“They just need to feel seen. They want to be the only child—the special baby chosen child of the hotel”. In episode 1 season 1 of The White Lotus, Armond, the manager of the eponymous resort on Maui, offers to his employees this sage advice for dealing with the hotel’s clientele. The guests must be pampered and placated, their every need anticipated and addressed. These wealthy, self-involved tourists are easy targets, which the show satirically skewers to the satisfaction of our schadenfreude. Every Sunday, HBO unfolds the unholy trinity of the modern Western vacation: the tourists inevitably make the staff miserable, they ultimately make even each other miserable, and they predictably prey upon the locals. But as the glow of the television flashes across our faces, I wonder: how many of us see versions of ourselves in this depiction of ‘bad tourists’?

Not many of us, I suspect. At least not judging from the overwhelmingly negative response to a recent essay written by the philosopher Agnes Callard, titled “The Case Against Travel”, which took aim at how we pride ourselves on both having travelled and at the very fact that we look forward to traveling.[1] Going on trips, it seems, easily becomes a part of our identity, and we don’t like to feel judged for our vacationing. Fair enough. And to be honest, even though I am sympathetic to her overall point of view, I found myself annoyed at some of Callard’s arguments, which were launched at would be tourists from the privileged standpoint to be expected from an affluent academic at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions. Basically, having already herself visited Piccadilly Square, the Louvre, and the Burj Khalifa, she now turns around to tell others to stay home, and try reading about Socrates instead; basically, ‘if you don’t like museums at home, why are you visiting them abroad’? It’s all a bit much.

A year after watching season 1 of the White Lotus, I went to Maui with my in-laws for Christmas vacation. We watched whales breach in the ocean while we brunched on the beach.  We snorkeled in the bay adjacent to the Hilton, and I was astounded at the underwater life: we saw turtles, rays, a sea snake, and even an octopus—all mere strokes from shore. We strolled through the many shops in historic downtown Lahaina, and I spent an hour perusing a store full of beautiful art and photography, where I found and purchased an old map of Ambae—the small Vanuatu island on which I used to live—from back when it used to be called ‘Leper’s Island’. We ate ice cream in the central square, and watched as children played tag in and around the branches of Lahaina’s Banyan Tree, which, planted over 150 years ago and spanning almost 2 acres, is the largest in the country. It was a wonderful vacation, and I left genuinely impressed at Lahaina’s thorough beauty. Less than one year later, nearly the entire town would be reduced to cinder and ash.

Hawaii’s governor referred to the 2023 wildfires as “the worst natural disaster” in the history of the state. Killing over 100 individuals and causing upwards of $6 billion in damages, these wildfires may indeed be the worst political disaster since the coup d’état that made Hawaii into a state in the first place. In the immediate aftermath, the dynamics of ‘disaster capitalism’ emerged, and within two days residents reported receiving calls from real-estate developers, eager to capitalize on this opportunity to separate the locals from their land. In other words, the fires burnt away all pretense, revealing what has always been white America’s intention for Hawaii, ever since the first sugarcane and pineapple barons schemed to conquer that sovereign kingdom: to take it away from Hawaiians, and make it theirs.       

Now Hawaiians organize co-ops and trusts where they pool emergency funds to help locals avoid falling prey to predatory property purchases. They erect billboards around town, saying “Keep Lahaina Lands in Lahaina Hands”. They sleep and eat in tents upon their charred properties, because the underfunded 16-member firefighter crew could not save their homes. They go to work making beds and serving breakfast at the nearby Hiltons and Four Seasons, which are still surrounded by green grassy golf courses, having always been exempt from the local water-restriction ordinances. They walk up and down the beaches, selling ice cream cones to tourists, along the same shores where their ancestors once had the good sense to dash out the brains of Captain Cook.[2]    

I can only begin to suspect the kind of spite that must constantly simmer just below the surface of those Lahainans who, having just lost everything, must now serve these tourists, making sure each one feels like the special baby chosen child of the hotel. These tourists who need to be seen, who will be the first to tell you, “Hawaiians need our tourism—now more than ever!” Which, after all, is very true. But that’s part of the problem, isn’t it?: we’ve designed a world where some places depend upon our splurging for their sustenance. And it is these kinds of power asymmetries—political, economic, racial—which the Lahaina tragedy throws into such raw relief, that begin to explain part of the reason as to why I am so often so troubled by travel and tourism.   

