How Tourism is Fcking Up the World (And What You Can Do About It)
Hello and welcome back to the Unpacked Traveler Podcast, where we unpack the wonders and challenges of long term travel so you can feel empowered to embrace this lifestyle in your most confident way. Hello, my God, it feels so weird. Just wanted to say how crazy it feels to record a podcast. It takes so much confidence.
I'm trying to build that in me. I still have the impostor syndrome. Like, what the fuck you're doing right now? But anyway, I'm here. The ultimate goal is to inspire you to travel and just open up about this very, very interesting lifestyle.
And I don't care if nobody will listen to it, I will listen, I'm having fun and I'm doing what I love, which is talking about travel while traveling also, which is great. So welcome. Yeah. Today's episode is very, very interesting. We're going to talk about a topic that honestly I was saving for the next season because I think it's very sensitive is a little bit polemic, but I think honestly there's no way not to talk about it. Really.
We have to talk about it's really important that we mention it, which is just like how tourism is fucking up the world. wait, no, no, no, it's not. It's not only that. Okay, we're going to talk about the different styles of travel. We're going to talk about slow travel and fast travel and why everybody hates tourists. Yeah, so, I was in Prague last last weekend doing a fast travel kind of thing, which is not my my preferred style, And I'm going to talk about what is fast travel and what is slow travel.
But yeah, we were just in the subway and my cousin was holding her backpack behind her back, which is like where a backpack should be. Like, look at the name. Backpack should be in the back, right? No, but then a girl just starts, like in in Czech. She starts just complaining about the fact that we are holding her backpacks in our bag. And I'm like, Please teach us how to hold a backpack in the subway. What was the problem? And she's like, No, because this is not the polite way.
And then like she started speaking English because we were, of course, not understanding her in Czech. And she she was telling the right way to hold a backpack, was holding it on the floor because it was unpolite for the other people in the subway. And then her husband, they were really stressed maybe about something else, you know, like, yeah, when people are stressed, maybe something else is happening also. But anyways, her husband just turns up and say, Fucking stupid tourists. And then we were like, Honestly, we were laughing because how funny this was. But also how, how just disrespectful but honest.
And that got me thinking, you know, like there are many, many places in Europe where people just hate tourism, hate tourists. I know if you guys seen it, there was a meme or like a video going on on Tik Tok or Instagram a couple of months ago or maybe weeks ago, of the tourists in Barcelona, they were having like cafes in coffee shops and then somebody threw water in them. Or like many people threw water in.
The tourists just saying like, leave, leave, go back to your country or something like that. And I think it's nice to talk about it because they're not all wrong. Honestly, I think I'm yeah, I just try to understand both aspects and both sides of this fight or argument or. Yeah, I think everybody has multiple sides and multiple points of view and that's a very interesting one for me to analyze because traveling is what I want to do and what I do for my life, you know? So and while traveling, I've come up and met a lot of people and we talked about it and many of the travel blogs and travel vloggers that I follow, they are also talking about this subject.
So so why not? Yeah, that was the intro. Let's get started. So yeah, I'm going to start talking about the difference between slow travel and fast travel. So when we fast travel, the definition is that we are fast traveling. Wow.
So are you just like traveling short periods in several places. It’s more like, quantity over quality of travel. You know, most people who do that, they're working for like normal jobs and they have like a month of vacation.
And in this vacation, they'll have like two weeks of traveling, two weeks of resting in their country. And they have to make the most of these two weeks. So, of course, it's a very, very common and honestly, the most known way of traveling, especially abroad, is the fast travel, because also it's expensive.
So we wouldn't travel. When we travel shorter periods, we spend less money. So it's obviously very, very, very common in this type of traveling. People usually go to the most touristic places and big cities and very famous destinations.
And this is like what tourism is all about. You go to the places where you know it's going to be safe. You know, there is a lot of I don't know, Tik Toks or YouTube videos telling you of the tips and all the places to go, restaurants to eat. So of course, it makes things easy and makes things faster and just safer.
And we are less afraid to do this type of traveling because of the amount of information there is out there about it. So when we go to Paris and we go visit the Eiffel Tower, when we go to, I don't know, Las Vegas and we go to like the the strip, like the main street that I forgot the name. So these is the most common way of traveling. And honestly, the one that I don't like and I'm going to just just talk a little bit about the goal of this podcast. It’s not only to empower you to travel, but also empower you to travel the way you want, in the way you like and the way it matches your values.
