Like a lot of people who didn’t know him, I felt sad hearing of the death of Michael Mosley on the Greek island of Symi, being familiar with him as a doctor whose pleasant voice I often heard on the radio. He had the gift of giving advice without being patronising or preachy. Mosley seemed to be a wise man – and for this reason, the way he died seemed all the more shocking. I found it particularly poignant that his body was found just 30 meters from the perimeter fence of a beach resort. Somewhat sheepishly, I immediately identified with the inhabitants of the beachfront compound; if I’d have been on that island, that’s where I’d have been, flat out by the swimming pool, cocktail to hand and no trek more adventurous planned than that between beach and bar.
We tourists are far neater, stashed away in hotels, providing steady work for a vast number of locals and leaving neighbourhoods as real communities
The Greek islands make me feel like a big old play-it-safe lump, and led me to recall what was, for many years, my home-from-home, the Ritz Carlton Abama in Tenerife, and the supremely indolent holiday after which I inadvertently took home the wrong case from the airport. On opening it, I was confronted with such an array of sporty clothing and props that I momentarily suspected that a You’ve Been Framed-style prank had been played on me, mocking me for my laziness. The Canary Islands exist far beyond the beaches, being a seven-island wonderland of biospheres, national parks, volcanoes, caves, snow-topped mountains and hiking trails; this was the Tenerife my suitcase doppelgänger knew, and I felt briefly ashamed that my exploration of the same island consisted mostly of sampling new combinations of banana liqueur cocktails.
But I can’t stay ashamed for very long, luckily. I haven’t been on holiday for many years, since before Covid (I did it so much over two decades that I became bored with it, rather in the way I did with cocaine) but Mr Mosley’s death made me reflect that I’ve always been a total tourist, and never once thought of myself as a ‘traveller’. (‘World traveller’ is even worse, usually indicating a seriously annoying bongo habit.) I’m unusual in this; Airbnb is mostly to blame, with its presumptuous slogan ‘live like a local’. Like haggling (another ‘traveller’ thing to do), favouring private homes over commercial hotels is a fancy way of doing over the natives, raising property prices and certifying that the offspring of said locals will find it difficult to stay in their city-centre neighbourhoods.
We tourists are far neater, stashed away in hotels, providing steady work for a vast number of locals and leaving neighbourhoods as real communities as opposed to handy roosting posts for birds of passage on a bender. Far from being arrogant, acting like an honest-to-goodness tourist is an enlightened and gracious admission of ignorance; I loved puzzling over old-fashioned maps in the street and tipping big like a fresh-off-the-boat rube just begging to be taken advantage of – it’s all part of the respect we should pay for trampling over other peoples hometowns. Some self-deluded souls seem to think that if you call yourself a traveller rather than a tourist, locals will like you more. But tourists tend not to scrounge in the streets, whereas travellers increasingly do, as seen in the rise of the gap-year beg packers passing off pampered entitlement as roughing it, to the understandable disgust of many citizens of South East Asia.
Forster had the anti-tourist snobs down to a T when, in A Room With A View, the ghastly Mr Eager and Miss Lavish look down their noses at the charming and unpretentious Lucy Honeychurch:
Mr. Eager held her in civil converse; their little tiff was over.
‘So, Miss Honeychurch, you are travelling? As a student of art?’
‘Oh, dear me, no – oh, no!’
‘Perhaps as a student of human nature,’ interposed Miss Lavish, ‘like myself?’
‘Oh, no. I am here as a tourist.’
‘Oh, indeed,’ said Mr. Eager. ‘Are you indeed? If you will not think me rude, we residents sometimes pity you poor tourists not a little – handed about like a parcel of goods from Venice to Florence, from Florence to Rome, living herded together in pensions or hotels, quite unconscious of anything that is outside Baedeker, their one anxiety to get ‘done’ or ‘through’ and go on somewhere else. The result is, they mix up towns, rivers, palaces in one inextricable whirl. You know the American girl in Punch who says: “Say, poppa, what did we see at Rome?” And the father replies: “Why, guess Rome was the place where we saw the yaller dog.” Ha! ha! ha!’
‘I quite agree,’ said Miss Lavish, who had several times tried to interrupt his mordant wit. ‘The narrowness and superficiality of the Anglo-Saxon tourist is nothing less than a menace.’
So don’t feel that you have to make the effort that goes along with being a traveller. Sometimes simply putting your feet up in a nice resort is what you really want to do. You’re totally doing your bit by stimulating the local economy in bars, restaurants and hotels rather than saving your pennies by back-packing, camping out (and starting forest fires) and foraging from hedgerows.
Best of all, as a tourist you’re far less likely to yap on endlessly about your ‘experience’ afterwards – and very unlikely to make a dull and self-centred television show about your peregrinations. Faced with yet another variation on Sandi Toksvig’s Extraordinary Escapes, or Sue Perkins getting Lost In Alaska, I surely can’t be the only civilian who dreams of a world where we can escape from the banal insights of paper-thin ‘personalities’ on the wonders of the world?
Give me a Long Island Iced Tea and an infinity pool any day, for in the words of the wit James Maker: ‘Tourists support the local economy; travellers bargain down to the last rupee and get dysentery.’
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