Hidden travel gems you can’t wait to reveal and other great holiday paradoxes
- Here’s another one: when we go away we want luxury services but without the tourist numbers needed to bankroll them
- Perhaps 2020 has taught us that staying at home has its merits after all, or at least now we’ve time to examine the paradoxes inherent in being a tourist
Leisure travel is full of contradictions, such as how rushing halfway around the world for a last chance to see Greenland’s glaciers, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef or some palm-fringed speck of an island only hastens all these sights’ demise. Other travel paradoxes are as old as travel itself.
As early as the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher Socrates observed that change rarely turns out to be as good as a rest.
“How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away.”
The Roman philosopher Seneca, a Stoic, amplified this idea five centuries later.
“How can novelty of surroundings abroad and becoming acquainted with foreign scenes or cities be of any help? All that dashing about turns out to be quite futile,” he pointed out.
Seneca did not even anticipate modern-day instant communications that result in us taking not only our anxieties with us, but our friends, too, making a “getaway” a contradiction in terms.
But when it comes to travel, we’re all stoics in a way. Every year, we find planning a holiday and taking it produce stress levels that match those of getting married or moving house. But every year we grin and bear it, and then effectively “curate” our holiday memories, only to start all over again.
Recognising the need to preserve some idyllic cultural backwater by granting it Unesco World Heritage status often only ensures that it promptly disappears beneath a tsunami of visitors
We want to find all the services that sufficient visitor numbers would support, but without the number of visitors sufficient to support them. We want residents to be surprised to see outsiders and be correspondingly curious and welcoming, yet conveniently able to speak some mutually comprehensible language.
And having made a “discovery”, be it a mountaintop village or merely a restaurant around the corner from the one everybody knows and just as good, but without the queues, we can’t wait to destroy it by praising it to friends.
We want it to be secret, and yet we want to tell everybody all about it.
The world of tourism is in some ways like the quantum world, where the mere process of observing brings change, or causes the previously indeterminate to become fixed. Tourists showing up in any numbers, wallets open, can freeze a once fluid destination into a form that foreigners have found appealing, and stop it from ever evolving again to meet its residents’ needs.
Worse, visitors can cause a destination to rebuild itself to be more attractive still, sometimes to the point of self-caricature. And as visitor numbers reach capacity it may construct some more of itself, the better to rake in the cash.
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Recognising the need to preserve some idyllic cultural backwater by granting it Unesco World Heritage status often only ensures that it promptly disappears beneath a tsunami of visitors that brings it to the edge of destruction.
Perhaps this year has taught us that staying at home has its merits after all. Perhaps we’ve time right now to examine these travel paradoxes, so as to work out how to get the most out of any future trips while causing the least damage – as well as avoiding the greatest travel contradiction of them all.
When we’ve endured the traffic on the return journey, the check-in queues, the undressing for airport security, the cramped conditions on an interminable flight and the struggle to get the luggage from carousel to taxi; when we finally collapse, exhausted, into an armchair, what’s the first thing we say?
“I need a holiday.”
