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What is it about travel that makes other people tell you you're doing your vacation all wrong? A couple of weeks ago, a clerk in a store gently chided me for bringing books on a vacation after I mentioned stocking up on ebooks during a conversation about my Kindle. (I refrained from throttling her.) Also, when I posted on Ask.Metafilter a few months back seeking information on a private guide for South Wales and explained a few things about where I wanted to go, I got someone bitching at me for wanting to go to Carmarthen*, and someone else bitching at me for not renting a car and for wanting to hire a guide**.

Not to mention that every time you go onto a travel site and fail to avoid reading comments, you find a war between the hotel people, the hostel people, and the couch surfers, all of whom know what REAL travel is and they know that you're not doing it!

* He apparently missed where I said that I WENT TO COLLEGE THERE and wanted to go back for nostalgia's sake.

** I explained I'd hired private guides before and that I loved it - you're not on a herd tour, and you get someone who know way more about the area than you do to introduce you stuff they love about their area that's not in guidebooks. But, you know, GOD FORBID I BE A TOURIST OR SOMETHING.

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...I haven't encountered that level of advice-i-tude. Carmarthen was great when

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...I haven't encountered that level of advice-i-tude. Carmarthen was great when <user="nineweaving"> and I were there years ago!

Did you find a guide? I've always wanted to try that. I've had mixed success with the show-up-foreign-place and hire taxi driver for the day method. I know there is a movement toward local guide services in Paris and I think London, where you meet someone at a cafe and they show you around their neighborhood or whatever place you've agreed on.

As for books and guides, the more the better, and the older the better IMO. I mean, yes of course one wants current information. It can be really cool to envision what was there before the supermarket or to know which roads are the oldest ones in and out of town centers and use those instead. Fiction too.

I usually have books with me that have nothing to do with where I am. Not to the Surrealist extent, but totally unrelated.

And even if Carmarthen were a complete pit, I'd be seeing it through the glasses of nostalgia and would be all "Oooh, there's the pub we all got drunk at when the rugby team sang songs!" and "That was where that chippy was!" and so on.

I found this guy (the site makes it sound like a group of guides, but it's just one guy as far as I can tell). So far he's sounded great in email, and we ended up booking him for two days - one when he picks us up in Tenby and we sightsee our way to Cardiff via Carmarthen, and the next day when he'll pick us up and take us around places outside of Cardiff that we couldn't easily get to.

ETA: I also downloaded The Innocents Abrad to my Kindle. I almost always take it with me on vacation, because it reminds me that tourists have ever and always been the same. XD

Edited 2010-10-01 22:48 (UTC)

Urg, that was the lady next to me on the plane to San Diego who...I don't even know what she did, but she didn't read, and that was the important part!

Getting a local guide sounds like a fantastic way to see places. I'd certainy do it if I could afford it! Even with just group walking tours of cities I've learnt so much in just a few hours, so I can imagine having a proper guide would make the whole experience so much more interesting \o/

Metafilter is all about bitching at someone for being wrong, not just on the topic of your vacation. ;) (The site is fabulously useful, but, but, it is just the way it's been, and I've been a member there for 11 years.)

Hiring a local guide in a country where guidebooks and signposts are freely available would not have occurred to me... but whatever floats your boat. The only thing about a vacation is that you should enjoy it - if you do, it counts as a win. _Whatever_ floats your individual boat.

The point of a guide is that they know of things that aren't in the guidebooks. :) It's like if you came here, I could take you to eat at the almost literal hole-in-the-wall Mexican place run out of someone's garage (grandfathered in when zoning laws said you couldn't do that any more), and show you the small tree beside Highway 30 that someone decorates with seasonal and holiday-appropriate decorations, but neither of them would be in the guidebook.

And if you were driving, you wouldn't see either of them: the restaurant because it's in a neighborhood where there's no reason for you to go, and the tree because you'd be too busy paying attention to the road and coping with unfamiliar traffic signals to see it.

That's why I like getting a guide.

I like to explore for myself, but I totally get your point: I love visiting friends and letting _them_ take me around (or taking my friends around places I know) - but it hadn't occurred to me to ask a stranger to do it.

And now I want to go on holiday...

