‘The people of the future will judge us’

On Tourism

World traveller and extremely talented writer

Bruno Cooke

brings us a sharply written and excising piece on tourism, travel bloggers, and the estrangement locals feel as millions make their homes into weekend getaways. This is technically our first solicited piece, a long time in the making.

After a thousand years of praying, fasting and endless incarnations, Buddha finally gets to be a dildo. To Buddha's unending delight, he's generously endowed with enough to pleasure even the most enlightened. Now that Nirvana is within reach, grasp it wisely, firmly, and with intent, rub his belly. Rub it again, meditatively.

Last time I was in Vietnam, I cycled through Tam Cốc, a village nestled among the limestone outcrops of Ninh Binh province. It’s an area recognised by UNESCO for having Outstanding Universal Value. Karst cones and towers erupt from a rice-green delta. Kingfishers dance and shimmer in turquoise and blue. Small boats pootle along subterranean waterways linking communities of subsistence farmers.

People have lived in caves there, high up in the cliffs, for 30,000 years. And every travel blogger from Bali to Bucharest has been. It is “captivating” and “stunning” and “Ha Long Bay on land” and, apparently, a “hidden gem”. In Tam Cốc there is a street lined with pubs selling tankards of draught beer for the equivalent of 25p a glass, which means you can get about two-thirds pissed for the price of a cup of tea back home.

In a homestay on the edge of the village I met Peter, a geologist from New Zealand. He had long white hair and a straight nose, and jowls that moved when he laughed. The years had been kind to him. He was curious, chipper and involved. His wife, Susan, was a homeopath with a friendly smile. They met well into adulthood and were both around 70. For the past decade or so, they had been coming through Vietnam for two or three months at a time. They had retirement savings and pensions and were familiar with the man who ran our homestay.

They had been here in 2020, when most of the tourists hadn’t. They were able to enjoy the Trang An Landscape Complex, which is the protected area of Ninh Binh province, at its most peaceful and serene. Without, you know, more people like them, or me, milling around.

But they were honest, and appreciated the irony of loving a place for its emptiness. For not being blighted by paradise-hungry foreigners, while they themselves were blighting it. Nor were they too cut up about the throngs who were now swimming over the area’s karst mountains, drunk on cheap lager and the thought of hooking up while travelling. They rose above it, sort of. Passers-through, staying longer than most, watching the crowds flow in and out.

Hanging out in Tam Cốc worked for them. They’d come across it organically: by wandering more or less aimlessly from place to place until they found themselves wanting to stop. It’s ironic that most of us – ‘people who travel’ – only know where we want to go because other people have been there. And if we have access to such information, everyone else surely does. We only know Ninh Binh exists because of its popularity as a tourism destination. If a place is attractive to us, it follows that it will be attractive to other people. Any resentment we might feel towards the presence of other visitors is ironic because it should also be directed towards ourselves.

Peter and Susan were savvy to this. They admitted self-deprecatingly that their spoken Vietnamese amounted to a handful of phrases. They spoke lovingly, although generally, about Vietnamese people, and appreciated the inevitability of a place they’d been coming to for years becoming increasingly popular with young people.

The Internet means you no longer have to go to a place to find out where to go once you’re there. Bloggers have already done the work for you, while selling your attention to advertisers. But Peter and Susan went further, and this is what struck me.

“They’ll judge us for what we do,” Peter told me one afternoon, looking wistfully out across the paddy. Imagine it in a husky New Zealand drawl, jowls jiggling. “In the future, I mean. In the same way we look back on the colonisers of the past with incredulity. What were they thinking? The people of the future will judge us.”

‘This is why Laos never colonised anywhere’

Tourists can be real wankers. I have a list of gripes that starts with the way people talk about ‘doing’ countries.

“Oh, I haven’t done Borneo yet.”

“Last year I did Thailand and Cambodia. This year I’m doing Vietnam and Laos.”

Things you can ‘do’ include homework and laundry. They exclude nation states. Related is when people don’t refer to what they’re doing as holidaying or visiting but insist on calling it ‘travelling’, which, though technically sort of correct, doesn’t account for the fact that most of the time, when they’re actually in transit, they’re either asleep, watching videos on their phone, or complaining about some facet of the journey. The roads are too bumpy. The bus driver operates a parcel delivery service as well as a human delivery service. The slow boat is too slow. We would “definitely be there by now” if we hadn’t made all those stops for other people to get on. The engine is loud. It’s too hot in this tropical country. The driver doesn’t speak English. “Oh, I love travelling. I’ve been travelling for five months. Which countries have you done this year?”

