I’m in Palermo. I’m looking for somewhere to have a drink. I’ve wandered down back alleys trying to find somewhere quiet and hidden from the main drag. I want it to be full of people, but they have to be ‘real’ people. Yes, it has to be locals; it has to be authentic. When I arrive I want people to assume I’m one of them, to barely notice me. Even better… they might notice me and somehow approve.
I find just the place, and pick a table. A tiny square, candles on the tables, a low hum of conversation, chic people. I’ve arrived. I order a Negroni, to be one with the locals. Never mind the recent trend, I’m a long time Negroni fan. Cut me, and I bleed Campari. I sit for a moment and breathe in the authentic charm.
I look up and see a poster. ‘Tourism = Trendy Colonialism’, it says. ‘Go back where you came from.’
Oh right.
First thought: it’s a bit galling given the number of bloody Italian teenagers slurping their way through McFlurrys in Trafalgar square. Certainly I’ve often wished they weren’t there, but the least you could expect, coming from one of the most touristed places on the planet, is a bit of hospitality in return.
Then I hear English voices braying at the table next to me. And who can deny the sense of horror when you hear a mother-tongued voice in a foreign land. When you realise you are (whisper it) not alone?
Worse, there is an asymmetrical bob haircut, beards, Negronis.
Granted, my days of the asymmetrical bob, or any hair option, are long gone, but here I am with a beard, and, well - the rest. I feel deeply affronted, deeply confronted. Deeply ashamed. And slightly tiddly from the Negroni.
Why do I feel this way, or rather, so many ways?
The Shame of the Tourist
Maybe I should have expected a place that has been invaded and colonised as often as Sicily would be sensitive about such things - or perhaps, conversely, I might have imagined that it would be more relaxed? Just another wave - orange, over-sunned Germans, and pink, freckled Englishers, rather than Saracen hordes.
But it is indeed an alarming feeling to see the place you love overwhelmed, not by migration, but by visitors who frankly are often not considerate guests, or in any way invested in the place. I lived in central historic Edinburgh, then in seaside paradise Brighton, a brief while in tour central on the South Island in New Zealand, and then London. So I know a thing or two about what it feels like to not be able to walk down your street because of eighteen European teenagers walking arm in arm, or get on your commuter train because apparently 8am is the perfect time to take 80 Japanese students into central London. I know what it feels like to watch something real turn into an imitation of itself for tourists, like the authentic London singalong in the favourite pub that slowly became a tourist and hipster hangout. Of course, I was one of the first hipsters, and in all of those places, originally one of the tourists. Trendy colonialism.
Mass tourism does suck. Bruges is getting it. London might. It is a real problem, I am under no illusions. But I’m interested here in the subjective experience of the tourist and traveller - okay, let’s be honest, my experience.
The Planet is not Lonely
The first person in my family to go to university, I arrived in Edinburgh and met my first real middle class people. Bear with me, this is relevant. They were strange and frightening and terribly well scrubbed, and I wanted to be them, not to mention, bonk them. They had a confidence I could never muster.
And they did a thing called ‘travelling’. When I said, ‘Are you going on holiday,’ they would look bemused and say, ‘No, I’m going travelling.’ That sounded very strange. I learned more: there were often beads involved, and a special guide book that was much larger, and more sparsely illustrated, than the Berlitz guide to the Costa Brava I had treasured as a child in my first trip abroad with my Mum and Dad. My grandma went to Blackpool every year (I loved Blackpool!). My (Great) Auntie Sheila and Uncle John were the first package tourists to go to Franco’s Spain, and moved on from there to a wide range of Mediterranean destinations and never looked back - every year waxing lyrical about the grub and their adventures. We weren’t clueless yokels, and we wanted to get around too.
Anyway, a friend at university, on whom I also had a massive crush, had to explain to me the difference between being a tourist and a traveller. I honestly can’t quite remember what is was now, except that it seemed to be further away, longer, and something I couldn’t afford to do. There was a thing called backpacking, and a thing called a ‘gap year’. (Until then, I thought it was called unemployment.)
The special guide book was, of course, called the ‘Lonely Planet’, and indeed, they hoped to go to parts of the planet that were ‘lonely.’ They were there mostly to ‘find themselves’, and did so mostly by finding each other, drinking like fish and fucking like animals, and buying small pieces of multicoloured string to tie around their ankles.
The special book about being lonely, I discovered, was a strange one in many ways - it seemed to want everywhere to be dangerous. It seemed to think that telling thousands of people about hidden places would help meet their overwhelming need to be alone. It wasn’t ‘mass’ tourism though - it was still an elite practice.
Why did they want the planet to be lonely? Perhaps because, for such a necessarily social activity, tourism - or perhaps, even ‘travelling’ - has so often been bound up with the pursuit of the enrichment of the inner-life of the individual. And perhaps, most of all, we want an intimate and personal experience of the geographical other.
The perfect image
Here I am, seeking out the photograph without other people in it - in some ancient attraction, redolent in guidebook images (the Lonely Planet, usually) of the spiritual and solitary. And yet, I am suddenly face to armpit with a thousand sweaty sunblocked suckers like me. I stand with camera at the ready, finger primed to capture the split second when the Sunday magazine view reveals itself. Unspoiled by someone in a cheap sun hat, a strappy summer dress, a tropical print sarong, or a Superdry t-shirt.
Often, I’m checking my photographs before I even leave. I have created a record of my solitary personal experience: the window arched view over gardens without a girl in a Next thong; the glittering altar without a man with a priapic camera lens poking into your holy of holies.
