"Authentic" travel?

Monday, 28 November 2011

As someone who travels a lot, loves to travel, thinks about traveling a lot....I frequently find myself frustrated with the travel literature that's out there. It seems as if everyone is looking for an experience that no one else has had or that if only 300 people have been somewhere it is somehow better than if  1000 or 10000 people have been there. Furthermore, I find it a bit humourous when travel magazines/books feature "local's only" places. Surely if you are writing about it, it is not, or shortly won't be, a "locals only" place? On one hand, I understand this mentality, why go somewhere everyone has already been? But on the other hand, people go to these places for a reason. The Eiffel tower or Las Ramblas for example, yeah, they are touristy and cheesy, but they're also beautiful and I would feel quite sad for anyone who went to Paris or Barcelona and didn't go see these places. We all want to avoid being tourists, but we are tourists. When I go to a city that I'm not living in, I am a tourist, whether I like it or not. Even if I understand the language, the city, I still am not a local and I wonder if we should give up trying to be "not tourists" and enjoy the sights and sounds of a foreign city for what they are. When you travel there's always a competition between the long term travelers (I've been here for 2 months) and the just-passing-through travelers (I've been here two days and I'm still drunk from the last city I was in) something, which,  I've grown to find ridiculous. Personally, I like to stay somewhere for a long time, it's just how I like to travel, but I have to recognise that in the end, I don't think my experience in a place is any more "authentic" than someone who has just been there two days. The fact is that we are both going home with some new experiences and new information about the world.  I'm not sure what it is about modern life that has us in an endless search for authenticity but I think, at least in terms of travel, it's time to give up that quest and just enjoy where we are, wherever we are and for however long we are there.