One (gripe) has to do with the entitlement of men, often white men, and very often white men from rich western nations, who expect people in other countries to fawn over them, such as those who cycle into China, choose to forgo buying a local SIM card, neglect to learn basic Chinese, and bemoan the unhelpfulness of Chinese people when they don’t fall over themselves with offers of hospitality.

There are those who make terrible jokes, like the Dutch man who, during a delayed start to a boat ride on the Nam Ou River, quipped to a group of French tourists that “this is why Laos never colonised anywhere”.

Then there is the woman who, angry with the Lao minibus driver for making stops to deliver packages to people en route, yells at him, “No, no, no, no, no!” as he digs around in the boot, leaving him noticeably rankled and the rest of us afraid that he might rush the rest of the journey on the country’s narrow winding roads. The Internet had told her the journey would take three hours. The Internet had told her.

There is the Welsh woman on the boat to Luang Prabang who refers to the Lao nationals hoping to board the ferry as a “herd”, and the Italian man claiming the North Vietnamese police are “corrupt” when they fine foreign tourists for not having the correct documentation. They are, in fact, enforcing the law.

Meanwhile, on Reddit, there are tourists thinking they can drive motorbikes in the mountainous Hà Giang region without motorcycling experience or an International Driving Permit during the “rainiest and busiest time of the year”, wallets brandished and “ready to bribe”, who witness their friends rolling off cliff-edges only to be “saved by tree roots” and blame the “crazy truck drivers” who have spent years plying these same roads.

‘Do not forgive them, for they know just what they do’

In June 2023, the New Yorker published an essay by the philosopher Agnes Callard titled, ‘The Case Against Travel’. Callard was born in Budapest and grew up there, then in Rome, then in New York. Her grandparents survived the Holocaust.

In her essay, she builds a case against people who “pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so”. She quotes G. K. Chesterton (“Travel narrows the mind”), Ralph Waldo Emerson (Travel is “a fool’s paradise”) and the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (“Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel”), and notes that Socrates and Immanuel Kant rarely left Athens and Königsberg, respectively. They voted with their feet.

The “traveller’s delusion,” Callard writes, is that it “turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best”. Meanwhile, she says, the single most important fact about tourism is that it doesn’t change the tourist. It is preparation for death.

There are points on which I agree and some on which I don’t. On many, I find myself getting bogged down in arguments about semantics. There are so many phrases relating to travel that all mean different things to different people.

Backpackers like to say they are “going travelling”, but you can also call them “tourists” or “holidaymakers”. Some backpackers travel with suitcases and some tourists use rucksacks. If Neil works from a laptop and spends three months per year in Chiang Mai, is he a tourist? An expat? An immigrant? How much depends on the colour of his skin, whether he rents long-term or via Airbnb, or where he goes next? Are Peter and Susan emigres or migrants, homeless, “long-term travellers” or, dare I say it, “nomads”?

Callard makes a distinction between “going abroad” to, for example, fight in war (as Socrates did) or when “duties” demand it and, say, going somewhere of one’s own volition in order to experience “change”. The sort of travel she’s denigrating is that which is done by choice, and not “for the purpose of art, of study, and benevolence”. Obviously, we can’t pretend to know for what reason X or Y person has decided to visit this or that country, or to travel within their own. It can be fun to parse the semantics but that’s not really the point.

The simplest critique of Callard’s essay is to point out that its headline is clickbait. ‘The Case Against Travel’. It is ridiculous to make the case against travel. Her case is against tourism, but the article is only worth promoting to people’s Facebook feeds if its heading elicits an emotional reaction. That, too, is beside the point.

Callard’s appraisal of the act of travelling (slash tourism) misses something fundamental, which is the experiential knowledge one can inadvertently gain from simply being in another place. I’ll give three examples.

The New Yorker published her essay in June 2023 but I read it, when the publication promoted it to my social media feed, in early 2024, around the time I was cycling into Laos. I crossed the border at Na Meo and, after a few chilly hours on Laos’ dusty, winding roads, I rolled into Vieng Xai.