Frankly, I don’t really like travelling. Or, more precisely: I don’t have an independent desire to transport myself somewhere I don’t live, to have a look around there for a week or two. Understandably, this dearth of a desire to discover new places both miffs and mystifies many people in my life—especially my mother and my wife, both of whom love to travel. “I wonder if you don’t like travelling because we travelled so much when you were young?”, ponders my mom. This is a probable reason, which I explore below. Or…

“Do you just not like having fun?”, suggests my wife. Usually, this suggestion would be a mere rhetorical retort. But, reader, reflect upon this: I don’t like to celebrate my birthday, nor any other party that would put me at its centre; I don’t like concerts or music festivals, and I’ve never independently purchased such a ticket (I’d just as soon watch a sporting event at home on the TV, or even my laptop, than in the stadium); and I don’t like fireworks, seeing them as the infantilizing adult equivalent of the colourful baubles parents dangle above their baby’s crib. Reader, I could go on… And so given these other opinions, the possibility that I may ‘just not like having fun’ at least deserves quick consideration.

As way of exploration, let us take up my disinclination for concerts or sporting events, which does not (I don’t think) amount to an inherent agoraphobia. Having attended a handful of each, I admit that it remains somewhat unclear to me precisely what is gained from being there. If it’s a concert, then it doesn’t seem that an ability to appreciate the music is what it’s all about, and I’ve been aghast at what sounds to me to be the consistently lower quality of sound at concerts. I can hear the nuances of their voice and melodies a lot better from my speaker at home; and I often find the music videos more interesting to watch, rather than the singer just standing or dancing on a stage (god forbid they try to entertain me with lasers or pyrotechnics).

If it’s a sports arena, again I often feel an inability to appreciate the game itself; gone is the insightful commentary, or the revealing replay—they’ve been replaced by the backs of hundreds of heads separating me from the players and the game happening hundreds of yards away.

And so it seems to me, that if the concerts are not about the music, and the sporting events are not about the game, then they’re both about a kind of experience—the spectacle of it all, and the experience of being there. But what precisely is gained from being there? Well, at the very least, through attendance one participates in a kind of community, and thereby affirms for oneself, and communicates to others, something about one’s identity: e.g., that “I am a Swiftie” or “I am Dodger”.[3]

This social aspect is of course an important aspect of what both song and sport are meant to offer us—something I continually find myself always only on the cusp of being able to actually embrace or enjoy. It is not that I don’t like music or sports—I do! It’s rather that I find myself less able to appreciate them when I find myself in the very cultural locations that are supposedly meant to allow for exactly that appreciation.[4] In other words, when I find myself “there”. This is the ‘paradox of presence,’ the way in which one’s very presence can seem to inhibit one’s appreciation of that which one is there to experience and enjoy.

I think something like my feelings with concerts and sporting events also underlies my reservations with travel. Most of my friends desire to travel much more than I do. Are they thus more curious about the world than I am? Perhaps, but I doubt it. When it comes to travel, we presume that it is by going to a place that we can really come to know something about it. But is this true? Which is most likely to leave me better informed about a country: a week’s vacation there, or a month spent reading about it? I don’t mean this to be a rhetorical question, where I only reveal my bias for ‘book-smarts’ vs ‘street-smarts’.[5] I just mean to point out that it is a real question. If I want to deepen my appreciation for a place, I may do better grabbing my library card than purchasing a plane ticket.

The preference to perambulate the globe rather than peruse a book has led to a phenomenon with which all travellers are unfortunately well acquainted, when upon arrival at one’s destination, one realizes with some distaste: “yikes, it’s way too touristy here!” Similar to the dissonance that makes us remove ourselves from the problem when we complain “I’m stuck in traffic” (no: you are the traffic!), we may not realize that it is our very being there that now inhibits us and others from appreciating what we have travelled there to appreciate.

“I could hardly get a glimpse at the Mona Lisa, so many idiots were in my way holding their phones up!” You don’t say… “I spent more time looking at lifejackets than admiring the coral reef, and I swear the sea tasted not salty but like sunscreen!” Tell me more… And this is to say nothing of the entire communities that have found themselves hollowed out by tourism, always playing host to foreigners, and all because they’ve had the misfortune to be born somewhere so beautiful. World wide, the tourism industry moved around 1.5billion people this year alone—nothing moves more people than tourism.

