My mum has a philosophy that when travelling you'll have more enjoyment by visiting the second or third best version of everything. You'll turn up at a tourist attraction and be trampled on by a biblical quantity of people, then turn a corner to the lesser-attraction and it'll be practically desserted.
In Rome, don't go to the Colosseum, go to the Baths of Caracalla.
In Cambodia, go to Angkor Wat for a little while, but spend more time exploring the other temples - because you'll find there are a fraction of the tourists and there are plenty of fabulous temples to explore!
I think in a world of almost 8 billion people some compromise when travelling is necessary and healthy, for the preservation of these locations, but also your own enjoyment.
Case in point was going to Athens for a work event. I felt like the Parthenon was disappointing experience. The crowds were terrible. You can't get anywhere near the actual building. And it's often under some type of renovation/construction, so there's scaffolding everywhere. There are no trees, so it's basically it's a bit of a hike, waiting in lines, and then without shade you're out in the blazing sun (if in Summer time).
Afterwards I went to another site in Athens, the Ancient Agora of Athens. Wow, what a completely different experience. It was mostly empty. But there were several big buildings to actually walk up to and into. There were remnants of statues and other historical items that made it super interesting. There were also trees, for shade and the grounds were really well kept.
https://goo.gl/maps/pGRysme3D91Kt8Q7A if anyone is interested in seeing some of the photos of the location. I had never heard of it, but had a few hours to explore and this location saved my Athens experience.
My philosophy is just stay home on public holidays. Luckily my employer lets me swap out public holidays for days of my choosing. So I end up working every public holiday.
Ofcourse this doesn't work if you have family that gets public holidays. Works great for me.
>In Rome, don't go to the Colosseum, go to the Baths of Caracalla.
Or you could just pay less than $1k for an after-hours tour at the Colosseum or Vatican and see the place without crowds.
Not an option for everyone, but I suspect one worth considering for lots of people here. You can almost always pay for various levels of VIP-treatment at places like this, even if they don't tend to advertise it well.
Viator is not a terrible place to book, but there are many alternatives. A good travel agent or hotel concierge can deal with this for you, and also advise you about guides.
Also try to go outside of regular hours, often meaning finding alternative transport. At least in Angkor Wat you don't have to take a bus and then outside of those core hours you have lots of alone time.
Granted this experience was pre-iPhone so the specific example may not hold!
If you want to take the subway to/from Bryant Park, which is a pretty nice area, you're going to end up using one of the times square stations. Unless you're coming from the east/west direction. Don't hang out in times square, however...
The unusual behaviors of the tourists in times square are themselves a tourist attraction, a few times for the novelty, if that makes any sense.
Here is a darker, but better, version of this thesis, from a pre-instragram time:
To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit.
It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you.
It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
The notion of experiencing an unspoiled place is getting less and less realistic. But it's not the only possible goal. We could set others. Embracing a role of active participant rather than passive observer. Engaging in a mutually beneficial manner rather than trying to see without being seen.
The last overseas visit we made was to Naples and Rome. Rome has been sacked a number of times over two millenia, bombed by the USAAF, and has a variety of home-grown problems. Whatever we went to Rome to experience, it wasn't unspoiledness. And on the other hand, Rome is not at all a dead thing.
The writing felt slack and unfocused to me. Didn’t really understand the thesis, if present. Possibly this?
> The problem of travel at this particular moment is not too many people traveling in general, it is too many people wanting to experience the exact same thing because they all went to the same websites and read the same reviews
So it’s not rewarding to go to popular sites maybe? Or that they are crowded? Something about being middle class is insufficient to enjoy these places? But why not exactly?
I think that the thesis is more like "be warned that what you will find when going to a place you have seen promoted on Instagram won't likely be the same thing, because everyone else had your same idea and that place has changed in the meantime".
A number or places are promoted because they are (one way or the other) "exclusive", but if they are open to the public and everyone goes there, the exclusivity soon ends.
Small places like Positano did actually change due to the mass of people visiting them, on a larger scale Venice and Florence share a similar "shift".
To give you a small example for Florence, once there were a number of small "trattorie" (cheap restaurants) where locals would go, eating simple, local dishes.
For many years foreigners (travelers, not tourists) found these places (by mere chance), ate there, among the locals, and came home telling how pleasant was that experience to their friends, let's say 50 people, of these, maybe 5 (10%) would go in the next 5 years to Florence and eat there, so, each "positive review" brought in 1 or 2 customers the next year (replacing the one of the year before), the situation was stable.
Now one "influencer" goes there and his/her experience is read by 100,000 people, of these a much smaller percentage (1%) 1000 people next year go to that place.
It is a good thing (more work) for the restaurant, but - besides the queue outside - after the cook has been asked multiple times for "spaghetti bolognese" and the manager understands that the foreign customers are willing to pay 10 Euro for them (instead of the 5 Euro a first course was priced before), the restaurant will change menu and raise prices, no locals would go there anymore, additionally since very few people among the new mass of customers can actually appreciate the food, quality will lower.
Soon after, the guy next door will understand that there are thousands of people looking for food (and that there is no need for the food to be good) and opens a new restaurant.
In a few years "trattorie" disappear, replaced by "tourist restaurants", where thousands of people go expecting to have the same experience the original "influencer" reported.
