Against tourism

and in favour of getting bored in an ugly diner in suburbia instead.

I have been asking myself what it means for me to be on holiday. I remembered the holidays I would have every single summer as a kid. We would always go to the same tiny village during the summer. The main feature of those holidays was the combination of absolute nothingness and sameness throughout the days and weeks. Activities would include an occasional pizza, a daily granita or gelato, gathering or painting stones on the beach, reading piles of new and vintage magazines. No TV available, unless we visited someone who had it. The most exciting activity was the area exploration. I am calling it exploration, but the place was so small that we knew it by heart. Nonetheless, we were always keen to re-explore it further. That reminds me of the red theatre binoculars my dad kept in a drawer. My sister and I loved to get the binoculars to just look at the house in front of our balcony. It was always the same house, nothing new and nobody ever out, but the excitement was always guaranteed.

August 2019, Cascais

The piece is against tourism as a concept but not against tourists, so I don’t want to judge (or maybe I don’t want to get in trouble with the boss JC?). Rather, I am curious about it. I wonder why do we seem to value so much seeing new things over seeing the same things over and over with new eyes. One could say – well, how many new eyes can one have? The answer is that we barely see what we see. I cycle to my office every day, mostly through the same route. Even if that’s the case and I know the route by heart, I don’t know every single thing on the path and I notice nearly nothing. “Seen that, done that” – but not really. It is impossible to map out so much data all the time. That is why we need retouching in portraits (but guess what? That is also a story for another time).

During the pandemic, I got the chance to visit Japan thanks to a business visa. At the time, the country was closed to foreign tourism. I will never see Kyoto as empty as on that summer. It will never be that Kyoto again. Today Kyoto looks exactly like the Lisbon of my trip: full of people queueing and taking photos. As sad as it can be, I refuse to become a middle-class old man complaining about the uncultured masses only traveling to accumulate silly selfies and tacky magnets. The problem is not who gets to travel, but how many people and how. It shouldn’t necessarily be more expensive either. That would simply make it a thing of the rich or another thing people would go into debt for. (Remember 2007, when we thought that only rich businesspeople could ever spend 1k for a smartphone?! Until everybody could – in installments).

August 2022, half-empty Kyoto

Traveling may eventually become more expensive in the upcoming years when climate cataclysms will bring about a sharper sense of urgency in governments to regulate and tax climate-intensive behaviors such as flying (or simply unpredictable weather will make it more difficult), but for the foreseeable future, I think it will be the same.

So until then, I think we should practice two things:

1. Places to travel to would be like theaters. Seats are limited for each day and once the seats are sold out, nobody can enter anymore. Access would be regulated by a completely nonsensical lottery ticket system. I don’t care it’s nonsensical, I’ll talk about it all the same. Tickets should be free, nominal, and non-transferrable. Without the winning ticket for the date, one wouldn't be allowed to book any aspect of the trip.

2. People would have to be distributed more evenly and density per square meter reduced. Planet Earth is so vast and yet we all amass in Mykonos. Some of us will need to trade Mykonos for a Bulgarian coastal city or even better the glorious austere and desolate British coastline, for example.

The main tenets of this new tourism paradigm will be: don’t queue, don’t rush, get very bored.