Okay, so I'm not talking shit about fast travel just because I don't like. I think there's a lot of people that can connect to this way of traveling and maybe their only possibility of them traveling and getting out of their country is doing that. So yeah, just like understand yourself. I'm here for you to just understand that there are several ways of traveling because I honestly didn't.
I thought the fast travel was the only way that I could travel and see the world. But then I found out slow travel, which is my favorite, and I'm going to talk about it. So, yeah, solo travel is just kind of obvious. It's when we travel longer periods to fewer places. So we decide to spend, I don't know, maybe a month or maybe three weeks or maybe over than a month in places.
And that gets us to face a little bit more of the cultural change and embrace a little bit more of the culture that we're settling in. We get to experience more local places. We get to go less to the very touristic spots. We get to get more relaxation because we're not in a rush all the time. We get to have bad days and just have a free day of not going out of the hotel or the house or whatever we are staying in. It's just personally, it takes away the pressure that I have to be happy every day and enjoying my day every day, because that's not life.
Of course, even when we're traveling, we're having bad days and it just allows me to have these bad days and not feel guilty of not enjoying enough. But I honestly feel more at home when I do long travels. I know it's a bit of because of my personality, I get to blend in really easily with places and it's like a that animal. I think it's chameleon Chameleon. I don't know the way to say it in English, but that that changes colors when it goes to places anyway, I'm fucking that and I get there is a lot of people who are not.
There's a lot of people who are also like me. And again, this is only for you to understand better yourself so you can understand better your way of traveling. But I personally feel more at home if I get to stay longer in places I don't know. It just like creating this routine, getting to know like the local restaurant, the local favorite market. I don't know. After a little like three weeks maybe in a place we already have our favorites.
We already settled a routine we got used to. The weather for me is just, yeah, I get more the home feeling If I'm staying longer, then if I'm staying in just short periods of time. So yeah, another good point about slow travel versus fast travel is that we get to spend actually less money. I know we're spending longer periods so we might spend a bit more on stays, but that's not all true. When we go to like the very famous areas and very touristic areas, the prices are actually higher, especially if we go to like this big chain hotels or hostels. They're more expensive than the local areas would be.
So honestly, we actually save money by staying in the non touristic areas and doing this slower travel also because of course the restaurants are going to be more expensive and less real and less cultural, you know, like we're not even supporting the local economy. We might be supporting the American economy because when we go travel to these very big touristic places, maybe there is a hotel chain that’s American or maybe there is like McDonald's, KFC, Starbucks, you know, like it's really funny when people go out of their country to visit a new culture and they actually do the same stuff that they're doing in their home country. I don't know. For me, that's really interesting. I get it right. We need safety, we need cozy, we need to feel at home. We need a bit of that home feeling when we are away, especially if we're in very, very different places than ours.
But so yeah, I think another point of, of just doing this slow travel is that embracing the local culture, spending less money and just supporting the local economy and supporting the local culture. So there is a very, very polemic topic about does tourism killing the local culture of places Because as Yeah, I was listening to, to a video and that got me thinking. But also when I travel, of course I see that we go to a place, we go to a very different place, I don't know, in Thailand, I've never been to Thailand, but that's the video that I've heard. Or Prague. I was just in Prague. We go to those very different places from the country that we are from and then we're there.
And there's only the things that we've seen. We've seen coffee shops very cute and classy and and basic and, you know, oatmilk coffee shops. And then we see a McDonald's and then we see a KFC. I don't know, you know, like, where are the stuff from the locals, from the culture. They're just doing that for the sake of tourism, you know, like so I'm getting off topic. And that brings me to another subject about, you know, tourism and why sometimes it's not the best, which is Overtourism.
So I mean, that's kind of obvious, but I'm going to define what Overtourism is, which is when a lot of travels, a lot of sorry, a lot of tourists just go to one place and it causes problems for the locals, for the environment, for the tourist themselves. It's just super fucking crowded. You don't get to even go to the popular places and take your beautiful Instagram picture because there's so many fucking people. And if that's bad for the tourists, if the tourists go and hate the tourists because it's so crowded, imagine how the locals feel.
So honestly, I don't blame that girl in the subway who were talking shit up for us because it's a reality for them. You know, like you go to Paris, you go to Rome, especially European countries in the summer. It's just so fucking crowded. Imagine living there. Imagine having to take the subway to go to work in Paris and the subway is full not because of the people who are working, but because of the tourism.
