Travellers of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your guide books!

This "Hello" is probably overdue.

If you read nothing else in this post: THANK YOU!!!

A few days after the Seven Habits went up, I was reading Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Out of nowhere, this quote appeared, which I think most of the people seeing this will smile at:

“(Touristification) is my term for an aspect of modern life that treats humans as washing machines, with simplified mechanical responses - and a detailed user’s manual. It is the systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness from things, trying to make matters highly predictable in their smallest details. All that for the sake of comfort, convenience, and efficiency.

What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, or a flâneur, touristification is to life; it consists in converting activities, and not just travel, into the equivalent of a script like those followed by actors. We will see how touristification castrates systems and organisms that like uncertainty by sucking randomness out of them to the last drop - while providing them with the illusion of benefit.”

And I suspect that the overwhelming reaction to the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Travellers last week is a sign: there are a lot of people in the world who are travellers, and are underserved by a lot of the “travel writing” being pumped into our feeds or published as “guide books,” and who retch and convulse at the thought of taking a package holiday, all meals and drinks included, to anywhere.

If that is you, then welcome. Let’s be friends.

Going back a few days…

Last week, I was in a public square in Budapest. It was nearly 9 p.m., and Hungarian children were running around in the playground while their parents drank delicious-looking wine at a picnic table and laughed with each other in the heat wave. I sat down on a bench, opened a lined notebook, and wrote down ten random things I think travellers do that make them better than tourists. I left the park, went to my apartment, and typed them into a document. Then, I kept writing, words just pouring out. The next day, after a cursory review, I hit “Publish,” closed my laptop, and went on with my day, figuring that, at the very least, it could do no harm.

I should do that more often, as that’s apparently how posts go viral.

Thousands and thousands of reads, tons of new subscribers and followers (and my first paid subscriber who I don’t know - THANK YOU DT!), it is safe to say that something about the Seven Habits of Highly Successful Travellers clearly struck a chord.

Reading the comments, we all seem to feel a few different things:

1. Overtourism is actually a problem.

2. Travellers, though, can be part of the solution.

3. Tourists and travellers are fundamentally different in how they approach being in a new place (and, probably, being at home). We can all work at being better travellers; we should not work at all at being tourists.

4. These are not secrets; keeping travel advice close to our chests will not give us any advantage. Indeed, the more widely we can share these ideas, the better the travel world will be overall.

People shared their own approaches to travel that matched the habits - long searches for toothpaste in Malaysia and peanut butter in Budapest; non-religious people making churches a core spiritual part of their travel; book suggestions; even someone who feels the same way as me about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. These were people who live and travel differently - with more attention, compassion, and thought, and a greater focus on responsibility when we encounter new people and different cultures.

Tons of comments had excellent ideas and habits that I didn’t think of (but will include in a follow-up). Travellers seem to have our own ways of working into new places; while we all aim to learn, and we focus on the people, we all seem to approach travelling in different, beautiful, ways. The most impressive thing from my perspective: there is a core community of travellers here that is eager to connect around travelling, around certain principles of living and behaving, and we are seemingly not yet served.

So I WILL write a follow-up with more ideas soon (perhaps crowd-sourced from many of you, if you don’t mind), but I need to say that you will not get many more of these kinds of posts. What you can expect in the future from me:

1. You can expect travel writing that is heavy on words, experiences, and stories.

2. I’m going to be writing about places and people as completely and truly as I possibly can. I will pour my heart out here. If you go to a place that I write about, my hope is that you will be able to identify places simply from the descriptions (and, of course, addresses). You should also be able to identify people - not general, hazy descriptions but, with permission, specific people you should seek out because they are amazing. (Habit two: focus on the people!) This is what I think makes real travel writing: getting a sense of the place and its residents. If this is the case, to totally bastardize the Dali quote, the difference between other travel writing and Souvenirs is that this is travel writing.

3. What you will not find: clickbait notes that try to game the Substack algorithm, 72-hour listicles, or photo-heavy pieces about how amazing my life is living in XYZ city and how, if you become a paid subscriber, I can show you how to do the same thing. I want to grow, but I want to grow slowly, by meeting my own standards of sharing quality - not by producing crap just to get eyeballs.

I want to write my truth, and connect with people who like it. I’m not writing for people who want to live vicariously; I’m writing for the people who want to live, and looking to connect with people who are living vibrant lives.

If this is you, then again, welcome. I really, truly hope our lives intersect.

Returning to the beginning: THANK YOU for all of your follows, subscriptions, likes, and most of all your kind and thoughtful words supporting this little piece of the internet. It means the world to me.

In a few days: travelling to Pisa, including the restaurant that lets homeless people sleep on its covered porch at night to keep them out of the rain; the other Leaning Tower of Pisa, and how not to knock it over; completely unsupported conjectures that Galileo’s apprentices may have started the “holding up the tower” photo phenomenon that grips 97.3% of tourists who see it; the gellato maker who suspected there was a city-wide conspiracy against him because he made better gellato than the politically-connected shop across the Arno river; and a story about a basket of oranges in a church (plus an ancient, vague Italian recipe for excellent limoncello that involves “magic”).

Is that a listicle teaser? Crap. I hope not. This better be good…

With love and gratitude,

Andrew

Bologna Benches