Vieng Xai is famous for its vast network of caves. There are 480 or so, some much bigger than others. This is where the Pathet Lao, also called the Lao People’s Liberation Army, sheltered from the United States’ merciless nine-year bombardment of Laos during the Second Indochina War. The US Air Force dropped 2 million tons of explosives on Laos between 1964 and 1973 in a covert, CIA-led military campaign now known as the Secret War. There are statistics: two tons per person; one planeload of bombs every eight minutes for nine years; 80 million cluster submunitions that failed to explode on impact, leaving nearly a third of Lao soil contaminated with unexploded ordnance (UXO).

But statistics can only illustrate so much. Walking through the caves, accompanied by an audio tour, you hear accounts of American atrocities never taught in British schools, and certainly not in American ones. You stand in the dark of the maternity ward cave imagining women give birth in forced silence and hear about how all the villagers had to stop wearing colourful clothing to avoid being spotted by airmen trawling the skies. How a captured pilot revealed his orders were to look out for and bomb livestock, because humans might be nearby. How they farmed only at night. How most Lao people had barely heard of America, and had no idea why the US war machine was targeting them.

A year or two earlier, I was detained for five hours at Tel Aviv airport for, as far as I can tell, having recently been to Lebanon. When they let us go, I interacted with the nation of Israel and the nation of Palestine. We drove through Palestinian land on fenced-off roads accessible only to cars with Israeli number plates, visited the wall built by Israel in order to prevent Palestinian freedom of movement, and listened to accounts of IDF raids on Palestinian homes.

In 2017, I lived in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, China, for half a year. I ate well everyday on a monthly stipend of £200. I posed for photos with excitable Tibetans. I spent a lot of time in a building called the Poly Center, a residential tower block that housed two very good clubs on the 19th and 21st floors (techno/house and disco/hiphop respectively!), where you could buy laughing gas in the corridors, exit at five in the morning, eat perfect fried noodles at Barbecue Land, hire an Ofo bicycle for 20p and cycle the wide boulevards home.

Shortly before Christmas 2024, I went back to China, crossing from Kazakhstan to Xinjiang Province, which is famous for the stories western media outlets tell about it. I ate at Uighur restaurants in the provincial capital, Ürümqi, in Beijing and Shanghai, and in Hainan, an island province off the south coast. Wide cycle lanes, electric vehicles, clean air, chipper hospitality, decent and affordable public transport, the best food in the world, and restaurateurs who don’t bat an eyelid when you say, “我们不吃肉” (wǒ men bù chī ròu, or, “we don’t eat meat”). China was as I remembered it: a breath of fresh air.

My point is that my understanding of the context of Israel’s war on Gaza is informed by my experiences of visiting both countries. My understanding of US imperialism and its insatiable appetite for blood is informed by visiting the caves of Vieng Xai. And my appreciation of China is informed by my experiences of living, and visiting, there.

I hadn’t heard of Vieng Xai before I visited Laos. I expected to receive comparable hospitality in Israel and the West Bank. Before I went to China and experienced life there, I did what lots of people do, which is to read news headlines – about Xinjiang and social credit scores and state propaganda – and believe them. My point is that I needed to be in these places to learn these things, and that I never set out to learn them. Being in places with an open mind has inadvertently shaped my worldview.

Incidentally, it has shaped my worldview in a way that runs contrary to the interests of the United States government – and, you might say, of its allies. Let’s not forget that UK governments blue and red have called China a “threat to our way of life” and supported Israel’s right to “defend itself”. I actively appreciate and support many of the countries that the US has made its enemy: Laos, Vietnam, Palestine, China. There are other examples. And I find it quite shocking – though maybe I shouldn’t – that the New Yorker would discourage people from gaining new perspectives on history and geopolitics by visiting other places.

Perhaps it’s because doing so might lead them to oppose US foreign policy. Who knows?!

https://x.com/ProperMag/status/915937500761399296

‘A supposedly fun thing I accept I am snobby about’

The more experience you have of a thing, the harder it is to make generalisations about it. So when people ask me what English people are like, I lose myself in all the possible answers. The variation among the identifiable demographics and the instinct to provide an answer that’s neither generic nor wrong leave me stumped. Now I just say they’re “sort of like me” and wait for the expectant smile of my interlocutor to fade.

Say the same of tourists. Not that they’re like me, necessarily, but that they’re more diverse than any generalisation would allow.