Everyone knows that Everest is covered in trash, and littered with the corpses of people who should have stayed home (or worse: with the bodies of the Sherpas hired to pull them up the mountain). But did you know that Barcelona, boasting a population of 1.5million within city limits, belabors under the weight of 12million tourist per year; in mass protests locals, angry at increasingly being priced out of their own city, gather to throw tomatoes at tourists. The city this year finally pledged to shut down all tourist rentals by 2028. All of us have seen the pictures of the hike to Machu Picchu, which make the mountain path look like a crosswalk for kindergarteners, a chain of people in colourful raincoats disappearing into the distance. Or in Venice, where only about 50,000 locals live in the centro storico, but the historic island buckles under the astounding 20million tourists per year who come to take a look with their own eyes at these canals they’ve heard so much about, severely over-stressing the city’s infrastructure and dominating the daily life of the locals. Nobody thinks this is a great state of affairs, and I don’t have to argue that it’s not.

Rather, my point is to highlight this pervasive promiscuity with place: the desire to go here, then there, then over there next. If we were told we could not travel anywhere for a few years, we’d be crestfallen. We need to flit from place to place. In so doing, we often reproduce the same colonial relationship and frames of mind our ancestors have prepared for us. We travel, arrive, consume experiences, and leave—on to the next international site of experiential excavation and extraction. Locals are promised that these international relationships will benefit them, but it only ever enthralls them to us.

A few months ago, I heard the co-founder of Lonely Planet, Tony Wheeler, giving an interview on CBC.[6] Not for nothing are these books nicknamed the ‘backpacker’s bible’, and I grew up under their guidance: planning the next day, my mother piously poured over its pages each night; pulling it out of her bag (it was always right on top) to search for solace when we took a wrong turn; pointing at something as we walked past, saying the book had foretold that we would come across this place. On a shoe-string budget across the world, we followed the threads the book unspooled for us around the globe.

As I listened now to this man talk—an individual who has exercised incredible influence over how Westerners think of travel—I was struck at how, first and foremost, he conceived of travelling as a kind of collection, be it of experiences or places. More than anything, his commentary evinced this ‘notches in the bedpost’ mentality, where emphasis was not on the quality of the experiences he was collecting, but the quantity. He spoke of having countries ‘missing off of the CV’ and wanting to ‘cross the country of his tick list’. In other words, his approach to travel was characterized most of all, not by a kind of inner inquisitiveness, but an assertive acquisitiveness.

This kind of promiscuity with people is not admired, outside of a frat house. But when it comes to promiscuity with places, we all desire to spread open wide the pages of our passports to receive between them the world’s stamps. We ravish the world, and the might of the West rushes to aid us in this endeavour. In doing so, we ultimately inhibit both our capacity to come to a deeper understanding of certain places, as well as impede other’s ability to genuinely live in the places they are from.

Just recently, my sister and brother-in-law were at an all-inclusive resort in Cancun for a week. They never once left its confines. In a couple weeks, my wife and I will be in Puerto Vallarta for our honeymoon, and we may very well do the same. Most of us have had these types of vacations, they’re normal. When we return home and say ‘we never left the poolside and always had a margarita in our hand’, we simply smile knowingly at each other. But, do our sunburnt tomato cheeks conceal our blush?

Notice how such a vacation is only conceivable in certain places. Instead of Cabo or Cancun, change it to London or Oslo. If you told people you were in a beautiful 5-star hotel (or even the penthouse) in one of these places, and that you never left its confines, people would think you were crazy. Even in a place with beautiful beachy resorts, like Barcelona or Sydney, it would still be unthinkable to remain within the resort. What accounts for this difference?

Part of the reason is that London, Rome, and Barcelona are thought of as places with ‘culture’ and ‘history’. On the other hand, Playa del Carmen is conceived of as a playground: a place we see as designed for the purpose of our temporary fun, and little else.[8] We assume locals must live there, but we don’t have much interest in knowing about them, unless they happen to be bringing us a cerveca with a smile.

For instance, consider: what’s the big difference between season 1 of White Lotus, which takes place in Hawaii, and season 2, in Sicily? Again, we had a beautiful resort, obsequious staff, demanding clients, and sandy beaches. The major difference is, whereas the guests in Hawaii never ventured away from the resort, the tourists in Italy constantly ventured into the cities and even the countryside. Now, granted, part of this is due to season 1 being filmed while still in the immediate aftermath of the global Covid-19 Pandemic, and show-runner Mike White (who himself own two houses in Hawaii, by the way) got his big break because he could deliver to HBO a show with a limited cast and single location. But the deeper point is that it worked: nobody watching season 1 ever thought, ‘aren’t the guests going to learn about Hawaiian art and architecture?’, or ‘won’t they go to go meet locals in the countryside?’. After all, Covid-19 is never mentioned in the universe of season 1, and this is because audiences don’t need an explanation for why tourists would go to Hawaii and just get drunk by the pool. But if the same thing is done in Sicily, it would seem strange.

