The Authentic World

This article on tourism was making the rounds a few weeks ago. Well, really about overtourism. And it starts with the premise:

The stigma of overtourism is contingent on the sense that a place without as many tourists is more real, more authentic, than it is with them … Overtourism is also a subjective concern based on a feeling: It’s the point at which your personal narrative of unique experience is broken, the point at which there are too many people — like yourself — who don’t belong in a place.

So, Iceland, for example. And the article asks this question: “If fully one-fifth of humanity are traveling away from home, then how foreign are tourists, after all?”

But there is another question the reader begins to ask herself. If it’s not authentic; if your visit to a country is not the experience that someone who lives in the country would have on a normal day, is there a point to tourism?

I think there is, but I am cognizant that the experience I have in the country rarely mirrors what a resident of the country experiences or even picks up on from the world around them. Even when I am staying with people in their home, eating homemade food. I know that it’s true based on the opposite: that I can spot the DC tourist or recent transplant within seconds. It’s what they’re not picking up on from the world around them; the subtle cues every area holds. Therefore, I assume the same is true when I’m moving through the streets of another country. There is stuff I am missing because I just don’t know.

So what is the point of tourism if your experience is always going to be surface-deep? I think, for me, it’s about being a witness. It’s observing. It’s sitting in a space and trying to understand a portion of it. There are things that I want to see up-close vs. in a picture.

And sometimes it’s about meeting other people on the road. I once met this amazing woman when I was walking around Barcelona, looking for a museum that had unknowingly closed after the publication of my tour book. (See, kids, that’s how we lived back in the old days, with outdated information.) She was from Massachusetts, also visiting Barcelona at the same time. I ended up spending two days with her before she left to go back to the US. Was it an authentic Barcelona experience? Not at all. But it’s hard to feel sad about that when you’re hanging out with someone fun.