There is also, like, everything, again, there's bad sides, good sides, a lot of different points of view. I'm just showing a point of view that's really, really for me that's really interesting. You know, I'm going to, of course, give you some tips how to maybe avoid overtourism, how to embrace slow travel in in your way. But yeah, I'm going to first talk about the shit and then I'll talk about the solutions. Okay. So yeah, the fucking overtourism besides the quality of living of the locals just going down so much because of this stress, because of the the over people.
How do I say that? Over people in the subways. They're sometimes actually pushed out of their homes because of the increasing rents. Like can you believe that like you're there living in your city happily and then they're actually starting to rise the rents because of the tourism, because they know the tourists will have more money to pay than you. And then your houses are like the house that you were living in just becomes an Airbnb and then it's just crazy. That's what what's happening everywhere. I know the fault is not only because of the tourists, it's because of capitalism.
But let's not get into that, okay? That's too much of a conversation for us to have in the fucking podcast. I would have to invite somebody else to talk about it. But as you know, this is the tourism and traveling perspective, which is like, fucking sad, you know, like it's sad. It's sad especially if you, like you're living in a place for years and years, you’ve built your life, you've built your family and then you get pushed out because of that.
It's kind of sad, honestly. It's one reality. I just don't want to get the idea that tourism is bad and traveling is bad. That's not what I'm doing here. I just want to open up your mind about the reality of travel and then talk about how we can solve it, how we can be a little bit more mindful when we travel and when we go Europe in the summer.
I don't know. And honestly, it's not only bad for the locals, it's bad for the tourists too. As again I said, we hate when we go to a place and is full of tourists. We go to Greece, take our picture in these beautiful white houses (white houses). It's so weird to say that.
And then there's so many people that we cannot take our picture. That's a big white people problem, but that happens a lot. I've heard. I've never been to Greece again, but, you know, like that happens and we got to experience less of the traditional local culture because we have so, so many international people, so many tourists. The prices are huge and high.
And you see everywhere, there's trash in the street. I don't know. I don't know. I'm just saying you wouldn't want that. There are better ways to travel and safer ways and the relaxed, more relaxed ways. I know I'm telling you this slow travel is my favorite type.
So of course I'm going to tell you that. But of course, do your type of travel. There is ways to avoid the overtourism and overcrowded tourist spots, which is super simple. Just don't go in the high season.
Just go. Don't go in like Europe. If you go into summer, it's worse. If you maybe go in the winter, it might be a little bit colder, but you know, it's okay, go in, I don't know, spring, fall. Just just search up on Google or chatgpt which is great to search up.
When is that low season in the city that you want to go and that's already helping you a lot because you're going to have a very nicer experience and travel experience. But it's also helping the local culture and the locals to have a more slower to... so they can., Idon't know how to say that for them, that's going to only be easier for them. Sorry. Yeah. So yeah, as I've already said, one of the tips on how to be a little bit more mindful with your traveling, I'm going to mention the other ones of course. And one of them is really, really interesting for me is just like go into less popular destinations.
I know we want to go to Paris and take our picture in the of Eiffel Tower, but it's so much nicer when we actually go to less known places. We actually get to experience a lot more of the culture. Again, we get to spend less money and it's so much nicer not to see tourists all the time and like people from our country all the time, because when we go travel, we want the new, you know, like everybody wants the new. When we travel, everybody wants to, I don't know, see French people speaking French and having their baguette, I don't know. So why don't you go to a smaller French city or a smaller town and it's a bit more I mean, I talk from personal experience.
It's a lot more scary when you actually do that because of the lack of information and the lack of tips on TikTok are, you know, is a it's a bit more scary. It's like we're diving into the unknown So it's scary. It's scary, but it's so much nicer. I've been to Paris and also I've been to a very small village in France called Briançon and it was so much nicer when I went to Briançon. It was just smaller.
Everybody was nicer to each other. They don't hate tourists. So you actually get a lot of a lot more help from the locals. They're much sweeter and nicer to you knowing that you're from abroad.
It's just an overall nicer experience. And yeah, it helps if we speak a little bit of the local language. But also nowadays we have Google Translator, we have Google Maps, we have our phone.
Our phone is a very, very nice tool that helps traveling so much. And yeah, just be thankful and make use of your phone. I really want to do also also a list of tools and apps and how your phone can help you when you're traveling.