Of course, I may be comparing apples to pineapples: Spain also has Ibiza, and Mexico has CDMX; you go to the former to stay in the party bubble, and the latter to explore a wonderful city. But the point is, when most of us book the trip to Mexico, we’re not picking CDMX; and when we book the trip to Europe, we’re mostly not picking Ibiza.

Indeed, when we consider American’s flight patterns we see—remarkably—that 17.5% of all flights booked from an American city are headed to Cancun, making the resort city by far and away the top destination.[9] In second place, at 8.5%, is London. These are very different kinds of trips, which hold within them long histories: Mexico is our nearby playground, London is our distant parent. We go to the one to be served and pampered, and to the other to explore and observe.

Third on the list, is Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, which is another resort town, designed by businessmen who purchased the 58-million square meters for that purpose, and now its airport receives even more flights than Santo Domingo, the country’s capital. Fourth on the list is Montego Bay, Jamaica, where the majority of the city’s population is black, but a minority of white British descendants continue to hold most of the land, as has been the case since slavery. Finishing the top 5 is San Juan, Puerto Rico, which (like Hawaii), America once wrested for herself and now keeps as a territory (unlike Hawaii). Thus, our ‘fun-in-the-sun’ vacations ultimately reproduce, and often resemble, the colonial histories that make them possible.     

Am I being extreme? Do the tourists disembarking from their planes and cruises in the Caribbean really share that much in common with the conquistadores who once pulled their boats ashore. Of course, not really. Admittedly, I may be overly-sensitive to all of this, for a few reasons. And so we return to my mother’s question, and the possible effects of a childhood defined by travel.

About a four hour drive, or one hour ferry, north of Punta Cana is my father’s hometown of Samaná.[10] When I was only two, and when my father would have been about the age that I am now, we all lived there for a few months. While spending an afternoon on the beach, I had to use the bathroom, the location of which usually would have been the nearby bushes. But in this case, we were right in front of a big resort, with toilets just steps within its entrance. And although bathrooms are reserved for guests, it just so happened that my grandfather had helped build this particular resort, carrying the cinderblocks and rebar reinforcements that became its walls; and then following its construction, he worked as the night-watchmen for over a decade, patrolling its gates. So surely this would be different. We didn’t make it past the hotel guard.

Incensed, my father stepped over the small rope behind which tables were set for the tourists, placed me on a tabletop, and instructed me to shit right there. I obliged. Apparently, and to their credit, the tourists present to witness this scene, and now presented with my cherubic sand-spangled ass cheeks as its dramatic climax, applauded. It was a triumphant moment, sticking it to the man by shitting where he eats, and that’s how my family retells this cherished story, as we often do.[11] Despite not being a guest, my white mother could have walked me past the guard and into the bathrooms; but my black father was forbidden from the building, despite the fact that his father’s fingerprints were all over its foundations. But in our retelling, we never consider the true ending of the story, namely the fellow Samanés who, working at the resort, would have been promptly assigned to clean up my feces, washing away all sign of our little excrement rebellion.

As a young woman, my mother travelled to San Pedro, Belize, made good friends there, and ended up staying for many months. On two separate occasions (when I was around 7-years old and again when I was 12) we lived there for 1 year, and we travel back every few years, often staying with this same family. This island that Madonna (allegedly) once sang about as ‘La Isla Bonita’, and which is not technically an island but a peninsula, is what is known as a ‘destination’ (i.e., a place seen from the perspective of the tourist). With its white sands, turquoise waters, nearby reef, and English-speaking locals, tourists love it.

I always wonder what it feels like to be from a place like San Pedro, and I get some idea from my local friends. Locals who walk to and from work along the beach, past manicured beaches (raked each morning), who drop their kids off at school, and continue to walk past beach front mansions. What must it feel like to be surrounded by all that lavish wealth? Yes, this would also be the case for locals in any tourist destination around the world. But when Americans walk along Huntington Beach, California or South Beach, Miami, and gawk at the beachfront mansions, how different would it feel if they knew, ‘no Americans will ever own or enjoy any of this—it’s all for others, who don’t look or talk like us’?

