Travel Notes

Are you a traveller or just a tourist? The endless quest for finding the holy grail of authenticity in regions outside one’s familiar culture is an exercise in self delusion. It’s like pretending to eschew online consumerism while ordering a bike bag on Amazon.

Tourism is a kind of disease that has made the experience of visiting Venice or Kyoto less appealing for visitors and locals alike, scooped away affordable rental housing for locals and turned a once pristine hike to Mount Joffre into something more akin to a BC ferry line up on a holiday weekend.

Beware the traveller who implies they are doing something different than “the average tourist”, a spell I once fell under. Maybe it’s best put this way? All travellers are tourists but some travellers think what they are doing has more value than the rest of us.

In the end, it’s about the dollars the traveller/tourist bring and maybe the unexpected hiatus of mass tourism during the pandemic has demonstrated limits are required. Kind of like haiku.

No doubt many, many factors have led to a real crisis in places becoming overrun with visitors but for me the most striking change from being a tourist forty years ago, or even a decade ago is having the vast resource of the internet at your fingertips.

Booking accommodation is a snap, navigating your way with GPS is unbelievably easy (despite common pitfalls) and planning where you want to go is one or two hen peck taps away. And you can send off your immediate impressions to those you left back home in real time, or share with the whole world. Especially those special places which suddenly may not be special anymore. Yet those special places appearing on countless screens suddenly become less special. The soul of something can easily get lost in all the pictures.

I’ve also noticed the addition of internet technology has made the possibility of chance encounters and exchanges less likely, where standing on a corner with a puzzled look and a map in your hand often attracted helpful gestures from locals and increased opportunities for interaction.

It seems the visitor today strides forth (or back and forth in my case) eyes glued to a device, following it like the flag of a tour guide, those very iterations of travel the “real” traveller once scorned.

Thankfully, even with all this technological assistance, being in a new place still means a certain amount of mystery exists in how things work. Each day brings an unexpected encounter with someone and a different way of doing things.

So, as I go here and there now, in Japan, the hiccups and embarrassing moments of not knowing the proper way to do things is, I hope, both a source of information, speculation and  revelation; often humourous.

Full disclosure, read this interview on CBC with my former employers. Thanks John for sending.