To be or not a tourist?

Range of Toruists

“A tourist is an ugly human being. You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day. From day to day, you are a nice person. From day to day, all the people who are supposed to love you on the whole do.”Small Places, Jamaica Kincaid

Miss Kincaid dedicates the first part of her novel to tell those who are considered foreigners in her land to tell her how disgusting they become when they turn from an ordinary person to a(n) ugly tourist.

In some sense I can’t deny that she’s right, tourists are ugly. To this point i’m becoming kind-of undecided of what is right or what is not because to being may diverge into two different forms, the one which portrays them as guests of honor and the one which places them as individuals with an attitude of growth. 

In a sense, to be a tourist it means to be someone who enjoys visiting another country with the hopes that there he/she are supposed to be treated as “kings/queens”; all they want is only a phone call away. We tend to go out into different countries hoping to relax and leave that life we commonly know from day-to-day. So, leaving your country is becomes a symbol of letting go that which holds you down week-by-week hoping that the days to come will only be filled with euphoric experiences that leave you wanting to return the moment the airplane lifts of or ships leaves port. The moment you arrive to your home, the thoughts of that trip begin to resound in your head to the point you believe that there was a new switch which was turned on in your sub-conscious, but you can’t really put your finger on it. This is what the second form of tourists do, they believe that traveling with purpose is the best way to do it.

Those who travel with purpose are the tourists which believe that traveling outside your borders - in this case physically - makes the individual appreciate the power that lies behind traveling. To travel is to find euphoria where it is not placed, I’ll explain. To live with a preset mind is to become another John Doe from the street, but to live with the notion that each day there is a new lesson to be learned, makes you transcend from the position of incompetent to whatever level you want to place yourself. Traveling with respect and compassion may make you into a completely new individual which you may not recognize at the end of such trip. Curious Journey Photo

As I mentioned, I can;t deny that she is right, most of the tourists are intrusive and egocentric individuals; but if we deny the access of these individuals to our place of origin, we deny the possibility of people getting to know who we are and why we are in such a place (economically, socially, and politically). Maybe one of them can make the change that they might be yearning to.