywhere, there for the noticing.
If you haven't already, I strongly recommend you check out Gerald Murnane's novel Inland. It has a lot of beautiful stuff to say about prairies (if you can bear some postmodern trickery in your fiction).
I think you're totally right. I actually often think that one of the places I feel I 'travel' the most and have new and unique experiences is in non-coastal USA.
Well,that's it,where we live in "ordinary" but to someone else it's exotic
Where they come from is a their "everyday" but to us it's exotic.
How amazing to see that patch of original Prairie. If I went to America that's what I would want to see,not NYC or Disney world.
I really enjoyed this - a fantastically well articulated exploration of an interesting question.
I appreciate it’s not really the same… more a substitution. But I have found that sense of wonder and fabulous new worlds more in recent years through depth, rather than far flung breadth.
Not living somewhere else to get more depth, but exploring it where I already live. Learning about the soil and the unexplored worlds beneath my feet, researching the local history I only had a vague sense of, observing the details of the lives of the non-human locals I live around.
The first time I read about the sheer number of nematodes, or heard about mycorrhizal fungi, it felt so alien and fascinating. I wanted to explore and become so familiar with it that I could understand the life of a springtail or the 16th century lead miner who drank in the same local pub as me.
Maybe an impossible task!
I guess what I mean is perhaps the same as a few other comments. Is the difference between a traveller and a tourist an attitude, and a desire to really experience and understand, not just to have been?
Really great point, thank you!
This is a great article. I think the key these days isn't to just go an see something. The key is to go and challenge yourself - learn the language, hike a forest (even a few miles from home), go on a long trail. Backpacking can be the new exotic. The effort of getting to Japan may be much more accessible than it was, but the effort of learning Japanese is something you most likely won't master in your time there. But the act of trying will give you a greater appreciation of Japan and its culture, right?
Also - rather than try to visit a new place, maybe try to live in a different place? That is much harder - and we shouldn't look down on anybody who can't. A surgeon from SD has incredible responsibilities, and so if he wants to trek Everest, that's cool. But if you're looking for the joy of being something different than a tourist to Petra, why not spend a year living in a place like Jordan? Or, if that's intimidating (I'll admit that I don't know how I'd go about doing that in that particular country), then do it somewhere else where you'd feel comfortable.
There are still mysteries around the world, different ones for every person to uncover for themselves uniquely. While the distance is much less, the challenge can still be there for those who want it :)
Came here to say this. Local everyday life is still so much different, especially in rural parts of many countries. You can’t fully get away from combustion engines or the internet almost anywhere anymore, but daily life, community and local culture will still surprise you if you go live somewhere or even just visit for a longer period of time. Potentially a self-enforced slowness that isn’t automatic as it was in the days prior to cheap and easy air travel, but effective in my experience. Also, generally if you go one or two steps off the beaten track you can still find places all to yourself. Even in busy popular tourist cities, just wandering around on foot is a great way to get away from tourist traps and find more unadulterated local culture. A friend and I walked all the way around one of the ancient walls of Istanbul a few years ago, which isn’t even *that* far off the beaten path, and we had some super fun encounters with local kids playing, moms cooking, and generally getting a peak into more local life, including lots of surprised stares to find some clearly non-Turkish ladies walking around.
"Why not spend a year living in a place like Jordan?"
1. It costs money and you are probably not allowed to work/earn money during your stay.
2. For most countries you need a visa document / stamp, limiting your options.
I think there's a lot of truth in what you're saying, Ned. I'm travelling at the moment. I'm in Zanzibar having spent the last two and a half months on the mainland of East Africa. Everybody has done the same excursions, they've stayed in the same hostels and they've met the same locals.
At the same time, I feel like the sense of adventure that travellers like Thesiger experienced was partly down to the lack of global context that 'locals' would've had. He was the all-knowing traveller, learning about cultures and taking this knowledge with him, from one uninformed tribe to the next. Now we have Masai warriors making TikToks and the Chaga are selling Kilimanjaro coffee at Soho prices.
The combustible engine has made the world physically smaller, but it seems as though our internet age has virtually shrunk our world, granting us all access to the same knowledge pool. This is probably also responsible for stealing some of that "traveller magic", don't you think?
I think you’re completely right! I’ve noticed this myself having gone to India throughout my whole life I’ve seen how many years ago there was a great interest in something new but now everyone has 5G phones even if the village still doesn’t have good electricity
I hear what you are saying, bur believe the difference between a traveller and a tourist - a tourists flys in and flys out taking snaps to prove their visit, whereas a travelling lives in the community, joins into community activities and learns their language, customs and makes connections along the way.
At the other end of the spectrum: if you do find somewhere sufficiently "off grid" to go, you're likely to be sharing your train carriage with some nightmare danger tourism YouTuber (and part-time sex tourist), e.g. Miles Routledge, Harold Baldr.
BRILLIANT piece. I mourn over tourism, homologous shops and eateries and Mountains invaded by dentists every day.
Thank you!
I very much agree. In my experience, aside from the obvious of avoiding capital cities and attractions featured on Lonely Planet, the key to being a traveller rather than a tourist is more about "how" than "where". Hiking, hitchhiking, riding in marshrutkas/shared taxis (rather than planes, trains and Intercity buses) will still in many parts of the world lead you to authentic, spontaneous experiences with locals.
You’re probably right
I'm glad to be of an age where I saw the Sistine Chapel before InstaSham existed.
Great piece, thanks! Very true, and sad in a way hard to describe. Saw the same when living in Shanghai for sure. You know the airspace, a term coined by Kyle Chayka? The coffee shops are an airspace, for sure. You’d dig this: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification
Thanks for sharing!
100% agree with the point of your post, I would only add: If you know of any place where you can travel without being a tourist, don't comment that on a popular Substack article 😄
I guess much of the adventure feeling is now shifted to actually finding out about these less known locations, enjoying them quietly and guarding them as a precious treasure
Feel free to email me them directly then!
Well done, thank you. "Going Solo" is one of my favorites. Another, if you haven't read it, is Thesiger's "The Marsh Arabs" (1961).
Thanks Ted! I really enjoyed Marsh Arabs