In 1956, poet Elizabeth Bishop worried about the imprudence and absurdity of going abroad. “Should we have stayed home and thought of here?” she wrote in her poem “Doubts of Travel.” “Is it right to watch strangers’ plays in this strangest of theatres? How childish is it that, with the breath of life in our bodies, we rush to look at the sun the other way?”
Decades later, these quizzical phrases and the frustrated sentiment behind them seem to perfectly sum up a new attitude toward international travel: moral anxiety. Every summer, headlines emerge about tourists misbehaving, whether by inscribing their names in the Colosseum or posing nude at a sacred site in Bali. Even the usual business of tourism leaves a lot to be desired. Overcrowding at the Louvre makes viewing the Mona Lisa an unsatisfying experience for the short term. Pedestrians, noise, and trash slowly degrade places famous for their natural beauty or historical importance. In the Canary Islands, the Greek island of Paros, and Oaxaca, Mexico, residents of popular tourist destinations have protested against large numbers of tourists. For many travelers, it may now seem somehow wrong to venture uninhibited into the culture and landscapes of other countries and expose locals to your presence for the sake of leisure. Meanwhile, the long-haul flights that make such travel possible emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases. Bishop’s question is our own: Would the world be better off if we just stayed home instead of boldly venturing out to other countries?
In the midst of this quagmire, journalist Paige McClanahan’s book The New Tourist offers a sober defense of tourism and a really helpful framework for thinking about our own travels. She argues that we tourists (which includes anyone traveling internationally for work or pleasure) have got the whole story wrong about the pleasures of tourism and underestimate its potential. Many of us are used to thinking of ourselves as mere hedonists or economic participants in the tourism industry when we go on holiday. But we largely forget, McClanahan writes, “about the power we have, even if unconsciously, as contributors to vast and powerful social forces.”
The New Traveler: Discovering the Power and Perils of Travel
Paige McClanahan
The New Tourist is dedicated to crystallizing a bird’s-eye view of tourism as a frightening phenomenon that we participate in every time we leave our home country, and that we risk if we ignore it. Traveling the world used to be the preserve of only the wealthy. But thanks to a series of recent developments, such as the deregulation of the airline industry in 1978 and the launch of Travelocity and Expedia in the ’90s, it’s now easier than ever to plan a trip to Iceland or Antarctica. Last year, the world was visited by more than one billion international tourists, and tourism accounted for almost 10% of global GDP. As McClanahan shows, this tremendous traffic is currently shaping the world, both for better and for worse. Tourism has revitalized the city of Liverpool and employs almost a quarter of the workforce in the Indian state of Kerala. It has also turned places like Barcelona’s city center and Amsterdam’s red light district into seedy, kitschy tourist hangouts, overpricing out local residents.
Tourism also has the power to shape how tourists perceive other countries. McClanahan devotes a chapter to soft power, or the political ability of governments to influence other countries. As she points out, travel changes where we spend our money and where we “sympathize.” Tourism, for example, has helped Iceland grow from a country virtually unknown in North America to one recognized on the world stage. And Saudi Arabia plans to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into tourism, with the goal of attracting 150 million tourists a year by 2030. For countries, especially those working to change their international reputation, tourism benefits are not just financial. “The moment you put your feet on the ground, perceptions start to change for the better 90% of the time,” a “nation branding” expert tells McClanahan.
McClanahan did, in fact, visit Saudi Arabia to research the book. “I was scared to go because I had read about the country’s treatment of women and journalists,” she writes. “More scared than any of my recent travels.” But she was fascinated by her conversations with Fatima, the tour guide who was driving the two of them around in a silver pickup truck. Over the course of a day, the two discuss women’s rights in Saudi Arabia and the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “Her answers are thoughtful, often surprising, and I completely disagree with some,” McClanahan writes. But when McClanahan returned home and published her interview with Fatima in The New York Times, outraged readers slammed her. “I just want to know: how much did MBS pay you to touristize your country?” one reader wrote to her in an email, referring to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “Or was the payment strictly made at the bone saw?”
McClanahan likens these commenters to acquaintances who say they won’t visit the United States because they dislike some aspect of the country, such as its stance on abortion, immigration, or race. Her trip to Saudi Arabia did not change her perception of the country’s suppression of free speech and criminalization of homosexuality. But it gave her a “glimpse into the breadth and depth of my ignorance of the country” and made her realize that it must be viewed with nuance. In addition to its regressive policies, the trip, she writes, made her realize the complexities of the country that millions call home.
