Being a Tourist

On travel, wanghong, faux-Bavaria, and (hopefully) not being the worst version of myself

I.

“This is the most unhinged article I have read in awhile,” I messaged my friend.

The article in question: The Case Against Travel by Agnes Callard, a polemic published in The New Yorker on the misguided pursuit of travel, sporting a rather spicy subtitle: “It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best.” I admit I was not altogether unbiased in my reaction, currently mid-way through a month-long road trip through the Pacific Northwest. I hoped I was not becoming the worst version of myself.

Callard argues that travel — specifically travel as tourism — is a pointless exercise imbued with overwrought significance. Her grievance boils down to what she calls the “traveller’s delusion”.¹ We seek travel as a means of discovery and growth, and in fact, “touristic travel exists for the sake of change,” but always fail to achieve this goal, returning home unchanged.

This failure occurs because tourists end up doing what, as Callard says, they are “supposed to do” and taking the photos to prove they were there. Normal personal preferences are suspended in favor of checking off the top TripAdvisor results. When in Rome, we all do as the Romans do.

She shares an example from her own travels:

For example, a decade ago, when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?” So I went.

In giving up our own desires to instead do what we are “supposed to do”, tourists experience no lasting transformation:

I entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which is to say, zero falconry.

In Callard’s view, tourists do not change, but they do end up shaping the places they visit, which adapt in order to attract and accommodate visitors. Think of any tourist trap: Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, Times Square in NYC, Pike’s Place Market in Seattle. “We go to experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others,” she writes.

I have some sympathy for this specific point — in a world of social media and influencers, the proof of an activity often eclipses the activity itself. What matters is the stylized Instagram photo you take, not your actual experience (and any discovery or growth that might come attached). I was reminded of this piece on wanghong (网红) — a broad Chinese concept roughly translated to “internet famous” — in particular the ouroboros of social media inspiring the creation of physical spaces that were designed specifically for social media attractiveness.

From the piece above: “The most wanghong architecture I can think of is the Binhai New Area Library in Tianjin, first opened in 2017. With bookshelves on the ceiling shaped like an eye, the library is wanghong in every aspect: the spot is popular among social media influencers because of its interior design. If you look at the pictures, you’d wonder how readers are able to get the books so high up on the shelves—but don’t worry, the books are fake anyway. It was never designed to be a space where one reads, but rather where one poses for photos.”

Wanghong is more a vibe than an exact definition, but certainly appeared to embody the idea of tourists inflicting change on the places they visit to the point where a library becomes famous for the fake books they have painted on the wall.

In typical Chinese “these amps go to eleven” fashion, entire streets were fabricated to attract tourists via the Chinese equivalents of Instagram. 

But as they say, “there is nothing new under the sun”. And China was hardly the first place to do this.

II.

As part of our road trip, I recently visited the town of Leavenworth, Washington. Nestled in the foothills of the Cascade mountains roughly three hours to the west of Seattle, the town was founded in the early 1900s and succeeded for some time as a logging town and regional office for the Great Northern Railway. Eventually the railroad relocated, the timber industry declined, and the town fell on hard times, until the 60’s when the city reinvented itself in the image of… Bavaria.

Taken from our trip. I'm particularly fond of the faux-German remakes of popular brands.

There is no actual German history or legacy tied to the town. It's simply that two enterprising business owners thought theming the town might revitalize it. And to be fair, the surrounding hills did look a little like Bavaria.

It worked better than anyone could have imagined.

Millions of tourists now visit Leavenworth each year. Everything is Bavarian-themed, from the fonts used for signage, to the fake wooden beams painted on the sides of buildings, to the biergartens, brat houses, and lederhosen. Success begets success; the more tourists that flocked to the town, the more Bavarianization occurred.²

Like any tourist town, Leavenworth also survives by selling goods to tourists, mostly cheap Chinese products: t-shirts and hoodies, sun hats, magnets, mugs, ornaments, water bottles, and all manner of toys for kids. The whole thing struck me as an instance of the bizarro world we increasingly live in: a highly successful, but artificial tourist town partly built off selling chintzy merchandise imported from our geopolitical rival.

This is not to say I did not enjoy my time there. We ate some excellent food. Papardelle at Larch (some of the best pasta I've ever had in my life), ice cream at Whistlepunk Ice Cream Co. (twice!), bratwurst and beer at München Haus. In true fake-it-till-you-make-it fashion, the tourist demand at Leavenworth has attracted all sorts of excellent food vendors. And the mountains, forests, and rivers that circle the town are unquestionably stunning and very real.

This mix of reality and reproduction makes the town feel hard to place, unrooted from reality, like a video game environment. Leavenworth exemplifies the idea of place shaped by the tourists who visit.

III.

After leaving Leavenworth, I puzzled over why Callard’s piece on travel bothered me so much. I agreed with her that many places were changed by tourists, but there was a big gap between that and travel turning us into “the worst version of ourselves”.

It seemed like she was making a bad-faith argument: If you believe that travel by definition must shake your core beliefs in some life changing way, then you are bound to be disappointed when that doesn’t happen on every trip. But no one was making that claim; sometimes a trip to Vegas is just a trip to Vegas. She seemed to be arguing against some theoretical straw man who insisted that travel was always life changing, maybe as a reaction to the modern phenomenon of Instagram, performative travel, and #vanlife. There was no doubt that modern travel was afflicted with a real wanghong authenticity problem, but to argue that travel could never be meaningful seemed absurd.

Her article struck me as one of those pieces that says more about the author than anything else. It seemed obvious that yes, travel could be superficial and leave a traveler unchanged, in the same way that any activity might leave one unchanged. But it was not at all clear why that was the only kind of travel that could exist.

And even if she might allow for the possibility of travel causing some tiny amount of development in the traveler, her bar seemed impossibly high, asking to see a “difference in their [the traveler’s] behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass”. Good lord, why bother experiencing anything I thought. Watch a movie? Read a book? Go on a walk? Spend time with friends? Are experiences meaningless if they don’t leave you fundamentally altered? Aren’t we changed ipso facto every time we experience anything? Callard denounces our imbuing of travel with “a vast significance, an aura of virtue”, but she is the one demanding a vast shift from those returning.

Ultimately her disillusionment with travel read like a self-fulfilling prophecy:

The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang.

I supposed if one embarked on every vacation with her view, the odds of gleaning anything meaningful would be pretty low. I could not imagine anyone who stood to benefit from adopting this mindset — why not leave open some possibility of discovery? I was still at a loss for who this piece is for; what change she hoped to see in the world as a result. But after wrestling with her arguments for over a thousand words, it was time to move on to the next stop of our trip.

Travel, like so many things in life, is what you make of it.

1. The New Yorker uses the UK spelling “traveller” for no good reason, despite being a US publication. When not quoting from The New Yorker piece, I spell it “traveler” because that’s how everyone else in the US spells it. The pretentious editing is not doing her any favors here.

2. Bavarianization was most successful in Leavenworth, but other nearby towns also tried it with varying degrees of success.