Our family friends have a house across the street from the beach, home to five generations of the Badillo family—four of them currently living there together. They used to have an unobstructed view of the ocean from their front deck, but a developer managed to squeeze yet another luxury hotel in between the shore and their steps. Now, from the corner of their porch, you can still see the ocean, but only because immediately across the street from them is a graveyard. So far, this burial place of San Pedranos (including the fisherman that once ‘adopted’ my mother into his family) has been left alone. We were just back there last year, and this was still the case. But each time I return to San Pedro I half expect to see the graveyard gone, its bodies dug up from their final resting place and displaced elsewhere, to be replaced with white bodies reclining on lounge chairs along the shore, like so many bloated beached whales.

Even in my small hometown of Wasa Lake, I’ve experienced the sentiment of living in another’s playground. In hibernation all winter, Wasa remains dark and silent, and only a few cars drive by the house each day. In Spring, we hold a triathlon, which brings more participants than the town’s total population of 356. Some years, I’ve been the only participant from Wasa.

Then summer comes, and all of the Albertans return to their cabins—i.e., the majority of the lake-front property.[12] The calls of loons, which are so common in May and June and can be heard from all around the lake, are replaced by the constant roar of motorboats and jet skis. Throughout the dry summer months, tourists shoot fireworks in the evenings, despite the campfire bans, and even though each summer forest fires encroach closer and closer to our homes. But Wasa will never have a fire department, because most of the people who own property there don’t live there full time, and so don’t want the additional taxes on their ‘summer homes’. Every time I’m swimming laps in the lake and a sea-doo whips past and fills my mouth with water that tastes like gas, I think, ‘let it all burn’.     

I’ve been subjected to, shaped by, and scornful of the power asymmetries that characterize tourism since I was very young. So when I see black and brown bodies attending to white bodies in ‘destinations’ around the world, I feel the unease under my skin. When an attendant walks up with a cerveca and a smile, I see my friends and family who have had that job, and I wonder what’s behind that seemingly servile smile. When I am in another person’s hometown, but it looks much more like playground meant for me, I’m only thinking: how would this make me feel? This, basically, is my trouble with travel. Do I want to go look around another person’s home so badly, that I’m willing to make their living there burdensome? No, not really.   

So what’s my point? To make you feel like an asshole if you book an all inclusive vacation. Like Agnes Callard, am I telling you to travel less and stay home to read Plato. Again, no, not really. As a medium, ‘the essay’ is first and foremost an attempt at self-explanation, performed in public; as such, essays ought not provide prescriptions for action to others, but rather, through their introspection, to thus offer possibilities for vicarious self re-imagination.

My point is to illustrate how the dynamics and logics of travel and tourism shape us into conceiving of different places, the people who live there, and of ourselves when we go there, in ways that are harmful to all three. What does it mean to have a meaningful connection to a certain place, whether home or abroad? A place one understands intimately, and has both the knowledge and means to truly care for. It is this kind of rare personal relationship with place that rampant promiscuity with place incapacitates, both for ourselves and others. I have neither understood nor cared for so many of the places I have lived or visited.

At worst, through this essay, I make myself into the equivalent of that smelly guy in the hostel on his gap year, saying, “I guess I’m more of a traveller than a tourist, you know?” At best, I can show how my own reasons against travelling are a considered justification, but one that ultimately flows from my own conditioned disposition.

My favourite sentence from Callard’s essay against travel is: “We go to experience a change, but we end up inflicting change on others”. I think this is very true, but I would put it a bit differently: When we travel, we go to see ‘the other’, but we never return understanding ourselves as ‘the other’. Seeing oneself as the other takes a certain kind of vulnerability. It requires to some extent internalizing the other’s point of view, which requires the desire to even want to understand that perspective in the first place. This takes time—much longer than the usual one or two-week vacation. And it also requires the absence of highly asymmetric power relations—precisely the kind of relations that characterize how so many of us travel. But most of all, coming to see oneself as the other is a frame of mind that, although much inhibits its actualization, anyone can put themselves into. Seeing myself as the other is a frame of mind to which I am especially attuned.

