Suzanne Harrington: Sunburn and sunlounger battles — I don't want to be a typical tourist
Suzanne Harrington: "The idea of being bussed in and bussed out, of cheering when the plane lands, of a thousand identical balconies — give me a wonky B&B down a feral backstreet any day". Sun loungers line the beach at a resort. Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Travel narrows the mind, said philosopher GK Chesterton.
He suggested that the only reason we go away is to see what is in front of us back home: “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
Admittedly he was a massive contrarian, but when we tell people we like to travel, what are we really saying? That we like going on holiday? What’s the difference?
Just as Dylan Thomas said an alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks the same as you, US philosopher Agnes Callard writes in a New Yorker essay that “’Tourism’ is what we call travelling when other people are doing it".
She’s right. We go to great lengths to avoid ‘touristy’ places, preferring instead the idea of ‘travelling’ to ‘hidden’ spots and ‘discovering unspoilt gems’; we look down on package holidays, all that angry red sunburn being herded on and off coaches, arranged in tidy rows around a fake blue pool with menus in English featuring food from home.
Not for us, the independent travellers, congratulating ourselves on our ability to slide in and out of places using apps and Airbnb. We may have been to India half a dozen times, but never the Taj Mahal; to Italy, but obscure bits of Puglia or Trentino, never Rome or Venice. We pride ourselves on going off-piste, using terms like ‘street food’ and ‘authentic’, learning six words of a foreign language beyond ‘beer’ and ‘toilet’.
And frankly I want to give us a slap, because what began as a necessity — The Lonely Planet’s first book, , published in 1975 and held together with staples, was written for intrepid skint people with backpacks – has now become a kind of middle-class delusion of travel non-grandeur. We’re all still tourists. We will always be tourists, even if we’re trekking up the Andes with only a llama and a coca leaf for company.
Yet I hear myself womansplaining to my partner, previously content with the packaged experience, that he might as well stay home with a sunlamp. That unless he is sweating on local transport, trudging through foreign train stations, joining his own dots, that it isn’t travel, it’s something else. What though?
Yes, I am a massive snob about this. I’d rather die than go to Dubai, and the Canaries leave me cold. The idea of being bussed in and bussed out, of cheering when the plane lands, of a thousand identical balconies — give me a wonky B&B down a feral backstreet any day. I’m too old to rough it anymore, but I’d still rather sleep in a field than opt for the homogenised experience of the all-inclusive.
“But sometimes,” says my partner in his most careful, patient voice. “Don’t you just want to stuff your face at the breakfast buffet and lie by the pool all day?” He says this as we are packing for a trip to France.
There’s a pregnant pause. Will we kill each other?
