I appreciate your honesty, Nicole. As mg's subsequent post implies, there is a certain expectation that REAL traveling is about the exploration and "purity" of the place you travel to. But how much of that assumption is propogated by marketers (e.g. REI, North Face, Patagonia) selling Urbanites $350 Gore-Tex rain jackets that will be lucky to see rain, let alone foreign rain.
But, mg, gotta say, part of me goes "No shit! You go! Everywhere we (first-world humans, not just Americans) go, we turn the place into a reflection of where we came from." But it is sort of the Heisenberg uncertainity principle of travel. I.e. by going somewhere to see how other people live, no matter how "pure" your intentions, you alter the behavior and lives of the people you visit. Isn't that only fair since most of us tour/travel with the intention of self-alteration (not to be confused with self-mutiliation while visiting WeWak, New Guinea)?
I always liked the David Lee Roth Land's Edge lyrics:
Now take the traveler and the tourist
The essential difference is
The traveler don't know where he's goin'
And the tourist don't know where he is
Small world till they lose your luggage, tho'
Yet, another part of me thinks it unfair to completely leave the "natives" out of the culpability calculation. This world's disparity of wealth makes it only reasonable for a guy in Thailand dragging fat-assed Russian tourists around in a rickshaw to dream of the day he has his own car (aka CO2-belching taxi) and strive to "re-distribute" some Russian rubles into his pocket of bhats?
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