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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
I still (as of 2016, when we had kids and stopped travelling adventurously) find it remarkably easy to get away from the tourist traps - just throw the guidebook away and go for a wander! There are a few places (like Venice and Florence) where the whole core city is now a tourist trap, but even somewhere like Granada you only need to get half a mile away from the Alhambra before hanging out with the students becomes more interesting than acting like a tourist. (I suspect this relies on you being young enough and having a good grounding in the local language). Places can also acquire a reputation for being dangerous that keeps the tourists away despite the actual crime levels being lower than most US cities - Naples (the city proper - not Pompeii/Ercolano/the Amalfi Coast) felt mostly tourist-free, and also safe to someone who grew up in south-east London.
The other problem, that a quick random sample of local culture will probably find locals imitating London/LA/NYC badly, is harder to fix. Hanging out with students is basically the same experience anywhere in the Christian or post-Christian world - only the architecture and the weather change from city to city. And if you speak to someone in thickly-accented, broken <local language> the response almost always comes back in thickly-accented, broken English. It may be boring, but it is victory.
This doesn't match my experience at all. Naples is full of crowds of tourists. Lots of locals too, but also lots of tourists.
That said, there's still cultural sites worth seeing even if they are suffering from success.
I was just in Naples. I agree. There are hoards of tourists. Absolute hoards. Unfortunately, I also don't think there is much worth seeing, at least compared to other places in Italy. It was, however, very um... unique.
Put it down as "Type 2 fun" maybe. While you won't actually enjoy any of the time you spend in Naples, maybe it's worth seeing just for the crowds, the trash, the obnoxious motor bikes, and how everyone you interact with tries to scam you just a little. Three days of boredom, annoyance, and squalor. A lifetime of stories!
Pompeii and the archeological museum are definitely worth a look. The castle and museum on the hill are also not bad. The way down from the hill is possibly the quietest part of the whole city. Most people take the funicular and motorcycles can't navigate the steps so it's just you, a small number of locals, and a few cats.
The pizza is also pretty tasty despite being very popular among tourists.
Overall I think it's worth a visit if only to see the sheer chaos that those people live in.
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