Mexico isn’t just drug deals and shootings. At the risk of turning a beautiful little village into a swamp of tourists, here are some pictures of Akumel, on the Yucatan peninsula. It’s south of Cancun on the way to the Mayan ruins at Tulum. It was one of the first places Spanish tourists came to in the 16th century, but now it’s kinda lost in the Mayan Riviera. If you like it, don’t tell anybody.
All photographs by Carolyn Bourcier.
When I was a kid, I loved travel programs. In my teenage years, I must have spent a month of crappy Sunday afternoons going places I’d never been. I’m not one to brag, but aside from North Korea, there are not too many places my electronic friends and I didn’t see on this little planet of ours. Yep, those were the days; slinging my pack around the world that wasn’t even in colour yet. Ah, but the innocence of youth is fleeting, and even though I continued to watch travel programs, when I grew up, I resolved to see these marvelous places for myself. On the first trip I ever took that required a passport, I discovered almost immediately that those wonderful television personalities I’d befriended over the years were a bunch of lying bastards. Their sanitized version of getting from here to there is Nixonesque in its duplicity. Even the mighty Pinocchio himself would be scandalized by such fraud. So, as a public service to all those other armchair travellers out there, I’m going to point out a few things about these charlatans.
Let’s start at the beginning. Where’s their luggage? Gandhi carried more stuff 
than these guys do. Nobody on travel TV, not even the kids who are supposedly backpacking through central Asia, ever carries anything bigger than a handkerchief. Then the smug buggers have the audacity to tell the rest of us how to pack! They hold up a bag the size of Paris Hilton’s purse and say something like, “I like to put everything in my carry-on; a few interchangeable items to mix and match, toiletries, and, of course, a good pair of walking shoes.” But notice: they never actually try to stuff that stuff into the bag. No, it’s always a cut to the next scene — when they’re rolling it off the Eurorail like it was made of Styrofoam. If you and I packed like that, after a week, we’d look like we’d been attacked by monkeys. The mix and match would be what do I want to wear today: stained or soiled? And that’s not the end of their chicanery.
Every single hotel, motel, hostel and people’s home they stay at has a view to rival Victor Emmanuel’s balcony in Rome. They always find these marvels on some crooked side street that you couldn’t Google if you wanted to because it doesn’t even have a name it’s so quaint. The place is never full, nobody else is at the counter when they check-in, and the room itself looks like the good bits of Kubla Khan’s Pleasure Dome at Xanadu. These palaces never smell like cabbage. I’ve stayed in a few places in my time, up to and including a converted telephone exchange, but I’ve never run across such earthly delights. I’ve never even met anybody who has, and I run with some of the worst braggarts this side of Texas. But wait! These folks aren’t finished yet.
The next morning, they wake up to a breakfast that would make Gordon Ramsey clean up his mouth. It turns out the owner’s brother is a Cordon Bleu chef who gave up cooking for the crowned heads of Europe to help his sister run her B & B. (Who knew?) Not only that, but it seems this is the one week of the year when aardvark is in season, and the bro is planning an aardvark fiesta for that very night! (What are the chances?) Meanwhile, a troupe of traditional musicians who have been rehearsing in the basement of the Florentine church across the street, just happen to love aardvark. And it goes on and on.
It never rains in television travel land. The wind doesn’t blow. It might do that misty cloudy thing you write poetry about, but you never see a gut-wrenching storm come slashing out of nowhere when you’re eight miles from shelter.
It’s never crowded, either. There are no lines for the Eiffel Tour, the Crown Jewels or (I assume) the Second Coming. It’s hop on/hop off at every tourist attraction from the Great Buddha at Kamakura to the Brandenburg Gate.
Nobody’s rude. Everybody’s interesting. There are no jerks in faraway lands, and certainly no idiot tourists busy poisoning the water for the rest of us. It’s all one big Disneyland with a foreign accent.
