And then Sarah realised that she was wearing TWO conical hats
There are people who travel and there are tourists. The debate of which category a person falls into – dependant on travelling behaviour, length of journey, lifestyle choices – is a long one that has been raging among backpacking communities for decades.
Travellers are generally pretty scathing about tourists, defining themselves as something different. They abhor the beaten track, turning up noses at any kind of organised tours or scheduled entertainment in favour of the wind at their back. Some consider it immoral to plan trips at all, leaving the mere details of transport and sightseeing down to serendipity.
According to Doug Lansky, author of Up the Amazon Without a Paddle, the difference between a tourist and traveler is not the guidebooks, cameras or tacky souvenirs. Instead “The traveler is the one who constantly pushes themselves out of their comfort zone as often as humanly possible. The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he comes to see.”
If you’d have asked me which I was when I was travelling at 19, I would have given you a dirty look for even asking the question. Even now I would say traveller, simply because tourists are so universally sneered at on the road. But I think that the distinction has been carried too far. Surely we’re all part of the tourism industry, spending western dollars, pounds and euros, on the services provided for that purpose and to suggest anything else is just kidding ourselves.
The Mekong Delta tour: an authentic experience?
Also, there are those travellers who are such snobs they give the rest of us a bad name. We’ve all met them – the kind of person for whom an experience is not ‘authentic’ or even interesting unless it’s encountered at least 100 miles off the beaten track, in the dead of night, with no other English speaking person, while wearing tribal dress and eating a local delicacy like boiled chicken foetus on a bed of brown tofu. W*nkers, basically.
They’re most likely to be found at a party eying the guacamole with suspicion, and saying ‘You know that’s not an authentic Mexican dish.’ Or boring the pants off everyone, saying: ‘Oh you went trekking in Chang Mai? Did you not get to (insert name of obscure village on Thai-Myanmar border)? Shame. It’s really the only way to see northern Thailand.”
So, when my friend Quimby suggested a 2-day tour of the Mekong Delta, I agreed that an organised tour seemed like a good way to cover ground quickly and save money. I wanted to keep an open mind and not be a travel snob.
In one way I came to rue that decision immediately. The ‘short journey’ to the Delta town of Can Tho where we stayed was an 8 hour bus ride. The ‘lunch included’ was a bowl of supernoodles. And the many ‘authentic attractions’ were tourist holding pens where we were encouraged to buy many useless things. Not to mention the authentic Vietnamese music we were treated to, which sounded like an angry cat being played with a spoon.
The usual tourist 'pose with a snake' picture
And yet, there was a part of me that was happy to just be picked up by the scruff of the neck and shown things. At one point when we were being paddled through the Mekong’s mangroves by a lady in a conical hat, I finally felt, after 2 months in the country, that I was seeing something that looked like what I had imagined Vietnam to be. Did it really matter, if it was essentially like being on a ride in Disney’s ‘Vietnamland’, and totally unrelated to the lived experience of the country today? That I saw it as a tourist on a tour and not after trekking for 3 weeks across swampland, wearing nothing but a loin cloth.
I ended up chatting to an Italian guy, Francisco, who was on the tour about the traveller/tourist debate. He’s a keen amateur photographer and told me he liked to think of himself as a traveller, not a tourist, but that he goes on organised tours to get the best photos of a country. If someone else is in charge of things he doesn’t have to concentrate on anything but the views. “Sometimes it’s easier to get bite-sized chunks of a country,” he explained. “Even though you see what the tour operators want you to see, it’s still real life.”
Duck gutting on the Mekong Delta: doesn't get much more real than that!
I look at his photos and see what he means. Even on one of the typical ‘factory tours’ that these trips always seem to include, Francisco has captured ordinary people going about their business.
Two women gossiping while making rice noodles, a small girl peeking at the ‘Felang’ (tourists) from a door frame and a particularly good shot of young, macho meat sellers throwing steaks to one another outside a butchers’. None of these have the suggestion of being staged, none are the typical tourist ‘thumbs-up in front of the Taj Mahal’, yet all were snapped on a tour.
My trip the Mekong Delta made me realise that getting off the beaten track is just an attitude, not an absolute. That people aren’t just travellers or tourists, they can be travellers and tourists.
And although I wouldn’t be in any hurry to get on another spoon-fed trip here, that’s more about the appalling organisation of the last one. I vow to try not to let travel snobbery cloud my judgement into thinking that these trips don’t provide people with a view of the ‘authentic’ country. You may only be seeing only one angle, and at that what someone wants you to see, but that doesn’t make it any less real.
Bananas for sale at Can Tho's famous floating market
