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I had the opposite reaction - it's like a breath of fresh air compared to a lot of contemporary travel writing. It's honest.

Sometimes you're not visiting a place to engage deeply with humans, but to take in the natural landscape and the historic sites, or simply to exist for a short time somewhere that's not like home. Sometimes while travelling (especially while travelling!) you have limited time and need to have a quick bite and keep moving, because long meals and deep conversations are not your priority.

Sometimes it's ok to say "here's my brief impression of this place, and here are its highlights and its faults from my perspective" because at least that's expressing an opinion. I don't need another Instagrammer making the most vague statements about a foreign place, telling me how beautiful/resilient/spirited the people are despite their circumstances, and saying noting more concrete, because anything more specific will be met with offense that the traveller could never possibly understand the context of this people or that country, and is just a spoiled westerner.


Could you please not turn travel into a pissing competition? People enjoy different things in different ways, also you are making a huge number of assumptions with little information and ranting quite a bit which makes it hard to take you seriously since you take yourself too seriously.


This response is quite the surprise - I am explicitly saying that I think this article reduces travel to "a pissing competition", as you put it, and that it is shocking to me to see it done so shamelessly.

The author will be describing interesting things about the place in a neutral or respectful tone for a line or five, and then suddenly switch to a sort of review-and-compare-mode, as if it were not a real place with 12 million people in it, but a product that just arrived in the post with this feature and that.

Or like a pokemon card, as I said, but for grown-ups. I have a Tunisia, it does xyz. It's good at this and bad at that. I mean that metaphor seriously, I think it really applies.

I mention the idea of putting in the extra effort to interact with locals - through volunteering, or whatever - not to make some comment about myself, or make some appeal to purity, but rather because it's a very good way to avoid turning travelling into stamp-collecting. It's a way of forcing yourself to see the subtlety and variety in a place.

The one assumption I felt myself to be making was that he reads Wikipedia, but that's hardly a heinous crime or anything. It was of no relevance to my point anyway.

Otherwise, regarding ranting - that's just, like, your opinion, man


Maybe GP takes themselves too seriously, but I read article and the assessment seems valid. The article's thoughts on train etiquette came across to me as particularly condescending.

The author decided to write an article about their experience and limited research, which opens them up to criticism.


well, its more then "smoked weed at the hostel for 3 days, all people there share my views and speak perfect english"




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