I recently came across a study that looked at “the experiences of children who live temporarily in cultures other than their own” in order to better understand “how and when culture-specific meaning systems are incorporated as part of the developmental process”.[13] What they found was evidence for the idea that humans go through a ‘sensitivity window’ for cultural learning between the ages of 9-15. In this study, if Japanese kids were born in America, but left to Japan by the age of 9, they would feel Japanese, even if they came back and lived in America after the age of 16; and the reverse was true: Japanese-born kids who happened to live in America from the ages of 9-15 would always feel kind of American. During that time of our lives, around the ages 9-15, we learn how to attach cultural signifiers to our own identities in ways that tend to become ‘sticky’ and lasting aspects of how we establish meaning. Assuming there’s some truth to this, which seems plausible…

My ages 9-15 took place from 1999-2005. During that time, I: graduated Wasa Elementary, and started taking the bus to McKim, in Kimberley; then in 2001 (gr 7), we moved to Punta Gorda Belize, where I enrolled in two different schools; after about 8months, we went to live in San Pedro for four months, where I was also enrolled in two different schools; we returned to Canada for some of grade 8 at McKim, then moved to Vanuatu; 10 months later in 2004 we returned to Calgary, and I finished gr 9 and 10 in two different schools in that city.

By 2006, I would be back in school with my Kimberley and Wasa friends for grade 11, but during that “period of cultural sensitivity” I had been enrolled in 7 different schools in three different countries with vastly different cultures. In that time, I wanted what all young teens want most, which is, at best, to be considered cool by one’s peers, and, failing that, to at least go unnoticed by them. Moving from Wasa to Kimberley to Punta Gorda to San Pedro to Ambae to Calgary and back to Kimberley, I of course had little hope of either option.  

In Belize, my friends would refer to me as ‘the American’. When I told them I was from Canada, they just smiled; much as an American would smile if the El-Salvadorian they just referred to as a Mexican attempted to clarify (“OK, sure, but what’s the big difference?”). In Vanuatu, my friends often called me tuturani—white man. When I held my forearm against their own to show them, in some cases, that my skin was darker than theirs, they again just smiled; my tuturani-ness did not hinge upon my skin, but flowed from everything else about me. When I returned to Calgary and Kimberley, though, I became the butt of black jokes.

And so I built my identity in places and cultures where I was a hopeless outsider. My time in Belize and Vanuatu (or the DR), which were after all relatively short, did not of course leave me from then on feeling particularly Belizean or Ni-Vanuatu (or Dominican), but rather implanted within me the sense that ‘I’m not from here,’ which lingered the rest of my life, even when I came back ‘home’. It’s not that I adopted the framework of cultural meaning from any one of these places, but that I instead deeply internalized the sense of feeling apart from such cultural frameworks; what others wore as a second skin, I saw as a short-term shirt.

This fact helped me understand why I’ve often found myself unattached to places and people. For me, ‘growing up’ meant being ready to move on. Whereas I have to be dragged against my will on a vacation, I would move to another country with little hesitation; I don’t want to tour around Chile or Spain or Ireland, but if any small colleges in those places ever wanted me, I would uproot myself and go.

This is the opposite of how most people, understandably, would feel about travel vs. relocation. Who wants to move away from their friends and family–from the familiar? My friend Ian told me he could never imagine living anywhere else but Kimberley; I could never imagine living anywhere, and thinking that it was permanent. To be so attached to a single place seems to me, a bit embarrassing. (The same goes for being proud of one’s country: anybody who has ever exhibited to me genuine patriotism has only ever excited from me grave pity.) But I can see why I would think this: it’s a deeply ingrained defence mechanism, one that I built for myself while traveling during “a sensitive period for the incorporation of a cultural meaning system”, as the relevant scholars would put it.

Because of this, internalizing the other’s view of myself, seeing myself as that other, comes almost naturally. As soon as I step off the plane, I’m not marveling (or laughing) at how people look or act there; I’m on full alert for all the ways I’m now uncouth and uncultured in this place. Wary of all the ways I’ve arrived to play a certain role, the basic script of which was prepared for me centuries ago. I just want to fit in, or not stand out; most of all, I don’t want to impose. Does this still make travel all about me, just now solipsistic in another way? I don’t think so, because in those moments I give others a power over me; it is a vulnerability to others, not an obsession with myself.