I don't know, but it drives me nuts! I get the same thing about spending time on the Internet. I mean, maybe I could understand it if I was, I don't know, spending my entire Hawaiian vacation indoors on World of Warcraft or something, but a) I'm not, I just want to be able to keep up with e-mail, and b) even if I was, who exactly would I be hurting?

It's not a proper vacation unless you follow the One True Recipe!

a clerk in a store gently chided me for bringing books on a vacation

But ... but ... what is the point of a vacation if you can't have books?! *baffled*

I DON'T KNOW!!!!!

I am so very, very baffled. WTF, I say. W. T. F.

I was never into hired guides until we went to Costa Rica and I realized that in that kind of environment it was totally possible to miss the six-foot-long bright red birds right above you until a much more experienced spotter pointed them out. There wouldn't have been much point going out without a guide.

When I got to accompany Dad back to Tanzania when I was in college (he was invited to give a talk at a conference in Nairobi), we ended up spending a week traveling in the Serengeti with a driver-guide. He was AWESOME at spotting wildlife - we even spotted stuff that other tourist vehicles hadn't, so we weren't always surrounded by lots of tourist cars.

He was also interesting himself - his dad had been a veterinarian to the local Maasai settlement when he was growing up, so he grew up with the Maasai kids and spoke their language. (ETA: He was also a native black Tanzanian, in case I gave the impression that he was European-descended.)

Edited 2010-10-04 02:44 (UTC)

I think travel is one of those subjects that's like child-raising and every medical condition ever--everyone has opinion, which they will tell you whether you want to hear it or not, and only their way of doing things is right.

a clerk in a store gently chided me for bringing books on a vacation

...does this person not understand the concept of having down-time during a trip? Or, I don't know, the idea that you might actually get stuck somewhere and want something to do while you wait?

Then again I can't fathom going out of the house without a book, let alone across the world, so maybe I'm the weird one.

I have no idea what she does when the plane is delayed. Probably annoy the hell out of the person sitting next to her trying to read a book, especially because she can't conceive of wanting to read a book more than wanting to talk to her.

So how much do you want to bet that clerk has never run across the concept of reading for fun, and thinks that the library is where you go when you get detention in school? (An idea which drives me nuts btw, especially since at one point I was the person in charge of the little monsters. Fun times substitutes have...)

I suspect so. Reading is work, why would you do that on vacation?

If I can manage it, I'm totally going to try to get a private guide for wherever I go next year, which would mitigate a lot of my concerns about traveling alone/language/missing the "good stuff".

I highly recommend it! Fairly expensive, especially if they have their own car, but if you think of it as renting a car for two days and some extra for a person who knows where to go, it feels better. XD

Mom and I hired a guide for the two days we were in Paris, and it was great- he could tell us about local customs that we'd never have known, know what restaurants to go to that weren't overrun with tourists, and teach us how to navigate the Metro and bus system.

But.. surely people don't travel without books. What do they do on planes and when they're waiting for things?

I'd never thought of the private guide, but it sounds like a wonderful idea. I always get a lot more out of traveling when I'm with someone who knows the place really well.

They annoy those of us who brought books!

My mom hired a private guide one visit, and it was such a good experience that we've done it several more times. We give them general guidelines as to what we like and don't like, then turn them loose on the itinerary. It's been good so far!

I don't even leave the house to go to the shops without a book, let alone going on holiday without one (or six)! It's impossible to spend an entire vacation doing things one after another, at some point there has to be some quiet time where a book would be handy, if only to give your feet a rest. :)

As for Carmarthen, I don't see what's wrong with visiting it even if it wasn't for nostalgia. It has a castle, an least one old church and is surrounded by the typical green hilly landscape of Wales, I could easily spend a couple of days there with a sketchpad and some comfortable boots.

It's sad that so many people think you can't have a "proper" holiday unless you spend all your time within 10 foot of a swimming pool or are frying yourself on a beach along with 10,000 other people that you pointedly aren't interacting with.

It seems that either you're supposed to be traveling with the herd and doing everything they're doing, or you have to be backpacking, hitching rides, and couchsurfing to meet the "real" people and share in their "real" lives, or you're Doing It All Wrong.

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