And - here is the interesting psychological aspect - either because they spent a lot of time and money to organize the trip or because they have no way (lack of culture/experience/taste) to appreciate the differences most people won't report honestly that their (unlike the original) experience was a shitty one and will as well publish photos of the place and tell everyone how nice it was, perpetuating the myth.
We usually ask at the reception where should we go eat out. It works out great most of the time. It worked fine in Florence. When we picked a restaurant ourselves we got out of the tourist area and ate at a underwhelmingly looking grocery/restaurant where university professors ate out. If the staff only speaks Italian, you're probably at the right place. The food was good and they had a huge selection of wines. Of course, we never put those places on Instagram. In Florence one can still be able to find places like that. But if you go to places like Positano or Taormina, then almost every restaurant is the tourist type and even the locals have no choice but to eat there.
Yep, there are still a few good ones, but don't tell anyone ;).
Taormina or Positano are so small that the "new wave" of tourist places have already (and since a few years) "killed" practically all the places for normal people[1], in Florence you can clearly see the trend, but there are still enough "old" places, though it won't probably last for long.
[1] though (if you have the means to go only a few kilometers away) in the surroundings of Taormina or Positano there are still many good traditional restaurants
Small B&B's with reception/concierge are rare (at least here in Florence), but while I would not totally exclude such "financial ties", they would be anyway with "good enough" restaurants that are not the "for tourists" ones, of course it may depend on cases, but it would not make any sense for the B&B or hotel to recommend a "bad" place, they would risk to irk the customer.
I liked the article, I know people who plan travel the same way as described in the article and it makes travel sound like a chore. I also feel like you're not doing the culture justice if you're doing this kind of "drive-by tourism".
Im the first person in my family to leave the continent and I have absolutely zero shame about being a mass tourist in a place my great grandparents could only dream of visiting and being merely "adjacent" to rich people. Middle class americans' toxic nihilism and self loathing is exhausting to read sometimes.
I went to the Eiffel tower because it's the eiffel tower. I know I'm not unique, I didnt need it to be a unique experience because I wasn't trying to prove anything by going.
Most Instagrammers and such need to accept that unless they are personally trekking through uninhabited land nothing they do will be unique and it's ok.
It’s not uniquely American nor is it uniquely Instagram either.
I’m French. My father is French. Decades ago as a kid we were in Paris on a short trip, and we were close to the Eiffel Tower. I asked my dad if we could go there, and he went on this weird rant about it being too touristy and not worth it.
So I didn’t get to visit the Eiffel Tower and I was sad. He wasn’t a great dad.
I still haven’t, to this day. Haven’t had the opportunity. I’m going to Paris in a month for my girlfriend’s birthday and I’m planning to go there. This notion that just because something is touristy you SHOULDNT do it is absurd. Pick what sounds pleasant, and don’t expect to be alone.
Going up the Eiffel tower elevator is great. The iron work is beautiful. The view is too. Anyone who appreciates the history of engineering will like it.
> Middle class americans' toxic nihilism and self loathing is exhausting to read sometimes.
One of the reasons I enjoy this site in addition to all the tech stuff is the way a random comment can so perfectly capture my thoughts on an issue. Indeed, I like to like things, even if everyone else likes the same thing!
I agree, that read like pointless bitching with the author being above the plebs they run into when traveling. Maybe they simply need to get off Instagram and take a breath once in a while. I don't use it, and I go to Florence not because someone made some dumbass selfies there, but because I love history. Three months ago, they have a system where you get a time slot in the museums, you book online and I ran into absolutely 0 lines there. Yes, a lot of tourists, but so what?? It is a beautiful place and it will always be popular.
> To be in Positano as a middle-class person — someone who can afford to travel and take time off work but not, say, afford to buy real estate in the city where they live — is to feel like an idiot for believing it could have been any better, or that being there is actually a benefit to the lives of the people who live there.
The article needs personal examples. Rebecca tells us that influencer-filled Positano is a terrible place to be and stops there. Don’t tell me, show me.
I do agree that seeking “the best” doesn’t serve us well when traveling. You end up in the same touristy spots as everyone else.
Case in point: when I was in Krakow, Poland, I went to a nearby salt mine, but instead of taking the English language tour went with a Polish group. I understood enough Polish to hear the guide talking about “those tourists” and had a great, immersive experience as an undercover tourist.
Such is the paradox of tourism. We want authentic experiences but depend on experts to define authenticity. Walker Percy captured this well in his essay "The Loss of the Creature." He wrote it in the early 20th century. Presently, it seems like people have a tough time enjoying something unless they gram it.
What a worth of space piece. It basically just boils down to the author being annoyed that other people visit popular sites too.
If you don't like other tourists, don't travel to tourist destinations. It's that simple. You don't travel to France and get annoyed that there are french people, well guess what, tourist destinations have tourists, that's a given, and it's a given everywhere, and it has nothing to do with instagram, Facebook or "this generation" it's just basic dumb fact.
I got super lucky to have booked an Airbnb with the most gorgeous, dead center, view at €200/night because it was a brand new listing that has no reviews. It was a wonderful stop on my month long trip in Italy earlier this year. If you have an SO I highly recommend for the vibes
In Rome, don't go to the Colosseum, go to the Baths of Caracalla.
In Cambodia, go to Angkor Wat for a little while, but spend more time exploring the other temples - because you'll find there are a fraction of the tourists and there are plenty of fabulous temples to explore!
I think in a world of almost 8 billion people some compromise when travelling is necessary and healthy, for the preservation of these locations, but also your own enjoyment.