Confessions of a Reluctant Tourist

The  modern tourist is a curious creature. They travel thousands of miles to find themselves, only to discover everyone else doing the same finding. They photograph sunsets they did not watch, meals they did not taste, and monuments they do not understand, all for the sake of the algorithm.

If the ancient pilgrim travelled to cleanse their soul, the modern tourist travels to enrich their feed.

The Lost Art of Living

I have long suspected that you cannot truly know a place until you have suffered there.

Until you have missed a bus, argued with a neighbour, and queued at the post office. There is a quiet joy in living and working somewhere, blending into its rhythms, becoming invisible.

Only then does a place reveal itself, not as a postcard, but as a person with moods, contradictions, and morning breath.

It is probably why I enjoy certain cities so much, even as a visitor, places where I once lived or worked, or could imagine doing so. Right now, I am on holiday in London, and it feels less like visiting and more like catching up with an old friend who has not really changed, just grown more expensive and slightly grumpier.

The same goes for the San Francisco Bay Area and Colombo. These are places that make sense to me because I know them well, warts and all, beyond their Instagram façades.

The Checklist Illusion

There are other places, the ones “you simply must see”, that I have dutifully visited and left feeling vaguely cheated.

You arrive, take the prescribed photo, tick the box, and move on, spiritually unchanged but algorithmically enriched. It is as if the joy of travel has been outsourced to the itinerary.

You are not experiencing a place; you are just completing a task.

Cities Worth Returning To

And then there are the cities that surprised me, the ones I did not just like, but wanted to live in.

Lisbon, with its melancholy hills and unhurried politeness, was one such place. Tokyo, whose discipline hides a deep eccentricity, is another, utterly lovable. And Istanbul, that grand old lady with her jewel-encrusted fingers resting regally between two continents, remains unforgettable.

These are places that make you want to rent a small flat, learn the language, find a job, any job, and complain about rent.

The Dead Cities of Tourism

Meanwhile, tourism, the industrial kind, is slowly embalming the world.

Cities that once pulsed with daily life now resemble open-air museums. Venice, for instance, receives more than 20 million visitors a year but has fewer than 20,000 residents left on its main islands. The city is drowning not in water, but in day-trippers.

In Barcelona, locals now stage protests against “touristification”, as rising rents and Airbnb fraud drive them from their neighbourhoods. Dubrovnik, whose old town became a film set for Game of Thrones, has had to cap cruise ship arrivals after the number of visitors exceeded 1.5 million a year, ten times its population.

Even cities like Amsterdam and Kyoto have begun to push back, pleading with tourists to behave less like football hooligans and a little more like guests.

What began as curiosity has turned into extraction. The streets are polished for the visitor, but emptied of those who once gave them soul.

Tourism was meant to bring the world together. Instead, it risks turning cities into theme parks, where authenticity is a costume and “local flavour” is served in plastic cups. The result is a strange global sameness, the same cafés, the same souvenirs, the same people taking the same photos of each other taking the same photos.

The Philosophy of Staying Still

Perhaps the problem is that travel has become too easy.

In our hunger for novelty, we have forgotten that depth often requires stillness and a bit of work. To love a place is to linger, to commit to it, to let it bore you, just as you would with an old friend.

Often, the greatest journeys might not involve motion at all. There may be wonders in your own backyard.

Concluding Counterintuitions

Maybe the most profound form of travel is not to go anywhere new, but to see what is familiar with a stranger’s eyes, to live, not visit. Like a favourite book that you return to again and again, its pages unchanged, but you changed.

The real adventure begins when you stop moving long enough, because that is the only way to truly arrive.