Even among the demographic of British tourists in their twenties visiting Ninh Binh in the year 2024, there is so much unseen diversity. There are groups of friends on gap years, students in search of volunteering opportunities and high-school sweethearts on their first big holiday. Kids in search of themselves and kids in search of other people. This girl who’s going through her first big breakup and this boy who’s just found out his dad’s got early-onset dementia and he doesn’t know whether to fly home or hang out and, is there anyone else here who’s been through what he’s going through? Families with kids and kids with their parents. Some who want to make friends and some who don’t. This guy’s taking field recordings of buffaloes sniffing around in hedgerows for a documentary score. This woman just found work as a message-writer for a popular American OnlyFans model but doesn’t know whether or not to tell her friends. From the outside looking in, we’re all basically alike. But as soon as you’re part of a group you see that it’s made up of lots of smaller ones.

In northeast Vietnam there’s a town called Hà Giang (pronounced ha-ZANG). It’s on the Lô River and is visited by foreign tourists almost exclusively for the purpose of exploring, via organised tour, the hilly region to the northeast. This is called “doing the Hà Giang Loop”, and it is a “MUST-DO” when in Vietnam. This is how the travel bloggers write about doing the Hà Gang Loop:

Listen - in my lifetime I’ve gotten the chance to do lots of amazing things. Bathe elephants in a river in Thailand, scuba dive through shipwrecks, explore royal palaces in Korea, and even camp in the Sahara Desert. But up until October of 2022, if you asked me what my favorite experience I’ve ever had would be, I would’ve felt like I was picking between my children - it was simply impossible.

Then, during the (incredibly small amount of) research I did for my 3 month Southeast Asia trip, I happened across something called the Ha Giang Loop - a 3-5 day motorcycle route that winds through the northernmost mountains of Vietnam.

The Hà Giang Loop is not something you “happen across”. It is among the most raved, blogged and talked about experiences available to those passing through Vietnam.

Most people book the (unique! bespoke!) tour offered by wherever they’re staying in Hanoi, and are shipped overnight to arrive at the same Hà Giang sorting office as everyone else on the day they’ll begin. By my estimations, several hundred people start the loop every morning. This means that on any given day, since there are 2-, 3- and 4-day tours available, there are upwards of a thousand motorbikes criss-crossing the mountainous landscape around Hà Giang, most carrying rider + passenger. There are also tourist cars and tourist buses, and a small amount of local traffic.

The various tours wend their way up and round spectacular scenery, stopping at viewpoints to drink coffee and eat Vinamilk ice lollies. At some viewpoints, a hundred or more bikes might be gathered at once, parked in higgledy lines on the side of the road. Lunches are hearty and shared. The eateries the tour companies have deals with dish out industrial quantities of fried chicken, beef stew, cucumber salad, egg noodles, spring rolls and sliced watermelon. We, the passengers, wolf it down as if we’ve been working hard all day.

Towards the end of the first evening meal, groups are introduced to one of the defining rituals of the Loop: shouting a lot about drinking Happy Water (and then drinking Happy Water). It goes like this.

The group leader will divvy out small porcelain cups of corn wine decanted from a jerrycan into a branded bottle. Corn wine is produced en masse, and culturally important to the various ethnicities that populate the area. But the ritual of drinking it seems to be more about volume (as in decibels, but also L) than observing tradition. Maybe that’s the point. Anyway, the leader passes round the cups and bids everyone repeat after him, then asks if you’re ready. Yes. Are you ready?! Yes! ARE YOU READY!? And you scream back, yes, we’re ready. Then:

Một, hai, ba, dzô! (One, two, three, go!)
Hai, ba, dzô! (Two, three, go!)

Hai, ba, dzô dzô dzô! (Two, three, go go go!)

Hai, ba, uống! (Two, three, drink!)

Each line is louder than the last, and over the course of an evening meal there could be half a dozen rounds. On the third night, still feeling the residual combined hangover from the first and second nights, you ask them not to include you, but they insist on pouring more liquor into your cup. They shout your name, you’re standing up, leading the ritual yourself, throat hoarse from straining, beaming into the eyes of your fellow passengers as you screech, một, hai, ba, dzô, drink, drink, drink, red in the face, beer to wash it down, same again, into the mouth and down the throat. Cảm ơn. At least everyone leaves knowing five words of Vietnamese.

One thing I found difficult about riding the so-called Hà Giang Loop was the unshakable and unnerving sense I had that the H’mong people – the largest ethnic group in Hà Giang – basically didn’t want us there. And not in a casual oh you rabble rousers kind of way. We were a complex nuisance.

