The End of Elsewhere : Travels Among the Tourists

Rating:
Summary: Bus tours - the tenth circle of Hell
Review: "To stop being a tourist, sometimes all you have to do is start standing still."

Canadian author Taras Grescoe understands the impulse to travel. A "non-proselytizing secular humanist," he has spent his life hopping continents, seeking increasingly rare unspoiled pools of exotic culture so popular among travel writers. His first effort, Sacre Blues, irreverently explored the Quebec landscape and citizenry of modern times.

However, in The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists, Grescoe stays resolutely on the beaten path, examining the impact mass tourism imposes upon the planet. Over nine months, he travels a Eurasian "tourist rut," ranging from Land's End in Spain to China's End of the Earth. Along the way, he strives to comprehend his inability to stay still.

A born storyteller, Grescoe is a disarming presence, cynical and self-effacing along the lines of Paul Quarington's Galapagos reminiscence The Boy on the Back of the Turtle. He is candid about his faults, including being wildly superstitious and having a past drug problem. His flaws serve to heighten the tale, as the trek begins to take its toll on both his beliefs and his sobriety.

Enjoying the journey at first, Grescoe wryly examines the surreality of group tours. The forced infantilization of a bus tour threatens to drive him crazy, while a low-key cruise is more pleasurable than expected, as "the combination of self-indulgent leisure and directed movement was the perfect formation of work-ethic sybaritism, like having sex in the afternoon while your clothes tumble-dry in the basement."

Intermingled amid fascinating asides on the origins of religious pilgrimages, guidebooks, and all-inclusive resorts, a bizarre assortment of excursionists make themselves known. Shirley MacLaine devotees line the 850-kilometre trek of Spain's Camino. Extreme athletes race up the Matterhorn. "Lager louts" vomit throughout the Mediterranean, while disenfranchised "trustafarians" trek through Asia armed with copies of Alex Garland's The Beach.

As Grescoe follows the "post-hippie banana-pancake route," the book's sardonic atmosphere shifts to despair, matching his increasing frustration with tourist locations consisting of "the same commercialized shuck." Sightseers become abusive, even violent, "finding themselves among the kinds of people they jostle with for standing room on the subway back home."

By the end, Grescoe's narrative expands beyond mere comic commentary a la Bill Bryson, evolving into a travel version of Rachel Carson's environmental masterpiece Silent Spring. Cultures become systematically sterilized and packaged for mass consumption, and the concept of `elsewhere' grows increasingly irrelevant. Nearing journey's end, he sees "the dispossessed being ushered from their land for failing to serve up a pleasing simulacrum of their culture," as Chinese soldiers remove locals from a tourist area.

Grescoe does not condemn tourism out of hand. It is bulk tourism's lack of connection with the world that inevitably befouls other cultures. As package tourists slavishly obey their Lonely Planet guides, local citizenry is pushed to the fringes, alienated within their own country, and plunged into urban slums.

Grescoe's hopeful cure? Slow down. Travel is fine when the ultimate aim is appreciation, rather than recreation. A tourist becomes a traveller only when bonds are formed and maintained. Grescoe's memoir, an important book, admits "it is a good thing to know how to use a guidebook. It's better, though, to know when to put it down."

Rating:
Summary: Bus tours - the tenth circle of Hell
Review: "To stop being a tourist, sometimes all you have to do is start standing still."

Canadian author Taras Grescoe understands the impulse to travel. A "non-proselytizing secular humanist," he has spent his life hopping continents, seeking increasingly rare unspoiled pools of exotic culture so popular among travel writers. His first effort, Sacre Blues, irreverently explored the Quebec landscape and citizenry of modern times.

However, in The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists, Grescoe stays resolutely on the beaten path, examining the impact mass tourism imposes upon the planet. Over nine months, he travels a Eurasian "tourist rut," ranging from Land's End in Spain to China's End of the Earth. Along the way, he strives to comprehend his inability to stay still.

A born storyteller, Grescoe is a disarming presence, cynical and self-effacing along the lines of Paul Quarington's Galapagos reminiscence The Boy on the Back of the Turtle. He is candid about his faults, including being wildly superstitious and having a past drug problem. His flaws serve to heighten the tale, as the trek begins to take its toll on both his beliefs and his sobriety.

Enjoying the journey at first, Grescoe wryly examines the surreality of group tours. The forced infantilization of a bus tour threatens to drive him crazy, while a low-key cruise is more pleasurable than expected, as "the combination of self-indulgent leisure and directed movement was the perfect formation of work-ethic sybaritism, like having sex in the afternoon while your clothes tumble-dry in the basement."

Intermingled amid fascinating asides on the origins of religious pilgrimages, guidebooks, and all-inclusive resorts, a bizarre assortment of excursionists make themselves known. Shirley MacLaine devotees line the 850-kilometre trek of Spain's Camino. Extreme athletes race up the Matterhorn. "Lager louts" vomit throughout the Mediterranean, while disenfranchised "trustafarians" trek through Asia armed with copies of Alex Garland's The Beach.

As Grescoe follows the "post-hippie banana-pancake route," the book's sardonic atmosphere shifts to despair, matching his increasing frustration with tourist locations consisting of "the same commercialized shuck." Sightseers become abusive, even violent, "finding themselves among the kinds of people they jostle with for standing room on the subway back home."

By the end, Grescoe's narrative expands beyond mere comic commentary a la Bill Bryson, evolving into a travel version of Rachel Carson's environmental masterpiece Silent Spring. Cultures become systematically sterilized and packaged for mass consumption, and the concept of 'elsewhere' grows increasingly irrelevant. Nearing journey's end, he sees "the dispossessed being ushered from their land for failing to serve up a pleasing simulacrum of their culture," as Chinese soldiers remove locals from a tourist area.

Grescoe does not condemn tourism out of hand. It is bulk tourism's lack of connection with the world that inevitably befouls other cultures. As package tourists slavishly obey their Lonely Planet guides, local citizenry is pushed to the fringes, alienated within their own country, and plunged into urban slums.

Grescoe's hopeful cure? Slow down. Travel is fine when the ultimate aim is appreciation, rather than recreation. A tourist becomes a traveller only when bonds are formed and maintained. Grescoe's memoir, an important book, admits "it is a good thing to know how to use a guidebook. It's better, though, to know when to put it down."

Rating:
Summary: Shrewdly observant and mordantly funny
Review: The End of Elsewhere is a wonderful book that engages the reader on several levels. Firstly, it is an entertaining travelogue, much in the style of Paul Theroux's non-fiction, shrewdly observant and mordantly funny. Grescoe follows the well-trodden paths of modern tourism, from a mock-pilgrimage in Spain, along an escorted bus tour and a Mediterranean cruise, to the remnants of the hippie drug trail in India and the sex tourists of Thailand.

The author interleaves his traveler's tales with just the right amount of historical and cultural context: the history of tourism from classical Greece to Cook's Tours, the perils of misleading travel guidebooks and the destructive capacity of eco-tourism, among other subjects.

The thoughtful reader will be lead inevitably to re-evaluate his own travel plans - and that, more than entertainment or information, makes this book a very worthwhile read.


Rating:
Summary: Very good but not excellent
Review: This unorthodox travelogue is almost as funny and informative as Bill Bryson's books. However, I have two gripes: first, Grescoe's understanding of history is sometimes unpardonably cliche (for example, when he writes about the Spanish Civil War); second, his use of very big words (examples from just one page, page 80: "lacustrian" and "rumbustious") is at first amusing but it quickly becomes pretentious. Four stars for sure but sorry, not five.