F*ck It. I’m A Tourist.

Tourist or traveller? It’s a question as old as the first ever travel books.

But I don’t like the word “traveller”. It smells of one-upmanship, of smugness.

There’s that sense that, just by hitting the banana pancake trail instead of the all-inclusive resorts, the camp site instead of the villa, the traveller is somehow better than the rest, their experiences somehow more meaningful than other people’s.

That you are a “traveller”. And that “they” are “tourists”.

That because you hang out with backpackers, and they hang out with package holidaymakers, you are somehow better.

That, because you are smoking weed in a $3 beach hut on a cheap Thai island, while they are drinking fruit cocktails around the pool on an expensive Thai island, you are, somehow, more integrated into the local culture than they are.

Tourist or traveller? Well, I’m not a big fan of package holidays.

At least since they stopped being a cheap way to get flights, way back in the dark ages.

But –- honestly — whether that holiday is a fortnight in Torremolinos/Cancun/Kuta or six weeks in a tour bus across Africa, whether your reps are organizing bananas down the swimming trunks competitions or a barbecue over an open fire, it is still a package holiday.

But, f*ck it. I’m a tourist, too. Here’s why.

I Use Guidebooks

For most travelers, the use of a guidebook is a sign of a tourist. Now, I like a personal recommendation as much as the next person, and regularly go places that aren’t in guidebooks.

However… Sometimes you just want to roll into town, with a map, and a list of guesthouses, with roughly accurate prices and reviews, all wrapped up in a good old-fashioned book, find a clean bed, and hit it.

Guidebooks are also bloody handy for letting you know, for example, where everyone will be watching the sunrise and the sunset over XYZ landscape or monument.

And, frankly, guidebooks are generally written by proper writers who know their stuff, and have more or less accurate historical background and cultural info. Very helpful, IMHO. Because it’s never good to pass within an hour’s journey of one of the wonders of the world and miss it.

Whether you’re tourist or traveller.

I Pay More Than Local Price

I am not a local. Ergo, in the developing world in particular, where the very fact of being able to leave my own country and bounce around theirs makes me richer than 99% of the population, I do not expect to pay the local price for services such as transport.

A traveller will spend hours haggling with some third world cab driver over the equivalent of 20p or less. (I’ve done it, in my youth.) As a tourist, I’m happy to pay 25% over, or thereabouts, without quibble. (More on this here.)

I Loathe Hostel Dorms

I didn’t go to boarding school. But, all the same, paying good money to sleep, in a bunk bed, with a room full of strange adults is just, well, painful, whether or not you’re working at the time.

I’m not shy about my body (possibly a little too un-shy for some). But I am a noisy, wriggly sleeper. One of those people that jerks, snorts and thrashes in the night. Activities I prefer to keep to myself, in all honesty.

I like to spread my stuff around, read and write in bed, and stay up late. Which is not ideal, even in the posh hostels where you have your own light by your bed, because the bloody things are full of light sleepers.

For some reason, this doesn’t apply when trekking. I’ll quite happily bunk down in a mountain hut, or sling a hammock wherever everyone else does, roll out a mat in the village rest-house, or whatever it may be. In the city, it’s just wrong.

I Love Theme Parks

Theme parks, water parks –- sign of the devastation of local culture and impending globalization?

Yeah, probably, though there’s something very Guatemalan about a Guatemalan water park, and very Vietnamese about a Vietnamese one, and very Thai about a Thai theme park, and these are not all for the tourists by any stretch of the imagination.

But they are also amazing fun. Show me a 360 degree aqua loop water slide, or pretty much any roller coaster on the planet (let alone Battlestar Galactica, and I regress mentally to about age ten.

Fun as an adult. F*cking hilarious with a kid in tow.

I Like To Eat Out

Like all the best travellers, I like street food, and local eateries where you chow down with your fingers from paper cones. I also like to sit down somewhere swep’up with a sea view and pig out on crabs, lobster, oysters…, head into town and gorge on steak or sashimi, treat my spawn to posh ice creams, buy nice stuff from the markets and cook it up.

I’m also a sucker for sky-high bars, revolving restaurants and the like, not to mention grown-up cocktails and nice beers. So shoot me.

It is relatively easy to eat for a couple of dollars a day in most of South-East Asia, even without going to the extremes of cooking your own rice and beans. We, err, haven’t.

I Own Impractical Clothing

Posh undies – check! Impractical shoes – not currently (I broke the last pair on their second outing…). Frock that is barely legal in most of the cultures we’ll be travelling for the next couple of months – check! Makeup (albeit caking through underuse) – check!

I may cut my hair with scissors. But I do like to think I might need to get dressed up from time to time, and my flip-flops tend to the sequined, not the canvas.

I do not, to my knowledge, own a single piece of technical or “travel” clothing. At least since I junked my hiking boots for a pair of Converse fakes that take up less space and are, well, so much prettier.

I Do Not Like To Walk With My Pack

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re carrying too much stuff. We like books. We trash electronics and a Kindle would last about a nanosecond with us.

Anywise. I take taxis, tuk tuks, motorbike taxis, and am currently driving us to Papua on a motorbike, because I do not like carrying 20kg of stuff any further than I have to.

I may travel with a backpack. But I am not a masochist.

Thanking you.

I Have Never Had A Tattoo

Though I do still dally with the idea, I have to say.

But tattoos, like the ability to play pool (or, I sometimes think, learning to surf), are something one should acquire by the age of 26 at the absolute latest. And I kinda missed the boat on that one.

Especially since David Beckham tattooed his kids’ names on himself around about the time I was contemplating an artistic Z.

I See A Backpacker Ghetto And I Run Like Hell

Bangkok’s Khao San Road is just horrid in all the wrong ways. Not sleazy. Not edgy. Not Wild West. Just a bunch of Western kids in hippie pants getting vomiting drunk on whisky buckets.

My spawn is wildly appreciative of comedy T-shirts (if, mercifully, not hippie pants), and has spent many a happy hour guffawing at the offers in Chiang Mai Night Market, Khao San Road and Vang Vieng.

But anywhere where travelers outnumber locals, magic mushrooms feature regularly on the menus and drinks are served in buckets, I am unlikely to enjoy.

Exception to this rule? Vang Vieng in Laos. Because anywhere where you can tube rapids,
enjoy rope swings and water slides, and –- were one not a responsible adult in charge of a child –- get absolutely muntered while so doing amid a dazzlingly beautiful karst landscape still, rather guiltily, gets my vote.

I Read Trash Fiction

I was pleased to see that Ubud’s wonderful library, Pondok Pekak, had Anna Karenina, something I’ve been meaning to read for a couple of decades now.

It also had a large selection of the oeuvre of British crime novelist Ruth Rendell, and pathology-porn fictionaliser Patricia Cromwell.

Would you like to guess which ones I read?

Sure, I had the flu, or summat. But I didn’t even take Anna Karenina out of the library.

My spawn has been on my case to read E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World for the last few months. A splendid, deeply cultured work of central European thinking, written for kids with adults in mind as well, it’s a wonderful book.

I’m on, err, chapter seven. And, yes, he’s still on my case.

Yep. I’m definitely a tourist. Particularly given we are, after all, on tour.

But what about you? Are you tourist or traveller? Or neither?

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