Of all the travel sterotypes the Anti-Tourist is possibly the worst, he is the traveller who as the name implies, hates with a burning passion the regular tourist, he is quite well defined here. He is the one who doesn’t just give advice on travel, he tries to tell you how to travel. He misses the worlds best attractions because there are to many tourists there and the location has lost it’s authenticity. The Anti-tourist’s main problem is that he has forgotten what travel is about, learning. He thinks he has learned it all and feels he is obliged to tell those he thinks are on his path how to get there faster, he has lost his patience with people. His original problem was simple he started travelling with a steadfast idea of what travel should be like and he charged ahead on that path.
Every traveller believes that they are travelling is the way travel should be. As far as travelling ‘right’ goes every traveller who feels they are travelling ‘right’ probably is (for them), maybe the best piece of advice we can all learn is to just let travel be what it is to each of us, (to each their own). Sterotyping travellers although a favourite pasttime of many travellers doesn’t serve anyone any benefit even if they are true. Travel is a subjective exeprience and it should be, the result is that even if different people experience the same things they experience as an idavidual and therefore might take very different things from it. There is an excellent discussion on boots&all travel forums about tourists here and there is a very good section in Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding about the ‘tourist’ ‘traveler’ divide. As Rolf says, travel is not a social contest, maybe tourist travel does leave something to be desired but if you look with an open mind you will see that in many ways ‘travelers’ are not that much different than tourists. Maybe a distinction between travelers and vacationers is more justified althought it is equally pointless because each are pursuing a completely different goal.
Most travellers want to imerse themselves in other cultures as much as they can and they aim to be as broad minded about it as possible, it would therefore make sense to extend that open mindedness to the travel culture.
on March 27th, 2007 at 10:57 am #
on March 27th, 2007 at 6:36 pm #
on June 27th, 2007 at 2:03 am #
on March 5th, 2009 at 2:43 pm #