Cameras, Maps and Backpacks

There is nothing I like about tourism. For all its benefits; the boosts on the cultural learning curve and the deeper understanding of other ways of life, it still cannot be justified to me as a worthy pastime. These 'benefits' are clearly just for the individual, so they can say "yes, I've been there, I've experienced it, me, ME!", and subsequently talk wine fuelled bollocks at a dinner party for the next quarter of an hour. In their own tiny, shoulder chipped minds they are suddenly authorities to speak about the places they've been, and it does not seem to occur to them that actually they are just like the millions of other people that visit tourist sites each year. More worthy is to travel deep into the bowels of somewhere like Borneo or African nations, places the common pleb do not know about or are uninterested about venturing into. I see two benefits; One, the 'tourist' has experienced something that few others have, the audience might actually care for the first 5 minutes of the dinner party monologue. And two; the risk of not returning is increased vastly.

It seems to me, after a visit to Rome, to its Colosseum and its Vatican, that these places and places like them are just breeding sites for ill mannered robots that feed off the principle of survival of the fittest. There is an element of dog eat dogness about tourism; you must be the first, the quickest, you must be the one to befriend the tour guide, to ask him questions and nod obsessively to make sure he knows that you understand and appreciate every single word and noise that spills from his lips and that you, his disciple for the day, have submitted entirely to him. If you plan to embark on a holiday to get away from it all, go somewhere with little to no cultural history.

I can't deny that i find the hottest tourist spots interesting and that i feel compelled to visit them before i dropkick the bucket; it's within us all that we desire fulfillment in out short lives, and touring the worlds' best shows is sure to deliver this on some level. But perhaps this level is a superficial one. One must ask whether I'm going to fulfill myself, or whether I'm going because everyone else does, to fit in, to say i "have." Perhaps there's an element of 'Wouldn't i look a dick if i came to Rome but didn't do the Colosseum.' or in other words; 'i might not come back.' That's almost the worst thing about this, the becoming of what you most hate about holidays, being uncontrollably caught up in the whirlpool of cameras, maps and backpacks.

The reason i ask the question of fulfillment is because i feared for my cultural side, whilst in Pisa, it was as if it had had a stroke. There it was, the leaning tower of Pisa, keeping it's promises of exhibiting both leaning and tower-like qualities, yet i felt unmoved, dare i say it, unimpressed. The cheek! Not only is it a tower that leans, but it was completed in the 1300's. The fact that it has lasted or that it was even designed and built then, should have done something for the stimulation of my awe senses.

There are two options then. One, the tourist has ruined it for me; the paintings, models, articles, comedy pictures, songs, on-site salesmen that they are responsible for fuelling and that have been shoved into my life from a small infant have successfully desensitised my awe receptors, and made these magnificent and triumphant feats of engineering and design a trivial matter. Or two, i am actually a carrot.

No human, no one with the power of reason, the crucial difference between humankind and the rest of the animal kingdom, could be left un-astonished when faced with sites of such historical, technological and engineering importance.

Perhaps it was the heaving masses, eating their lunches on the towers grass, perhaps it was the people trying to sell me tower shaped goods; key rings, magnets, models, perhaps it was the sheer amount of people taking the same comedy photograph that wasn't ever funny in the history of time, or perhaps i was just bored of hearing and knowing about it...perhaps, reader, i had false expectations built by the industry that surrounds and leeches off such a marvel. I am fairly sure when i say it is the tourist, me included, who has ruined such sites of human excellence - that's the worst thing about this.