We made the roads less usable for local traffic. The noise we produced disturbed peaceful village life and turned quiet back roads into overrun thoroughfares. We gathered like insects around coffee kiosks built on viewpoints, funnelling our tourist money into the pockets of just a few shrewd businesspeople, rather than into local communities. Breakfast, lunch and tea were included in the tour price, which meant we had almost no reason to distribute our cash anywhere else. In Hà Giang city, people of various ages greeted us with smiles and affection. On the tour, however, only very small children greeted us by waving, as if by the time they reach the age of, say, five years old, they have already grown tired of the seemingly endless streams of motorbikes. Everyone else seemed to look through us with a lack of interest I found disarming. As passengers, we don’t bring anything to the region. We are not exciting visitors – we don’t interact. We only observe, eat, and drink Happy Water in high-octane rituals and episodes of devotion to drunkenness.

A few days later, an old friend from university suggested I was being snobby for looking down on Hà Giang Loop tours as a way of interacting with the region. I guess I gave the impression that, deep down, I think my preferred mode of travel – by bicycle, and independent – is better. For what it’s worth, at the time, I agreed.

‘Buddha finally gets to be a dildo’

Acharavadee Wongsakorn was born in Bangkok in 1965, and grew up in a middle-class family. She worked in mass media, then in jewellery, and soon found herself brushing shoulders with the sort of people who would casually mention winning a million baht (£23,000 or so) at the casino. She began to resent how much money her peers were making. Life, she said, was like a “jewel waiting to be polished”.

So she got her head down. Opened her own business and started crafting her own designs. Became an expert on diamonds. By the mid 2000s, she found the success she’d been craving. She won accolades, and was named by Thailand’s Tatler magazine as one of the country’s 500 leading people five years in a row. Money, fame, influence. All of it in spades.

Still, she felt like she was chasing her own shadow. She was quick to anger, and scolded her subordinates with undue harshness. She would drive to see the revered monk Luang Phor Charan Thitathammo – who died in 2016 at the age of 87 – simply to ask for his blessing and boost her wealth. Even while she was visiting him at the Dhamma centre, her mind would be elsewhere, planning her next collection or working through business arrangements. Later, she realised that her fashion and jewellery shows were designed to stir up desire by making people feel like they lacked something. They “stirred people’s minds,” she says, making them confused. Confused desire can develop into sin, and she knew that she was exploiting people. “Life was spinning,” she admits. In an interview with MGR Online, she said that for years, all she thought about was work, and all she sought was money.

You know how this story goes. Acharavadee took up meditation to help cope with the stresses of business and celebrity. It led her to reevaluate her life, and she realised she’d got it all wrong. She sold her company and founded the School of Life Foundation, becoming a full-time Dhamma teacher in 2009. A few years earlier, on a business trip to France, she had stumbled across a Parisian bar bedecked with novelty Buddhas. There was a huge Buddha statue in the middle of the dance floor, surrounded by disco balls, cigarette smoke and alcohol. It was “heartbreaking,” she says, and eventually inspired her, in 2012, to set up the Knowing Buddha Foundation with a view to de-commercialise Buddhist imagery and return the movement to its roots.

In early 2013, a supporter of the movement sent Acharavadee a picture of a toilet decorated with Buddha’s face, from a French hotel bathroom. The organisation was already running a campaign in the Netherlands against toilets branded with the Buddha’s image. It’s more common than you’d think. Or, at least, it was until Acharavadee donned her marigolds and tackled the problem head on. “The Buddha image in the toilet is a hard hit to Buddhists,” she has said. They wrote to the French Embassy in Bangkok and to the hotel Moulin de Broaille, which had installed the toilet seat in its “pure Zen bathroom”. Then to the product’s manufacturer, which agreed to discontinue production.

One of Knowing Buddha’s more ambitious campaigns was against a Disney character – a dog – called Buddha.

In the Air Buddies film series, Buddha is a golden retriever puppy. He enjoys extended periods of yoga and meditation. He wears a traditional Buddhist collar. And he ends his sentences with “Namaste,” Sanskrit for “I bow to you”. He doesn’t eat meat.

Acharavadee asked her supporters, and Buddhists around the world, to boycott the Buddies movies. When Acharavadee reached out to the company, asking them to stop using the name Buddha for one of its characters, a man called Eric replied that they were “unable to assist [her] with [her] inquiry”. Too bad.