It’s not ‘nobody’, of course. I will make any number of exception ms for a tanned boy on a Vespa in Italy. An elderly nun, stooped with age and holiness, scores maximum points. I have captured a native. That is authentic. It’s my intimate experience. In a bustling, chaotic crowd in Palermo, my images are full of people, but I am going out of my way to ensure I don’t get the strappy dresses and sandals and baseball caps and cargo shorts.
I vividly remember an American girl screaming hysterically in Granada’s Alhambra: ‘PLEASE I just have ONE MORE PICTURE to take. PLEASE Could you just LET ME TAKE IT??’ Everyone was taken aback, but she certainly spoke for the mood of the room, not that most people could understand what she was saying.
And I think this is partly why some decry ‘mass tourism’ - its destructive power is considerable, but so is its potential to deconstruct the artifice of indivduality so central to our modern bourgeois ideas of what ‘authentic’ travel is about. Sometimes what is called ‘mass tourism’ is also just a sign that the cultural vanguard have moved on.
Exotic and authentic
As I said at the beginning, I want to blend in. I can’t. And I probably ‘shouldn’t’. It seems like a sort of bad faith, and an inability to accept my own place in the world. That desire is itself desperately bourgeois - an urge towards authenticity, and a need to show I am as cultured as the place I am visiting. Like the grand tourists, faced with the authentic culture of the exotic, I want to be found a native, a lost son, to return home transformed - and not just by the skin peeling off my nose. How could I become the exotic, not just see it?
I will never be good enough. I will never be ‘wanted’ by the other. I can never be exotic or authentic. Indeed, how can you be both exotic, and at one with the other - that is, domesticated? Once you go genuinely native, it’s no longer exotic. The ‘other’ is no longer ‘other’.
My first adult trip abroad, I went to Madrid. Immediately, all I wanted was to live there, to be one with the place. Not speaking a word of Spanish, to the extent that when I asked for coffee with milk, I had to mime horns and say ‘moo’, this was unlikely to happen. And indeed, it never did.
On one filthy hot, dusty afternoon, when everyone else was having a siesta (surely the greatest invention known to any culture), typically, I was awake and abroad during the hottest part of the day.
Seeking shade, I found an entrance into a cave-like bar, deep under ground, magically, and unusually, aire acondizionado. I followed the staircase into the darkness, to find a large space full of sofas and Spaniards sprawled out like happy perros, dozing in the cool, occasionally stirring to scratch an itch or sip a granita.
I went to the bar, and tried to order in embarrassing Spanish. The waitress seemed deeply hostile, more so even than the average young Spanish woman listening to me murder her language in the name of cultural ‘learning’.
Eventually, as I hit linguistic roadblock after roadblock, she gave a dramatic, hard sigh. In a lofty BBC English accent she said ‘What do you want?’
I ordered a beer, and, delighted to have perhaps found an inroad, perhaps a teacher, an insider, I asked her if she was English.
Yes.
Do you live here?
Yes.
It’s a great place isn’t it?, I gushed, my eyes wide and tail wagging.
She sighed her final ‘Yes’, looked furtively to either side, and disappeared into the kitchen, slamming the door. She wouldn’t come out again, even for the other people wanting drinks.
Making my peace
As a tourist, I carry guilt and shame with me like an extra large wheeled trolley, always aware that I am running over the feet of half the world. I’m part of the disneyfication of cities, as much as I am part of the gentrification of where I live.
So what to do? Deep down I still believe that travel ‘broadens the mind’. Well, it’s broadened my mind anyway.
I stopped believing that for a while, when I was told it wasn’t right to think it by an angry right on student. ‘What does broaden the mind actually mean?’ In this context, I think it means acknowledging, seeking to understand, seeking to connect with, seeking to trace the contours of, cultural and geographical otherness.
‘Geographical otherness’, she said, PAH! Well, I must say I did have that coming.
But understanding different cultures, I was brought up to believe that was admirable. And I do feel a bit cheated that one of many great reversals of the cultural trappings of social mobility - essentially, the middle classes pulling up the cultural drawbridges as soon as possible - came after I had started to travel, and of course, when it become more available to ‘socially mobile’ working class people. The prevailing ideology now was that tourism was destroying the world, and we were exploiters, not explorers.
Even more so, we were forced to ask, why should the world suffer my presence - not to mention my carbon footprint - to expand my own tiny mind, in the name of my own ‘learning’? Strangely, the people asking this were usually well-travelled lifestyle journalists, some self-styled trustafarian student freedom fighters in Che t-shirts who just stayed a bit longer in one place, or academics who zipped between international conferences. And they had usually picked these ideas up from travel on someone else’s dime. Which made it all okay - for them.
And now, the more I see of the world, the politics, and its xenophobic horrors and extremisms, the more I think we need travel. I pine for the international cosmopolitanism and its hopeful promises - which surely are not entirely outweighed by the destructive pressures of globalisation and mass travel?
But how do we decide who deserves to travel; who deserves to ‘broaden the mind’? And indeed, who most desperately needs it?
I’m tired of traveller guilt and bad faith, in the face, indeed, of my own bad faith. I don’t want to stop learning, so I have to make my peace with it. And yes, I’m happy to ‘check my privilege’ - but 50 years ago, the idea of anyone from my background seeing the world was unthinkable.
I have to come clean and be honest with myself, though. I can make all the high minded and ethical arguments I like, but once I have travel, I can’t do anything but cling on to it. It’s not quite middle class entitlement - with a typical streak of bright yellow shame - it’s more a sense of holding on to something that feels so valuable, and, generationally, even politically, hard-won. And valuable. I can’t just go back where I came from, or indeed, let go of my wheely-case.
Watch your feet.