Taras Grescoe: The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists

[sparkchaser]

In The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists, seasoned traveler Taras Grescoe journeys from the coast of Spain to the coast of China but does so "among the tourists" where the tourist rut has been cut the deepest. Giving a history of the various touring styles, below are some of the tourist modes he samples:

• Walking the Camino de Santiago, a 850km pilgrimage in Spain that dates back to the 12th Century.
  
  
• Driving through France relying solely on the Guide Michelin (now called Guide Rouge) to tell him where to see, eat, and sleep.
  
  
  After picking up two hitch-hikers and driving them to the next town.
  
  

  "You can't leave without trying the ewe's cheese!" they shouted, merrily, as we parted company in a vast parking lot in the middle of Pau.
  
  This sure wasn't Montana, I thought. There, the best culinary advice you could hope for from a hitch-hiker would be directions to the Denny's on the I-90. After he'd tied your wrists, taken your keys, and warned you not to move until you'd counted to a thousand.

  
  Upon visiting a vineyard and refusing a complimentary glass of wine for the road:
  
  

  "Most French people like to drive a little drunk." Ah ha! This explained why they used their cars like a four-year-old uses a crayon.

• Hopping on a package tour bus for a whirlwind tour of Central Europe.
  
  

  Luxembourg, the rest stop of nations, is tailor made for bus tours. It has ample parking, free lavatories, and plenty of souvenir shops, and it is too small for even the directionally clueless to get lost in. A quick dose of quaint, you're in, you're out -- half an hour, tops. It was only as we left that I read in a Tourist office brochure that I'd missed a cliffside elevator that led to the Bock Casements, a 23-kilometre network of underground passages beneath the town castle. But Emma didn't want her charges wandering too far, so when we parked in a ravine-side lot overlooking the meanders of the underachieving Petrusse River, she neglected to mention the attraction.

  
  He wryly notes:
  
  

  Once a foot-proud pilgrim, so recently a discerning Michelin motorist, I was being turned into a sheepish package tourist. The wound, as usual, was self-inflicted.

• Backpacking and staying in hostels with the college aged crowd.
  
  

  From what I'd seen of the kids in hostels and sleeper compartments, few got as far as being bubbled or poxed, and the only thing most of them would be able to talk familiarly of was variation in fast food menus. The contemporary Grand Tour was all about meeting other travelers, following Let's go-approved itineraries from Amsterdam to Prague, and returning home unscathed and unchanged. It was a travel groove that allowed college kids to voyage far from home without leaving their frat and sorority houses.

  
  
• Feeding his inner hypochondriac by visiting the spas at Baden Baden and rubbing elbows with the upper class.
  
  

  Mustering my dignity, i walked into the vast domed room and, as indolently as I could, descended the steps into the tepid exercise bath. Placing my cheeks on the steps, I languidly glanced upwards, towards the circle of cherubim that underpinned a coffered dome whose skylight cast a sensual half-light on the pool. Slowly lowering my gaze, I prepared to take in a scene of decadence straight out of Petronius's Satyricon.
  
  It was the Fellini version. A bespectacled man with wild tufts of black hair protruding from his back was giving me the eye as he paddled clockwise around the pool. At the swan-necked tap where the blond maiden in the brochure had been, a one armed man bent to rinse off a prosthesis. The only woman in the pool was rake thing, with the alligator hide that bespoke decades of pre-sunscreen tanning on the Riviera.

• Hitting the beaches of Corfu.
  
  

  I'd chosen it for its reputation as a paradise overrun by German package tourists and yobs in Union Jack shorts who emerged already legless from their charters to turn the Mediterranean into their personal vomitorium. Like the Spanish islands of Ibiza and Majorca, and like Ios and Mykonos in the Aegean, Corfu -- Kerkyra to the natives, "Cor, Phew" to the lads -- had the reputation of being an accessible, downtown party center, a kind of Blackpool-on-th-Med that offered moussaka-and-chips and 24-hour full English breakfast. Now that I was here, in the 40-degree-Celcius sticky heat, I realized I couldn't have chosen a more perfect hell for myself than an over-touristed island full of boozed-up louts.

  
  
• Relaxing at the all inclusive resort of Club Med, albeit for only a day.
  
  
• Abusing the inclusive all you can eat buffet of a Mediterranean cruise aboard the Marco polo.
  
  

  I ate with a different couple every morning, all of them small-town British, elderly, and full of minor complaints, so that by the end of the cruise they had blended into a dimly perceived slow leak, a vague distraction from my efforts to consume every item on the menu.

  
  
• Taking the well worn traveler's rut of the Lonely Planet India-Nepal road.
  
  

  I noticed a copy of the guidebook, the same edition as mine, open on the table. It had taken little effort -- three planes, several hundred dollars, and 24 hours without real sleep -- but I'd relocated the tourist bubble I'd left when I disembarked from the Marco Polo. In these parts, it was called the Lonely Planet trail.
  
  The Lonely Planet guide to India is as thick as a brick. Its cover shows an out-of-focus crowd of women wearing colorful headscarves, beneath which a caption reads "Saris, swamis & maharinis" -- an assonant recipe for exotic Orient cocktail...The added weight is worth it: the Lonely Planet is an indispensable guide. Not for discovering India -- anybody can do a better job by striking up conversations with English-speaking Indians -- but for hunting down other western travelers.

  
  
• Hiking through the jungle to see an "authentic" stone age village in Thailand.

Amusing, cynical (sometimes too cynical I think), and a few times heartbreaking, in the end Taras reminds the reader that in many cases all you need to do to stray off of the well used tourist rut is walk 50-100 meters off of the beaten path into a side street.

If you're a traveler, it should be on your must read list. I know it changed how I view traveling.

Oh, and for the record, Lonely Planet is my favorite guidebook series although I pretty much only use it for the general information, lodging, and sights. I like to figure out the restaurants and shopping myself.

And, just for fun, a pic from my recent trip to Madrid.

 

[chiangmaifalcon]

I am somewhat involved with tourists as I work for the tourist police here in Chaing Mai, but personally the best places I have seen in the world are the places that are not in the guidebook. I believe once a place becomes a tourist destination it changes into an exhibit instead of a real place. I am not saying tourist areas are bad. I mean they become tourist areas in the first place because there is something there worth seeing. I am only saying that to really see the world as it is, the best thing is just to go wherever you end up.

 

[sparkchaser]

Tourist police? Do you fine Americans for talking too loud and taking up an entire road by walking side-by-side? If not, you should.

 

[chiangmaifalcon]

Not in Thailand. Nobody talks louder than the Thais, and if you walk in the road like that here you will quickly be run down and killed.

 

[sparkchaser]

He talks a bit about the booming sex tourism trade in Thailand. I don't think he truly experienced it since he brought a surrogate wife to help in fending off the hookers.

 

[chiangmaifalcon]

Yes I am sorry to say this is what Thailand is known for. However the fact is although there are many prostitutes here, they are really a very small minority of the population. The main sex tourism areas are Pattaya, Phuket and Bangkok. The fact is the majority of Thai women are strict Buddhist and very proper and old-fashioned. My wife is from Cambodia but grew up in Nakhon Sawan and was a rice farmer, and a very devout and old-fashioned Buddhist. However, she does have a sister who works in a bar in Pattaya. Just about all the girls who work in sex tourist business send almost all the money they make home to support their families.