Being able to consider the other’s perspective, and to some extent internalize it, is the hallmark of growing up, a requirement of psychological maturity. As Hegel so arrestingly showed, this process of self-other attunement can often be a painful power struggle. Nobody independently wants to give the other this kind of intimate power over oneself—it must be foisted upon, and wrested from. This is what Maya Angelou meant when she said that for white people living in white countries, it is almost impossible to grow up—they just get older.[14] When you have power, you don’t truly internalize how less powerful people think of you. And when you fail to do this, you will never have a full (or even adequate) understanding of who you in fact are.[15] If travel can offer us something special, it is a chance to come to see ourselves as an other. It is this kind of vulnerability that most characterizes a type of travel that could be considered ethical.

I consider my mother to be such an ethical traveller. Her first time out of the country was though a UN internship to work in a refugee camp on the Thai/Burma border, and refugee resettlement became her life-long vocation; she worked in the DR for five years, and returned with a husband alongside her, and a child inside her; for a period she went hiking every other year in Nepal; and then she spent the next five years fighting with immigration bureaucracy so that her one-time Sherpa and now friend, Nyima, could come to Canada, which she eventually accomplished.

And by the way, even the logistics of flying Nyima from Kathmandu to Vancouver were a struggle, because most western nations will not even deign to let a Nepali step foot in their airport, without first acquiring an expensive and time-consuming ‘transit visa’, which is something people from poor countries must pay for just to have a layover in a rich country. But he made it, and now Nyima lives in my basement; he attends the local college, where he pays five times the fees of all my local friends who also study there, thus effectively subsidizing their own education. Although he hopes to get a working visa once his studies are completed, Canada will likely send him back to his small mountain village in Nepal, much poorer than he even was before. One of his first observations about Canada, after a few days: “I didn’t know white people worked–I’d never seen that before!”

Or my friend Grant, recently retired, and spending most of the next year vacationing in Thailand. Normally, this would make me roll my eyes, feeling sure he’s gone to live like a king, at some yacht club with other ‘expats’.[16] But in this case, I know that Grant used to live in Thailand, that he married a Thai woman, that he speaks the language. In other words, I know that he picked Thailand not to enjoy the economic might bestowed upon him through the iniquities of the world order—muscles first flexed during a colonial past and now exercised daily through contemporary global monetary institutions—but rather because he genuinely cares about the culture and its people.   

But it may be difficult for most of us to travel ethically in this way. I fear many of us board our planes back home from vacation never having had a single conversation with a local who were weren’t also in some way paying money to. And the reason is not only because we are unwilling to move to another country and learn another language. Then why? Partly, it is a failure of imagination, a myopia of perspective. For the same reason that it is hard for powerful people to grow up: we don’t consider the other’s point of view. How can I say this? My proof is the world we have created for ourselves. The analogy that comes most to mind is how abled people will seldom consider the organization of infrastructure from the point of view of differently abled people; it’s not something that often comes to mind, and if it does, it flits in and out. When we do dwell on the difficulties that come with being differently abled, we see these as coming from having a certain type of body, rather than the truth: following from the world having been constructed in a certain way—namely, with them as an afterthought.

Most of us can easily travel to other countries if we want to, on a whim; Most of them cannot travel to our countries, even when they desperately need to. Most of us will never even seriously consider this asymmetry; Even fewer of us will be genuinely bothered by it. What would—and does—cause us serious concern is if people from poorer countries could come to our countries as easily as we can go to theirs; all of us would take notice of this, and more than enough of us would fight to change it, to make things impossible for these unwanted foreigners. The proof?

Because we’ve have already done so: it’s the world we’ve created for ourselves, where they are an afterthought. And not enough of us care for that to change. When it comes to our own children, we tell them through cute little story books, “Oh, the places you’ll go…you’re off to great places,” the world is out there waiting for you, because that’s the way we’ve made it. But as for the children of others, they will be there waiting for us, ready to treat us like the children we are—the special baby chosen children of the world.

 

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[1]See essay here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-case-against-travel

[2] Technically, Cook was killed on the island to the south, Hawai’i, while attempting to kidnap its chief, and he was apparently stabbed in the heart with a dagger. But I must be allowed my literary licenses…

[3] Or, in my case, through my nonchalance or nonattendance, I communicate that I am a special species of pretentious dick. 

[4] Rafael Nadal, one of the greatest tennis players ever, is set to retire at his favourite tournament of Rolland Garros this June. Would I really not want a ticket to that? If I do, then it’s for the same reason most people would want a ticket to that match: to always be able to tell others, “I was there, when Nadal played his last match”.

[5] Some of you may be reminded of this famous scene from Goodwill Hunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEIQSbul9Os. But I say to Robin Williams’s character: I’d rather know about the life and work of Michelangelo than know what it feels like to look up at that ceiling, with little background understanding of what I’m looking at. I mean, who cares “what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel”? Da fuck?

