I’m not a tourist - packaged authenticity
by Simon Rashleigh
Simon Rashleigh dons his backpack to find the ‘unique’ experience - just like everyone else
I’m just another one of those travellers who doesn’t want to be just another fucking traveller. I scoff at the word tourist, them on their package tours, going from one budget hotel to another. I see busloads of them driving past, middle-aged and undoubtedly painfully dull, listening to the guide on the microphone, as her monologue gives meaning to the things that are whizzing past outside. Everybody laughs at the joke about the castle. They always do; she has the rapport down to a fine art. You have five minutes. For a photo, for a memory, for proof.
I seek something more real, the genuine experience, it’s what all we travellers want. It’s not about ticking boxes or taking photos. It’s about something less tangible, an experience, a feeling. We understand each other, us travellers. I’ll be boiling some pasta in a hostel kitchen, and will hear the same conversation I’ve heard dozens of times before. About how touristy the world has become, about the people paying a small fortune to be shuttled about a country as if they were in a theme park, about people who aren’t interested in learning about another culture except through a piece of glass in air-conditioned comfort. We know that what we get out of travelling is better, cooler and more real. You’ve got to go to Macchu Picchu man, it’s bloody incredible. I know, I went last year, how amazing was it?
There are so many of us. Sometimes when I look up from my guidebook, I’ll see them walking around with their heads in the same edition, with the same kitsch cover art, guiding us all to the same untouched destinations. I move from hostel to hostel, from one ‘must-experience’ destination to the next, and keep seeing the same faces. I can’t believe we missed each other in that hostel in Berlin, we will say. Did you go to the Checkpoint Charlie museum?
We are so many, us not-just-another-travellers, that we are a market. Corporations move in and corner the market, set-up chains of alternative-hostels, strike deals with alternative-travel companies, to shuttle alternative travellers to alternative destinations. The genuine experience is for sale. There it is on a platter, packaged up in bundles of the real deal.
I walk from the hostel. I need time-out. I find a café that is all mine, where I can just for a second be like a native. I order in German and everything, the girl who serves me is nice, she answers slowly in German even though she speaks English like a native. But as I sit down to enjoy it, I hear English coming from another table. It’s that same conversation again, about this very café. They’ve found it too- the genuine experience. They’re drinking it up in little cups.
How did this happen? When did I become a commodity, a target market, a demographic? When did we, this mass of ‘I’m-not-a-tourist’s become the tourism industry? I don’t want to be a tourist. I want to be something else. A traveller. An adventurer? But the words feel empty, and I can’t avoid the fact that a tourist by any other name would smell as bad.