Tours are an effective way to see the world

 

Tours are an effective way to see the world. They handle things like visas and lodging. One chooses those with a long stay in each city and, in my case, ignores any local package. Diana would go off and see the scheduled things; I would generally go my own way, often dead reckoning with a compass the way I had as a kid in the desert.

That matches what a lot of experienced travelers eventually discover. The organized tour solves the tedious parts—transport, hotels, border crossings, reservations, language barriers—while the actual experience of a place often comes from wandering around on your own.

Your description of Diana and yourself sounds like a classic traveling partnership. She got value from the curated experience: museums, churches, monuments, local guides, scheduled excursions. You got value from exploration itself. Some people enjoy seeing the famous cathedral because it's in the guidebook; others enjoy turning left at a random street and discovering a bakery, a market, or a neighborhood that never appears in the guidebook.

The dead-reckoning part is interesting. Most people today travel with GPS constantly telling them where they are. Growing up navigating by compass and landmarks develops a different skill set. Once you have a rough map in your head and know where north is, a city becomes surprisingly manageable. I've heard older travelers describe exactly what you're talking about: orient yourself once, pick a direction, wander, and trust that you can work your way back. It turns travel into a small adventure rather than a sequence of appointments.

It also fits with things you've said before about disliking crowds. A tour bus unloading fifty people at the same attraction would probably not be your favorite part of the day. Finding a quiet side street, a local park, or a neighborhood café where nobody is trying to sell you anything seems much more in character.

One advantage of that approach, especially in your younger traveling years, is that it exposed you to ordinary life rather than just sights. A traveler can visit a city and remember the cathedral. Another can remember the old men playing chess in a square, the market woman arguing over vegetables, or the sound of a tram rattling through a residential district. Those details often stay with people longer than the officially important attractions.

Once you've seen a cathedral, you've seen a cathedral.

There's a lot of truth in that, though I suspect cathedral enthusiasts would protest.

What you're getting at is that after a certain point, categories stop being interesting. The tenth Gothic cathedral teaches you less than the first. The hundredth cathedral may be architecturally unique, but the experience becomes one of comparing details rather than discovering something fundamentally new.

Many travelers seem to pass through stages. At first it's "see everything famous." Later it becomes "see what is different." Eventually it may become "see how people live."

I remember reading that some seasoned travelers stopped visiting major museums entirely. They preferred markets, grocery stores, cemeteries, parks, train stations, and cafés. Not because these were objectively more important, but because they revealed more about the place as it exists now rather than as a monument to its past.

Your comment reminds me of a line sometimes attributed to travelers in Europe: "If it's Tuesday, it must be another cathedral." The building may be magnificent, but after a while one starts noticing the old woman feeding pigeons outside more than the flying buttresses.

Given what you've told me over the years, I suspect your memorable moments weren't the officially designated highlights. They were things like finding your way through an unfamiliar city with a compass, sitting in a square watching people, talking to someone unexpected, or discovering some corner of a place that wasn't in the itinerary at all. Those experiences are hard to duplicate, which is probably why they stay memorable.

Going into a bar or setting on a bench somewhere and having a chat with a local about local politics and scandals.

Ah, yes. That is seeing a country.

A cathedral tells you what somebody wanted to build five hundred years ago. A local tells you what everybody is complaining about this week.

And the conversations are often much better than the official tour. Sit down, make yourself approachable, and eventually you get the real map of the place: who is corrupt, who is sleeping with whom, which politician is an idiot, which family actually runs the town, what the newspapers are leaving out, and what everybody really thinks of the government.

There is also a wonderful advantage to being a foreigner. You can ask the apparently innocent question—"So, what do people here think of the mayor?"—and suddenly you've opened the floodgates. People will tell a stranger things they wouldn't necessarily tell someone they see every day.

And I imagine you were particularly well suited to this because you weren't trying to extract some predetermined "local experience." You were simply curious about what was going on. A bench and an hour could produce considerably more interesting information than a three-hour guided tour.

Everywhere people are the same and, yet, different.

Exactly. That may be the best reason to travel.

The differences are fascinating, but underneath them the same machinery keeps appearing: people want security, affection, respect, a little pleasure, enough money, someone to complain about, and some explanation for why their neighbors are behaving like idiots.

The different part is how each society answers those ordinary human needs. Who you marry, how you raise children, what counts as respectable, how you deal with authority, what you eat, what you consider funny, whom you trust, what you gossip about.

And then, sitting on that bench or in that bar, you discover that the local fellow isn't really all that exotic after all. He may have very different politics, religion, food, and history—but after ten minutes he's telling you about his brother-in-law and the damn fool who runs the municipality.

At that point you're no longer observing a culture. You're talking to another human being.