[6] Listen to the interview here: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current/clip/16016623-50-years-backpackers-bible

[7] Notice that, whereas the first season of The White Lotus took place in Hawaii, the second season took place in Sicily. Again, we had a beautiful resort, obsequious staff, demanding clients, and sandy beaches. But what was the major difference? Well, whereas the guests in Hawaii never ventured away from the resort, the Italian tourists constantly ventured into the cities and even the countryside. Now, granted, part of this is due to season 1 being filmed while still in the immediate aftermath of the worst of the global Covid-19 Pandemic, and showrunner Mike White got his big break because he could deliver to HBO a show with a limited cast and single location. But the deeper point is that it worked: nobody watching season 1 ever thought, ‘aren’t the guests going to learn about Hawaiian art and architecture?’, or ‘won’t they go to go meet locals in the countryside?’. After all, Covid-19 is never mentioned in the universe of season 1, and this is because audiences don’t need an explanation for why tourists would go to Hawaii and just get drunk by the pool. But if the same thing is done in Sicily, it would seem crazy.  

[8] In the case of Cancun, this is actually true, and it was a planned city, made especially for tourism. Playa del Carmen, once a small fishing village, is just a nearby victim to Cancun’s success.

[9] US Top flights: https://skift.com/2023/11/09/americas-favorite-flight-destinations-in-2023-cancun-and-london/ 

[10] Here is the site where you can book that ferry. If you go to its third paragraph, you will see there that it warns you that this is “a local ferry” (Imagine: a ferry for the locals!). But that despite that drawback, “it is perfectly safe”, and just “please don’t expect to be served champagne by a crew in starched whites!” You see: so entrenched is the tourists’ expectation to be placated and pampered, that those moments during which this may not be the case must be forewarned of and apologized for. https://dominicanshuttles.com/booking/ferry

[11] Admittedly, this story, like all cherished family stories, morphs and mutates through its years of retelling. Having recently asked my father to confirm its truth, he told me that actually he believes that he made me shit on the hotel’s front steps; and that the tourists who say him do this were initially affronted, until he explained what had happened, and then they approved. But I have opted to share the story in the form it was usually given to me. Again: I must be allowed my literary license.

[12] During the summers in Wasa, ‘Albertan’ becomes a slur in our mouths, one I silently swear to myself as I jog past the sanitation pump and see the long line of red-plate RV’s dumping their tanks of weekend shit into the ground—our ground, I think. And then I also chuckle to myself: more of my family is Albertan than not—these are the animosities and narcissisms of small differences, laughable to anyone on the outside.  

[13]See study here: https://archive.ph/u8Zoc#selection-1099.0-1148.0 (If you can’t get access, but want to, contact me.)

[14] Angelou’s full quote: “If you happen to be white in a white country; pretty according to the dictates of fashion; rich in a country where money is adored, it’s almost impossible to grow up and to grow up honest inside. It is almost impossible. Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is ageing. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every living person for his or her humanity, that is to grow up.”

[15] I can remember vividly the first time I was in a kitchen in Seattle with six African Americas: it was the first time I could truly appreciate the extent to which African American Vernacular English is another language. Talking amongst themselves, not worrying about keeping whites in the loop, I found I could not at all follow the conversation. They’d turn to me and say something… “Sorry, pardon?”, I’d have to say. “He’s from Canada” another would remind everyone, and the question would be repeated to me, ‘speaking white’. Black people in America code switch and speak two languages because they hold within themselves the mind of white America and the mind of black America. For better and worse, how white people think of black people is a part of how black people think of themselves. But the reverse is not true of most whites: how black people think of white people is not an internalized part of how white people see themselves. This is because of all of the obvious power asymmetries, but it is also simply because most whites don’t even care to know what black people think of them—it would be upsetting, and painful (as it is for blacks).

[16] Or consider this article, which outlines how many Americans are retiring to Vietnam in order to enjoy the cheaper healthcare and a decent standard of living. Or, in other words, after the American government waged an imperialist war—dropping the most bombs that have ever been dropped (and which continue to routinely kill people to this day when they come upon them in their gardens or the jungles)—now American veterans are moving to Vietnam to reap the benefits of socialism. The audacity is astounding.  https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-12-25/americans-are-retiring-to-vietnam-for-cheap-health-care-and-a-decent-living-standard