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I love "backpacking". I have done many long trips to rather unusual parts of the world, almost always alone and "unguided". But lately I can't shake the feeling that it is becoming very difficult to find "real" information sources. With real I mean sources that will not shy away from saying it plainly when a city or area is shitty, ugly, not worth visiting, tourist trap etc but also will go out of its way to explore the unusual even when it is not always savory and entirely safe.
The typical guide books are just contend with giving a dispassionate list of every somewhat touristic part of the country, trying to be inoffensive as possible. I sometimes pirate the old Lonely Planets and the difference is day and night. If I buy a guide book it is because I want to be told the "insider" info which will be missing from the tourist office website. What use is it to produce a print version of everything I could find on google maps anyway?
Same goes for blogs. Perhaps this is more of an SEO issue but I used to be able to dig up plenty of amateur travel blogs or even forums full of people giving their unfiltered opinions and experiences. Now it is nigh impossible to sift through the "10 TOP EXPERIENCES" lists all regurgitating the same bullshit. Reddit is not a good replacement here, and Facebook backpacker groups are typically too inactive. I almost feel some nostalgia scrolling through some regional backpacker groups I used to be active in. They were great places to get up-to-date information and meet people. Now they are just dead. TripAdvisor and its forums are totally not a replacement here either. Why does every basic source about every random Colombian city keep going on about some graffiti street but not say a word about best clubs to dance with local girls? Is anyone actually going to these places for shitty graffiti?
But what is the culture war angle here? It is slight but I get the sense that the root cause of all this is the extreme global connectedness/homogeneity and disappearance of even the possibility of an adventure no matter how small. I can't escape the feeling that such "insider info" venues have disappeared because there is no demand for insider info anymore. Every remotely pretty place in the World has either already become dotted with a tourism infrastructure neatly exposed by airbnb/booking/tripadvisor/skyscanner/tinder or rapidly on its way. You can count on the locals drinking the same beverages, eating the same food, watching the same TV, dressing up in same fashion trends and living in same houses as you do. And if there is still a gritty or untamed side to it, it is considered almost rude to mention this. As if you are insulting the locals, as if you owe it to them to herd every foreigner to a couple carefully curated quarter away from anything interesting.
But then I have to wonder, what is even the point of traveling then? Were the decades between 1960s-2010s just a fluke or a transition period when most of the world became somewhat accessible through infrastructure development but did not assimilate into mundane sameness so completely yet? When you didn't need to be Lawrence of Arabia to see the world but it still took some self-selection of the risk taker personality? Should one consign oneself to using vacation time for skiing at resorts and hikes at well marked well frequented paths and just give up on the joy of discovering something genuinely foreign?
I realize fully that I am very incoherent. Perhaps I am just getting older and struggling to face up to the reality that I cannot just go to some forgotten part of the world with a return ticket two months later and "figure it out". I have responsibilities, vacation time is valuable, I can exchange money for convenience. I am writing this mostly to try to organize my thoughts and figure out if it is me that changed or the world.
P.S. please share with me if you know of any forums, bloggers, authors, publishers, youtubers honestly whatever that would prove me wrong and show adventure is alive and well at least somewhere. I really enjoy reading stuff like this
If you’re rich, Bhutan is still very good. There’s a $200 / person / day tourist tax, which keeps the riffraff out, and the government largely limits construction of lodging to well-established global 5* brands like Aman and Six Senses. They’re, in turn, forced to hire local guides (who are actually very competent, ime).
Civilization is creeping in, so you probably only have 5-10 years left, but the ruling class are keenly aware that preserving a certain charming pastiche backwardness (while also being very safe, clean and welcoming) is the future of the economy, and they act accordingly. It’s also a lot of fun to be in a Buddhist country that hasn’t yet been turned into a strip mall like the more developed parts of the rest of Southeast Asia.
Nice tip! Not yet rich but planning to be doing much better soon and enjoy DINK life for a couple years before kids. Gonna definitely check it out.
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Looks like a really interesting place and it should be right up my alley as a yogi. But dang, that's a hefty fee when accommodation and every other expense comes on top. Also, getting to Bhutan would be a pain due to needing at least 2-3 flights from where I live. Sigh.
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The rulers also decided that cryptocurrency is the future, and heavily invested in crypto mining.
Quietly, but infrastructure of such magnitude is not something that can be hidden. Something for people who worry how easily you can get away with AI development in coming Katechon Pact world.
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