Other examples of inappropriate usage of Buddha’s image and/or name include: Happy Buddha panties; a Popcorn Buddha promising “a moment of bliss in every kernel”; and an 8-inch silicone dildo called “Buddha’s Delight,” available for $59 in Oakland, California.

After a thousand years of praying, fasting and endless incarnations, Buddha finally gets to be a dildo. To Buddha's unending delight, he's generously endowed with enough to pleasure even the most enlightened. Now that Nirvana is within reach, grasp it wisely, firmly, and with intent, rub his belly. Rub it again, meditatively.

Acharawadee insists that Buddha's image has been “used disrespectfully for too many years”. While some desecrate it “without knowing” what is appropriate, “many do it intentionally”. They wouldn’t treat images of Mohammed or Jesus in the same way, let alone Judaism’s G-d. If they do, they know “they’ll be in deep trouble,” she adds. “But if they touch Buddhism, the Buddhists hardly have a voice to stop them. People think they can do anything they want.”

They certainly do. But what is an appropriate amount of moral outrage to feel or show when confronted with this kind of information? Do we continue to desecrate the Buddha by shitting on him, or do we support a campaign by a religious organisation to cease production of novelty toilet seats?

‘Fear and loathing everywhere, all at once’

Before setting off on my second or third long distance bicycle trip, my friend Tanya suggested I write a book about it. I kept notes, wrote bits. Worked on a structure and thought about how it might all fit together. That was in 2016. Then, in 2018, I went on a bigger trip, and the whole idea for the book changed from wanderlust travel lit in the style of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning to something more credulous. More about meditation, more Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The way of the wheel, the endlessness of roads. Wind and silence.

Then, in 2023, I came across a hard copy of With Our Own Hands at a homestay in Khorog, Tajikistan.

It’s a collaboratively written book about Pamiri cuisine compiled by a Swedish resilience researcher and a Dutch ethno-botanist, inspired by an elderly Tajik grandmother’s tales of her childhood. It brings to life an oral tradition of highly localised culinary wisdom, and presents recipes alongside stories and photos, all in three languages (Dari in Arabic script, Tajik in Cyrillic, and English). It struck me that no ‘travel book’, or book about travel, could do more for a place than With Our Own Hands had done for the Pamiri people. I began to think differently about how I chose to document my journeys, and since then, I can’t help but approach mass tourism more critically.

Tourism is steeped in irony and hypocrisy. We grope around in unfamiliar places, on the hunt for just the right amount of newness, one foot firmly planted in our comfort zone. Either hoping to come across other foreigners, at the very least someone who speaks our language, because we’re a bit fed up with limiting our vocabulary so that we can be understood. Or rankled by them for also searching for the same tranquil, cultural, unique and meaningful experience in the same place we are looking. For spoiling the view and clogging up the footpaths and making too much noise in the temples, while we do the same. Those of us who document – from live streamers to feature writers – jostle and clamour for hot takes and original forms of expression. Or simply hits. But every path has been trodden, and there’s a ticket booth on every corner.

We get from place to place on buses operated by companies set up to track and cater to tourist interests. We know where to go because other people have already been there. We have read the Google reviews. There are 5,000 hashtags for this place on TikTok. People have described its beauty. They went there at sunrise and snagged a pretty picture on their iPhone, which takes better photos than our old DSLRs. Google Chrome automatically translates the ticketing aggregator’s website into English. It even shows us the price in GBP, USD or EUR. Nine out of ten people on the bus are tourists hoping for a once-in-a-lifetime experience perfectly balancing authenticity and convenience, replete with vegetarian options, English-speaking staff, and the “most adorable Asian babies”. When we get there, we want everyone else to disappear because that’s when destinations are at their most beautiful. No, we want everyone like us––except us to disappear.

But the mechanisms of tourism and information-sharing mean we will only visit places that are visited by other people. So Agnes Callard rails against tourists for being uninteresting, and pro-travel travel writers rail against Agnes Callard for being ignorant while railing against tourists for doing Borneo. And the sun shines on the kingfishers dancing over the waterways of Vietnam’s Trang An Landscape Complex. Peter’s jowls wobbles delightedly and motorbikes scurry and blurt over the hills of Hà Giang. And the French smoke cigarettes, and shit on images of the Buddha.