For over a generation the concept of the tourist has progressively been fleeced of all prestige. Not even the most clear-cut and blatant camera-carrying tourist wants to think of himself or herself as such a gauche character; the guidebook editors have learned to call them "travelers," "visitors," "exploring individuals" anything but that semantic turn-off: tourist. Yet there have never been more tourists in the history of civilization, and the tourism industry have never been so robust. In fact, for the end of the year the 20th century, the second millennium a record number of humans are choosing to be anywhere but home! Thirteen million Americans alone are expected to visit Paris this year, and from now through the fall, flights are full, hotels are booked, restaurants will remain bustling and museums and opera houses will be packed all with self-denying tourists! I looked up the original meaning of the term and was enchanted with what I found. Tourism dates back to the 17th century and, according to Thackeray, the English were the first to practice it. A tourist at the outset was simply "one who traveled for pleasure or culture." So, from where comes all the shame? To travel for pleasure or culture not only seems like a pretty honorable and desirable activity, it is clearly the best motivation for experiencing Paris, the mecca of tourist destinations. When Europe became accessible to the American middle-class, students headed out to see the world, the backpack was re-designed for urban Homo sapiens and the pejorative perception of today's tourist was born. The guidebook of the age was aptly called "Let's Go." Social class or intellectual pretensions no longer played a role in European travel. Language barriers, foreign customs, "funny money," exotic cuisine and unusual attitudes meant that tourists needed help, and as a result, the package tour was conceived by tour operators. Without abandoning their "daily comforts" (physical and psychological), Americans came to Europe in droves and visited it as if en toto it were a museum, a theme park or a zoo. There was comfort in heading out into the world without the risk of getting lost or not understanding. Everything was in English and you just followed a little American flag in the hands of a guide. Today, tourists want to buy into the illusion of autonomy and get served up a good slice of "momentary" authenticity. Meanwhile, "real" local authenticity has moved feverishly toward a global concept of reality... Products have been networked to transcend geographic and cultural borders, a condition which is essentially the antithesis of true travel. In other words, you want to be like them while they want to be like you... I'm reminded of John Berger's excellent essay on zoos. Berger, author of that stunning little cult book "Ways of Seeing," states that people go to zoos to observe the animalness in animals, and the animals (doomed to the boredom of captivity) learn and take on from the visitors the one trait that is absent from their natural state of being: indifference. And so we end up visiting our own human indifference while in the pursuit of the very opposite, untamed "difference." Much of international travel is like that today. Industry leaders and discerning travelers have understood that, as a reaction, there is an emerging market among today's true tourists those seeking the animalness in animals, the ones that understand that travel is about losing self, not replicating it. As a result, we're beginning to see the invention of a new tourism, a getting back to basics. Theme tours, niche tours and tours to exotic places that require travel in exotic ways are increasingly in demand. The over-50 set can enjoy Europe's opera houses as their focus of travel. Some follow the artistic tracks of a given painter, while others are offered the worlds of jazz or cuisine or wine or Renaissance architecture. Present-day tourists have to be prepared to spend a lot of money to travel by foot or canoe or camel. In practice, you pay more to sweat than to procure air conditioning. It costs more to get beyond the comforts of ubiquitous and invasive infrastructure than to insist on them. You have to go further today to get somewhere unexpected where no one is expecting you! Few people are waiting for tourists in Ouadane in the Mauritania Sahara or in the back country of Patagonia. My imagination craves for a trek across Irian Jaya... And, all these tours are now possible! Consider this. Ninety-seven percent of the Americans who come to the French capital for pleasure tourists never see the city's outskirts. The few places left where local life is less interrupted by gawking outsiders are barely glimpsed at as the Roissybus veers toward the city center. As I observe American and British and German and Japanese tourists arrive and depart, questions keep gnawing at me: what is the best way to visit this city now? How does one get beyond and past the gloss of packaged Paris? What can you do to become a "real" learning-and-discovering tourist? Doesn't part of the attraction of "real" travel lie in the "pain" of realizing how little you know about yourself via the place you are visiting? So much had already occurred here before your country's existence was added to the ranks of history as well as prior to your own life... How do we get back that consciousness? Quite accidentally I started reading Paris guidebooks from the end of the last century and was overcome by interest. Massively less practical, these bound editions were driven by what we call today "content." Travel guides today are largely riveted to process: how to survive, how not to get lost, how not to get bitten by the animalness of the animal. We write and consume manuals of operating instructions. P.G. Hamerton's "Paris in Old and Present Times," published in London in 1892, begins like this: "Nationality affects our estimates of everything, but especially does it affect our estimate of great cities. There is no city in the world that does not stand in some peculiar relation to our own nationality; and even those cities that seem quite outside of it are still seen through it, as through an atmosphere coloured by our national prejudices or obscured by our national varieties of ignorance." Here we begin to see that the pleasure of travel necessitates our transcending the national filter that we cram into our baggage. At random, I open a page that tells the story of how the Petit Pont burned down in 1718 at just about this time of year and a woman lost her son in the Seine. Her grief was greatly increased because she could not find his body. The neighbors told her of a sure method to locate drowned bodies and she believed them. She took a round piece of wood and lit a stick in the middle of it, added a piece of blessed bread in honor of St. Nicholas and sent the burning object down river. It sailed towards a parked barge filled with hay which quickly caught on fire. The sailors cut the lines to get away from shore and the blazing haystack floated down to the Petit Pont whose wooden piles under the arch were engulfed in flames. The bridge burned down along with many houses on the Left Bank! Until I read that story I never paid much attention to that bridge, but today, I can't cross the Petit Pont with the same indifference. After a long stint of Paris residency, I think I've discovered a personal formula to rejuvenate the traveler, the visitor, the exploring individual within us: go back to the source: become a perpetual tourist everyday. There is plenty of animalness left to discover in our city... and in ourselves. David Applefield (david@paris-anglo.com) is the author of "Paris Inside Out" and the "Unofficial Guide to Paris" (forthcoming, Macmillan). He edits the literary journal Frank and the Paris web site, www.paris-anglo.com. |
