People are always surprised by my writing.
“It’s so honest!” “Are you always this open?” “It’s refreshing to have someone share their experience without filters.”
Those are just a few of the comments I’ve recently heard and I guess I should address them.
I’m a spiritual being having a human experience. It’s baffling, exciting, frustrating, frightening, and ecstatic. Most of the time, I find myself just trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. So, when I write, I try to share that. I want to connect with other spiritual beings having a human experience. Do I share everything? No. I’ve learned that I need to be mindful of the other people who I share this journey with – whether they are friends ,family, colleagues, or people who are in the same town or on the same train. I used to share a lot more and it caused some problems for people, it caused some problems for me. There have to be limits.
In Baoism, I’ve said that my yardstick for ‘Good things’ and ‘Bad things’ is generally about doing harm. Good things don’t do harm to myself, the planet, other people, or other beings – or even to stuff, in general. Bad things tend to be toxic to someone or something. So, these days, when I share, I try to be mindful of all of that.
Lately, I’ve started to think a lot about tourism and both the positive and the negative aspects of that.
I know that there has been a long tradition of defining travelers and tourists as different things but essentially if you don’t live in a place and you are there for reasons other than work or visiting people – you’re a tourist. There isn’t anything wrong with that. Traveling as a tourist has been something I’ve dedicated a lot of my adult life to. I’ve seen wide swaths of the world and it has done me personally a huge amount of good. I’d like to think that the money I’ve spent, the work I’ve done, the friends I’ve made in different places – has helped those communities I have visited – but in truth, I don’t spend a lot.
I heard the term ‘beg-packer’ earlier this week as a way to describe ultra-budget backpackers – the lowest spending (in dollars) of all tourists. That was me for a long time – sleeping on couches or in spare rooms of locals, cooking my own meals, riding in the cheapest seats on the cheapest transports – but also meeting people, learning about how people live, and discovering more about a place than you could ever learn by taking a private jet and staying in an expensive private villa. I may not have been injecting capital into the local economy but I was putting a human face on the people of my country and sharing the human face of the places I visited. I feel like the kind of tourism I was doing as a beg-packer was far more healing and nutritive to the planet and everyone on it than any other kind. I’m a writer, so I was writing about these places and people (back when people read). In some cases, I shared far too much (of my experience and of the experience of a place). I’m sorry Serbia. I’m sorry Morocco.
The thing is – as toxic as some of my over-sharing may have been – it was nothing compared to the toxic nature of exploitive tourism. The kind of tourism you find in Hawaii, in Mexico, most recently in other places. Here is my definition of exploitive tourism: tourism that pretends to be bringing economic benefit for a place but actually is just drinking the local people’s milkshake. Big shoutout to one of the best actors of all time for making that line iconic in There Will Be Blood.
Tourism in general is just fucking toxic. A big company takes a huge amount of money to move people from one place to another. They do it on the premise that visiting that place or thing will bring untold benefits. It will make you happier, sexier, more powerful, get you likes, impress your online and real life friends, make your spouse or your kids love you more, and fill the big gaping hole that unfettered capitalism has left in your soul. Hooray! The big company gives none of that money to the people in the place where they are dumping all these people. However, they are correct in saying that dumping a bunch of people with money in a location they don’t live or know anyone (because if they knew someone they wouldn’t be tourists they would be guests) creates opportunity for people to make money. So tourist businesses rise up. Restaurants, souvenirs, hotels, resorts, activities and attractions – none of them are for the locals but they are ‘good for the local economy’ at least if you believe in a trickle down theory. Gradually the local businesses get replaced by businesses owned by people who don’t live locally. Chain hotels, chain restaurants, chain activity companies – or maybe the local companies become big themselves. The end result is the same, the benefits of tourism go to fewer and fewer and the costs of tourism are distributed to the many. I drink your milkshake and everyone else pays for it – including you.
When I was a kid, living in my toxic fucked up real world, I used to get dumped at my grandmother’s house. She had every National Geographic magazine and I lived in them. I saw how beautiful and diverse and wonderful the world was. My toxic teens left me with few opportunities to see the world so I joined the Marines but didn’t end up seeing much. When I got out, I tried to go the normal route but I still needed to see the world I had only experienced in those magazines. Ultra cheap backpacking in Southeast Asia opened the door. Then Couchsurfing. Still, the greatest travel gift the world ever gave me. My heart is broken that Couchsurfing didn’t survive as it was, but how could it. The rise of bro culture, dudes using it for dates, people using it for business, and then AirBnB – who wants to give out their room when they can rent it for a week to pay the mortgage? Very few, it turns out.
I met some of the kindest, most generous, most open-minded and open-hearted people I’ve ever met during that brief window of using the internet to travel while there was no AirBnB. Between that and being in the thick of things during the period when hostels were still a great place to meet seekers and travelers (before wifi and smartphones) – I was really lucky. Travel showed me the absolute best of what humans can be. I can’t think of a destination where I didn’t make a lifelong friend – now, sadly, I’ve been a bit of a lunatic when it comes to social media and there were times I deleted all of my social contacts to delete the site – in those cases, I lost contact with my lifelong friends but I’m sure if we meet, we will still be friends.
All of that to set the stage for why I was in love with travel and promoting tourism. I saw it as a way to make the world smaller, make amazing friends, find love, experience new cultures, and bridge understanding. Then suddenly, it became real that I could make money and pay for my travels, my family, my life with travel blogging and travel writing. it was actually a very short window that I was able to do that, but I guess it’s like rats with a cocaine dispenser. I’ve been not making money from writing about travel for a lot longer than I made money writing about travel and promoting places.
Back in Hawaii, I found myself a tour guide again. It was a lot like being a prostitute. There were clients I sincerely liked and those I didn’t but I had to fuck them either way. Like an enlightened prostitute, I told myself that I was doing a sacred duty and in the process, I could help make them into ‘better’ tourists or ‘better’ people. Yes it was about the money, but I told myself it was also about sharing the wonder and beauty of sex er…Hawaii. I did my job. I was good at it. Some clients even became friends. The truth is, there was nothing beautiful about being a tourism worker in Hawaii. A sex worker would have more of a positive impact. God bless the sex workers.
Tourism is a toxic business. Tourism is toxic.
Here’s my take on Tourism. If you don’t know someone to visit when you go to a place, just don’t go. Yes, I realize that the above criteria makes a lot of my past travel toxic. I know, I know, but in the immortal words of the immortal Bob Hobbs “I’m not the kind of person I’m preaching to.” So there.
So, what do I suggest you do if you want to go somewhere but don’t have a good reason or know anyone? I suggest you get friendly online. Find a travel blogger, a writer, a person who is on YouTube or Instagram (ultimately people who are reaching out for real human connection) and make that human connection.
Want to come to Hokkaido? Reach out. Make friends with me (and others). I promise, you will have a better experience and a better life from doing things that way. Is it easy? Fuck no. I’m cynical and suspicious of people (as we all should be) – but show me you are a genuine person and watch how my shields melt.
What’s the point of all of this? The point is that couchsurfing wasn’t tourism. It was going to new places to meet new friends. Tourism sucks. Don’t do it. Make some friends, see the world, make it a better place for all of us.
You know where to find me.