Me Traveler. You Tourist. {Grunt}

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”  Thank you, G.K. Chesterton for this over-repeated gem, but another entry in the tourist vs. traveler debate (Can it be a debate if one side is doing all the debating?)

I had intended to write one day about the absurdity of the “tourist vs. traveler” but I reduced it to two simple statements.

  • I The Traveler want to feel superior to someone (You The Tourist).  You are just here to have your picture taken.  I am here to truly experience the culture.  Me traveler.  You tourist.  GRUNT!
  • I The Traveler am pissed that You The Tourist are here, too.  You The Tourist are the one person that pushed the destination over the edge.  Now, if all these darn tourists would get out of Machu Picchu so I could get a clear picture. What are all these idiots doing at the Leaning Tower of Pisa?

The  delightful entry by Doug Mack says everything about the traveler vs. tourist debate.  http://www.fivebadideas.com/2010/03/always-other-chap-notes-on-tourists.html Very seldom do I read a travel article and agree with someone in nearly every statement, but this time I do.

I never knew him, but I bet G.K. Chesterton would like to be remembered for something else.

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Book Review: A Tourist Free Coast

Book Review:  Off Season, Discovering America on Winter’s Shore

Tangier Island

A vision of the coastal towns is with summer in full shine, seagulls and minivans plying the shore.  In the south there is fried fish.  In the north there is saltwater taffy and boardwalks.  All along, the city folk have built beach houses here, to rent out to strangers or to share with friends in summer.  But it is the locals who run the coast when the tourists leave for the summer.  When winter rolls in, the pace slows as the ice chokes the harbors, and the towns are left for those who enjoy the solitude.  This is Off Season, not Jersey Shore.

In Off Season, Ken McAlpine spent a winter driving the east coast from Florida to Maine seeking stories of small town life.  Whether or not we come from small towns, we want to believe in Mayberry.  McAlpine’s journey recalls William Least Heat Moon’s classic Blue Highways, a road trip through small-town America. “Life doesn’t happen along the interstates,” he wrote, “It’s against the law.”  McAlpine’s story is similar, Continue reading

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The nonsense of divorce-cation

It’s good to make vague predictions because it’s easier to be right.  USA Today recently wrote about the trend of divorce-cations, in which split couples travel together for the sake of the kids.  Seriously? Personally, I don’t want to be on that vacation.  But this is not about divorce.  It’s about the crazy words people are making up about vacations.

In my top 8 predictions for the world of travel in 2011, I predicted that someone will coin new vacation terms that are even lamer than “mancation.”  And you heard it here first.  Thanks, USA Today for making me sound prescient.

For a hilarious take on divorce-cations, prayercations, and more, check out This Week in Travel #78, where they create new words like bingecation:  a vacation where you binge on booze or (I’m assuming) food.  Binge away!

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Weekly Travel Quote

Perhaps it was the solitude, perhaps it was the views from my windows or the sound of the surf, but I slept for long hours every night and woke to wonder at the dazzling perfection of this quiet world.
–Ellen Gilchrist Town & Country Travel Spring 2004

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Yesterday’s Shanghai

Before I left for China, I watched a Discovery Channel documentary (China Rises:  Behind the Great Wall) telling the story of how the Chinese government was tearing down old homes in downtowns to build skyscrapers.  The show was a few years old, so I never thought I’d witness it in person.  I knew that I would see a mix of old and new in Shanghai, but nothing like this.

We exited the subway to walk to COOL DOCKS, a semi-trendy restaurant district just off the Bund.  We wandered through a neighborhood of old Shanghai, where a woman served dinner in a makeshift restuarant of 3 tables, while she cooked in an open-air wok.  Shanghai streetlife of merchants and bicyclists continued right in front of Continue reading

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Book Review: China Before Steroids

Behind the Wall:  A Journey Through China by Colin Thubron (1987).

The modern skyscrapers of China tell us no stories.  They are evidence that China has arrived and that China has modernized, but they tell no stories about the journey it took to get to this point.  Behind the Wall: is a traveler’s journey through mid-1980’s China (before Shanghai looked like Chicago on steroids).  Backpackers to Beijing laid around in their hostel rooms complaining of how awful the country was and how difficult it was to travel there.   The 30-something story luxury Jinling Hotel in Nanjing was the tallest building in China.

In the rest of the country, rats ran through dumpy guesthouses.  The streets Continue reading

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Dyslexic Shanghai: A Pnik Experience

Um, I think it’s supposed to say “PINK”, not “PNIK”.

I looked in stores all across Shanghai to buy a shirt with some “Chinglish” typos on it, but I never found a shirt that could compete with this Chinglish typo which I saw in downtown Shanghai near the Pearl Tower.  In fine print under the word PNIK, it says “Lucky Pink.”  So I guess they can only spell properly in small fonts.

Unfortunately, the shirt I found for myself is not this funny.

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Weekly Travel Quote

Place is memory.  All our lives tell us so.  Why is it we remember forever not what we were wearing or doing or feeling, but where we were at the most crucial moments?  There is a wider sense of place–planted in our memories by people we have never known or met.

–Frank Delaney National Geographic Traveler, 10/99

 

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Journey of a Hotel Pen

The pen has no significance to you.

It is merely a hotel pen, that arrived on the loading dock with 999 other identical pens.  But it means something to me, just like that sand painting or lei or snow globe means to you.  I picked it up at the Renaissance Koh Samui in Thailand during a trip around the world nearly four years ago.

I don’t think the hotel chains know that their pens have meaning.  If they did, they would order the custom pens instead of the ones that just say “Renaissance Hotels.”  I have a whole drawer of hotel pens without meaning:  Marriott, Hilton, Doubletree, and more.  But this custom pen has meaning. I used it to write postcards from the deck of our deluxe room…during the day, of course, because the mosquitoes moved in at night, camping around the yellow glow of our room.

Since then, it has traveled with me in backpacks and carry-ons to other parts of the world.  Its trip to China last month will be its last.  The pen is starting to get a bit temperamental, so I will throw it away today before it decides to glob on my shirt or my notebook.  I still have my Koh Samui memories, along with about 100 other hotel pens that are begging to be used.

I’ll write more about the Renaissance Koh Samui soon, but this pen deserved its own story after the journey it’s taken.

PS.  I don’t really have feelings for ballpoint pens.

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Weekly Travel Quote

Cheung Chau Island, Hong Kong

“Water cities have a way of seducing us,though it’s always difficult to know why, and explanations vary with each city.”
Andre Aciman, Conde Nast Traveler, 01/05

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