McClanahan’s anecdote suggests what we can gain from tourism. She argues that tourism has now become “the most important vehicle for intercultural dialogue for humanity.” What we gain from physically traveling to other countries is a sense of how normal things are in most parts of the world. Unless you stick to only the most touristy places, when you go somewhere else you temporarily immerse yourself in everyday life, navigating convenience stores, train timetables, and local currency, surrounded by other people just trying to live their lives. It’s like a visceral, intimate reminder of our common humanity that is distinct from the policies of the group’s current governing body. McClanahan suggests that travel helps people see for themselves and more sharply discern the differences between national positions and national cultures. This direct experience reflects the truth much better than the flat, extreme images the Internet and the news provide. And that’s a good thing, because in numbers alone, this kind of intercultural exchange is happening on a much larger scale than any other.
Seeing the wider world more clearly seems beneficial for all involved. But it is difficult to compare these grand ideas about travel with their actual effects. How exactly does visiting new places change you? Can short-term travel, especially travel geared towards foreign tourists, really give one a realistic view of life in another country? McClanahan does not specify what she disagreed or agreed with Fatima on, or what aspects of Saudi Arabia she was unaware of and learned during her travels. In the Times article, Fatima’s response about being a Saudi woman driving a car without a headscarf or abaya is uniformly light-hearted. “It’s still a new thing, so some people might stare, but they respect my choice,” she says. Readers may wonder if she has a motive to respond that way as an ambassador for the more liberal Saudi Arabia. It could be argued that by not pursuing it further, McClanahan is actually avoiding the complexities of Saudi Arabia. And this superficial experience applies to any kind of travel. During the trip, amid the stress, fatigue, and vague shame, the idea that I’m doing something good not just for myself but for the world can seem incredibly noble, even exhibitionistic. How much is the realization of my ignorance worth compared to the tangible harm caused by emissions or supporting a nation with unjust laws?
But this tension is at the heart of the soft power debate. How people feel about other places matters because these opinions shape reality. Ignoring these vague feelings risks falling into the old trap of viewing travel through a personal rather than a social lens. What would happen if we subtly shifted the way millions of people see other countries? Perhaps, McClanahan suggests, we would learn to coexist equanimously with different worldviews, to live without fear or intolerance. This is a skill necessary for democracy and peace, an outcome that is worth compensating for the downsides of mass tourism.
But to encourage this global citizenship mindset, governments, businesses, and tourists alike must change the way the travel industry works. If we view tourism as a collective phenomenon, then most of the burden for improving it shouldn’t fall on individuals. “Tourism is a sector where too many governments get the memo that they should pay attention only after too much damage has been done,” McClanahan writes. (Her book is packed with examples, including a heartbreaking image of visitors trampling so badly the native grasses and moss around a popular valley in Iceland that it may take 50 to 100 years for the landscape to recover.) Instead, she argues that lawmakers should enact regulations to help manage the influx, and she lists concrete steps they can take: setting capacity limits, building infrastructure to accommodate the traffic, banning short-term rentals that drive up prices around the world, and ensuring that most of the money and other benefits flow to local residents.
But the social lens also suggests that there are good and bad ways to be a tourist. Travel is always personal, but we can change our behavior to recognize our role in broader systems and increase our chances of having a meaningful experience. McClanahan draws a spectrum with two contrasting types at either end, which he politely (and optimistically) calls the “old” tourist and the “new” tourist. The old tourist is essentially the prude character we see in the headlines: self-centered, self-centred, someone who superimposes their fantasies onto a place and becomes indignant when their expectations are not met. What distinguishes the new tourist is his focus on the place he’s visiting – that is, don’t think of it as about you; focus on where you are.
That is, traveling well requires basic physical courtesy: not littering, not crossing wildlife fences, not taking parts of beaches or ruins home, and generally not being a nuisance. But it also requires some research and critical thinking about the destination itself. I have come to use international travel as a crash course in the history of a particular country. That mostly means reading books and spending long hours in museums and historical sites. But this happens to be something I enjoy. Equally as beneficial is learning the language of the country, having conversations with residents about their lives (if, of course, they seem interested in talking to you), going to lesser-known destinations, reading the country’s newspapers to find out what issues people care about. The key is to invest something of yourself and try to engage with a different place. This seems to me a more honest description of the undeniable costs of going abroad. Even Bishop concludes in “The Travel Question” that the endeavor is ultimately worth it. “Indeed,” she writes, “there is no doubt a lot of research to be done to find out what the costs are, and there is no guarantee that the costs will be worth it.” “I would have exaggerated its beauty if I hadn’t seen the trees along the road, and it would have been a shame if I hadn’t seen them gesticulating like noble mimes in pink robes.”
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