(no subject)

[telophase]

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.

Comments

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

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.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

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.)