If you want that, just help me and let me know, okay? I think it's really important that I get you guys's response so I know that I'm not speaking to a computer and I'm not being hated for talking about very this kind of topic that is sensitive, you know? So if you could like the podcast sharing with your friends, tell me on my DMs on Instagram that you really are enjoying and you want more and let me know if you want the list of tools and how your phone can help you on your travels. It's already on my to do list, but it's really much more. I do it with much more passion if I know that's going to actually be helpful for somebody. Okay. Other ways to be a little bit more mindful on your traveling is just...
trying to research a little bit of the local norms and the cultural traditions. It's not that you have to give up on yours and just do what they understand as right. But it's really, really nice when we get to understand a least their culture and educate yourself about their culture. You know, it's it shows a little bit respect and consideration. And, you know, there is another topic of like learning a few words in their language.
In my experience, I haven't done that. I feel like I'm really a bad person, a bad traveler, because I don't sometimes try to learn the language. I don't know. My brain is just not there. I went to Prague. I tried to learn their yes and no, and it was actually reverse.
You have to say no to say yes. And I was for me like, okay, I'll just use my Google in English. And it got me it got me through my trip. But it's just like, if you're interested in their culture, just learn a few things.
It's really nicer when we get to actually open our brains to new knowledge. And another topic is just like supporting the local economy. So try to go to local restaurants, try to stay in local owned accommodation instead of the big chains, big American chains, try to eat thir culturally known food in a very small, maybe restaurant, family owned. It's really like it's helping them if you don't just go there in and help America. And yeah, just try to do authentic stuff there and don't be afraid to.
No, no, no. It's not actually that. Be afraid, but do it anyway. That's that's my thing. We're always going to be afraid of the unknown and of the new experiences. But just do it. Just do it. Trust yourself.
You got this. If something goes wrong, you know, you’ll figure it out. You know, if you don't like it, well, you try again. Like there is nothing that can go so fucking wrong to make you actually... your fears are always worse than reality. That's my, that’s my experience, your fears are worse than actually what's happening.
Trust yourself and do it, you know. And I can't believe I've spoken for 20 fucking minutes. I It's so crazy. The third episode, guys, I don't know if you can tell, but, I'm still a little nervous. I'm still little like, it's hard for me to keep on going on the same subject without stopping for 20 minutes. I do have to do some cuts.
So you you might have seen some cuts. I don't know. Yeah. I just want to say thank you for listening.
I really, really appreciate your support. Traveling is my dream. I don't want to discourage anyone. I just want to show the reality of traveling, the wonders and challenges.
That's the fucking intro, which is real. Like I'm not. I don't fucking care about the Instagram pics and the the cute way of traveling. You know, traveling is great, it’s amazing. When we get to experience these different cultures, understand a little bit more of ourselves through it, understand that we're never weird, we're never weird. Dude, if you feel like you're weird in your social group and your family in your culture, it's just that you haven't found your your thing.
Your people. Traveling for me, it just helps me understand that the world is too big for us to be weird. We are small, you know, it just made me a lot more humble and a lot more confident when we travel and we get to know all of these different things and we come back from our travels with, fuck, the unpacking the bags again. We unpack our bags and we unpack a new version of ourselves and how beautiful that is. I'm getting the chills right now because that's all what this podcast is about.
It’s about finding ourselves through our travels and getting to know this beautiful planet that we live in and getting to know all these beautiful cultures that we have around us and learning to respect them and be mindful to them and respect ourselves and be mindful to ourselves too. So this was a lot about the fact that there's the slow travel and the fast travel. But the final conclusion that I want to give is understand yourself.
What do you prefer? What are your skills? Do you think you have the skills that it takes to stay a month in an unknown place? Would you rather start small and maybe stay a week and do the fast travel instead? Amazing. Do it. Do you care about the environment so you can follow the steps? Amazing. You don't. That's okay. You do you.
You don't have to, you know, there's no pressure. I think this is the overall idea. You know, get to know yourself before and your travel is going to match that. And if you want help doing that, just let me know. I can help you understand yourself and your ways of traveling. There's so many and all of them are so beautiful.
If you think that you want to travel, you just don't know how to start. I'm going. Also, there's another idea I really want to prepare.
Like a list of journaling topics or just like thinking about it. Questions that can help you understand yourself better and your ways of traveling better so you can have a nicer and chiller travel that matches your personality. I think that's really nice.
I haven't done that yet and I imagine that when this episode is going to be out, I will not have done it. But it's an it's an idea if you're interested in about that, just also let me know. Your support counts and I really appreciate you listening.
So thank you so much for listening so far and I hope you enjoy your week and your travels. See you in the next one.
2024-11-10 23:55