I realize that television, by its very nature, is the willing suspension of disbelief. I understand that you can’t build a half hour program around waiting in line to see the Mona Lisa. I’ve written for TV. It’s show ‘em what you’re going to say; don’t tell ‘em. The nuances tend to get lost. However, there should be disclaimers on travel TV or some explanation that the intrepid kid looking at the camera has an army of invisible sherpas, sweating the details. There’s a huge difference between going somewhere with a producer, director and camera crew — and you and the boyfriend grabbing a flight to Bangkok off the Internet. Honestly, if you’re going to distribute travel information, at the very least, it should be useful. For example, why is there never a travel program that tells you: “Dragging 25 kilos of laundry around India is stupid. Clothes are cheap there. Buy as you go.” Or “Restaurant X serves Mystery Meat, keeping looking.” Or, every once in a while: “Hey, folks! Don’t come here. It sucks!”
Now, that would be information you can use.
Every travel writer since Herodotus has penned a line or two on how to get over jet lag and culture shock. Don’t drink alcohol; suck Meyer lemons; wear those weird tight socks that turn your toes into Vienna sausages, etc. etc. There is only one cure for jet lag, and you heard it here first: outlast the bastard. Go about your business as best you can; eventually, time will re-telescope and you’ll get back to whatever normal looks like at your house. Culture shock, on the other hand, is a completely different beast, and for some people, there is no cure. They’re scarred for life.
Culture shock is your mind rebelling against a massive shift in your comfort zone. It’s as if somebody set off a bomb in your inner baby carriage, and all the things you know and trust — like Boogy Bear and Blankey — are gone. The air smells funny, the food tastes strange, the people around you are odd, and you spend half your time being lost. Invariably, your senses simply overload and shut down. This is a natural reaction that happens to even the most seasoned traveller, and you don’t have to go halfway around the world to get it. Any sociologist will tell you, for example, there are some serious cultural differences between cities and their suburbs, or even between neighbourhoods. Of course, it’s all relative. Taking a trolley to the ‘burbs to visit Aunt Helen and hiking the Karkaar Mountains of Somalia are noticeably different experiences – depending, on your Aunt Helen. My point is culture shock is unavoidable; it’s how you handle it that counts.
It’s been my experience that most tourists start fading out around Day
Five. This
is when the ruins all start looking the same, the quaint local Corn Dance seems remarkably similar to the Wedding Dance and it’s too much trouble to read every plaque on every wall. At this point, most tourists go back to the hotel and get heavily into the Tylenol™. However, a select few, stop, find a bar, sit down, take three deep ones and look around. They might look like they’ve just been given an overdose of Novocaine (it’s the vacant eyes) but they’re actually looking past the crumbling ruins and the colourful costumes. They’re seeing the guy serving the drinks, the two women having lunch and “What the hell is that gorgeous smell?” These people have instantly become travellers, and they’re never going to be anything else.
Travellers understand that people in different places do things differently, and while it might take some getting used to, it’s neither better nor worse than what we do. They wonder how the waiter got to work and why the appetizer is moving — not how much the dessert costs in real money. They see the sights (like everybody else) but they notice that somebody has to cut the grass and they wonder how they do it. While tourists assume that their destination is a carefully planned theme park, travellers understand that every place they go is filled with ordinary people who live, breathe, cry and go to the bathroom. (In some parts of the world, it’s very important to know where and how.) Travellers are there because they’re curious. They see the world as a gigantic playground with swings and slides and kids they haven’t played with yet. I’m not knocking tourists; I just think they’re missing out on a lot of stuff.
Culture shock is the slap in the face everyone gets when they travel. For tourists, the cure is a return to the familiar comforts of home, but for travellers it’s an addiction that will never go away. Like James Kirk, they have a burning need to “seek out strange new worlds…and boldly go [etc. etc.]” In short, travellers travel and tourists go places. Tourists bring photographs and souvenirs home with them; travellers bring their experiences. But the main difference is travellers also get a mild case of culture shock when they get home.
WD Fyfe 