travel is about the unknown
And while at the subject of Lonely Planet guides: they are children’s books.
Travel is about the unknown and the unexpected, travel is about discovering. But those ‘travel’guides tell you where to go, what to see there, how to get there. You know exactly what awaits you.
Those using those books are tracing the footprints of others: a boy scout’s game. Travel-wise they, well, haven’t grown up. Those having outgrown those guides go their own independent way.
Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, the small southwestern part of Holland along the Belgian border where I was born and grew up, is done away with by Lonely Planet as an irrelevant region of farmland and chemical plants.
Now this is not true. There are some interesting old buildings in the towns of Hulst, Sluis, Aardenburg. There are characteristic tree-lined ‘polder’ dikes. In the half submerged conservation area of Saeftinghe over 200 types of birds have been spotted.
But íf it were true, what’s wrong with farms and factories? A TRAVELLER is curious. He first and foremost wonders what a place is like. Beautiful or not, that matters less. Whether there is ‘something to see’ is a worry of tourists.
And then: a TRAVELLER is open to everything. A cloud in the sky. Furrows in a field. The daily life of the one hundred thousand people living in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen.
At Lonely Planet they don’t understand this essence of TRAVEL.
TRAVEL: THE UNKNOWN.
Tourism: the predictable.
TRAVEL: WHERE OTHERS DON’T GO.
Tourism: the beaten track.
TRAVEL: IN DEPTH.
Tourism: superficial.
TRAVELLERS THINK UP THEIR OWN ORIGINAL TRIP.
Tourists take their second-hand routes and destinations from guidebooks and tour operators.
TRAVEL IS BASED ON AN IDEA. LIKE FOLLOWING A SPECIFIC ROAD OR RIVER. OR REACHING SOME REMOTE PLACE. OR ZOOMING IN WITH AN ETHNIC OR HISTORICAL LENS. OR JUST MOVING ON RANDOMLY, THAT’S AN IDEA TOO.
Tourism makes no such sense. It combines a couple of ‘things to see’ that have nothing in common other than maybe being located in the same country.
TRAVELLERS ARE CONTENT JUST TO SEE WHAT IT’S LIKE SOMEWHERE ELSE.
Tourists need ‘sigths’.