MAGAN'S WORLD: Manchán Magan's tales of a travel addict
WHEN THE WRITER and critic GK Chesterton remarked that "the traveller sees what he sees; the tourist sees what he has come to see", he didn't suddenly create the elitist divide between tourists and travellers but merely perpetuated the long-held snobbery that has existed since ancient times between intrepid adventurers and the rest of us.
We all yearn to be Odysseus or St Brendan, but most of us have more in common with the mashed-potato-skinned, beshorted, camera-touting figure of the tourist, our socks pulled up to our knees, bumbag around our waist, anxiously wrestling with a recalcitrant map on a busy street corner.
This is not what some travel supplements would have us believe. They are determined to brainwash us into believing that we are all intrepid, open-minded travellers now, striking out with courage, style and urbane humour into the unknown.
A new form of travel apartheid has arisen between travellers and tourists. The latter has come to mean "anyone who travels in a style I regard as inferior to mine". Travel magazines and glossy brochures are forever hammering home this divide, sneering that tourists travel to get away from home whereas travellers feel at home when they travel, or that travellers see what they see while tourists see what they have come to see.
Even Paul Theroux refers to it, commenting that "a traveller doesn't know where he's going; a tourist doesn't know where he's been".
Are we not guilty of protesting a little too much? We seem so desperate to make the point, as though a bit of last-minute snobbery will stop the crass hordes of tourist intruders in their tracks, sending them back to their ghettos along the Spanish costas and leaving our heavenly Sri Lankan and Patagonian sanctuaries unspoilt and exclusive.
At least tourists have the courage and wisdom to realise that all of us end up feeling a little alienated when abroad. They don't attempt to make embarrassing efforts to fit in. They have the sense to know that a foreigner will always be a foreigner and that no attempt at dressing in saris, having your hair braided or saying "
ni hao" will make much difference.
Travellers claim that they are committed to doing as the Romans do, yet in all my travels I've never once met Romans who live on a diet of granola, banana pancake and milkshake - the unwavering diet of all young travellers. Somehow they just expect the locals to have built a little cafe for them to provide these things, as well as a book-exchange shelf and a few dog-eared copies of
Time.
How this is blending in I just don't know. As for the hot- stone and mudbath spa right beside the subsistence-level village, don't get me started.
Tourists are more honourable than travellers in every way. Both groups are as likely to be seen entering a mosque or temple in inappropriate clothing, but it is the traveller who will insist on bartering a stall owner down to below cost price and boast that they don't tip because it is not a local custom, ignoring the fact that farm workers and peasants have already moved to the area precisely because of foreigners' propensity to tip.
A whole economy depends on it, and when they don't tip the community suffers.
Of course we are all tourists and travellers - even explorers, too, on occasion: think of that time you discovered the new fruit in the market or the divine eatery down a side street. We are all dependent on each other, sharing flights, access to embassies and travel medication, so let's just work together and try to make travel the one area that isn't dictated by style and elitism.
manchan@ireland.com