You’ve been planning your trip for the last 3 months and possibly dreaming about it for most part of the year. All those guide books you managed to skim during your escapes to the local library or bookstore made it a real challenge to synthesize centuries of culture and tradition into a super-efficient, carefully crafted tour that will have you retracing the steps of millions of tourists that have been to the big city before you. I had already written about this common travel trap in I could live here:
One could argue that the splendour of any famous landmark is constantly diluted by the ongoing attack of mass tourism, misguided by a market saturated of travel guides that most of the times reference the same top 10 or 20 landmarks not to be missed, while telling us every snippet of knowledge that travellers must know about these places, cancelling every attempt to make that experience unique.
As if facing the prospect of getting a diluted version of Paris was not bad enough, a recent analysis of the way that tourists and locals experience the same cities reveals that your quest to “experience the french lifestyle” is way off:
 Blue represents locals, Red tourists and yellow might be either. Notice dense blue clusters ignored altogether by tourists. Courtesy of Eric Fischer. Imagine being able to tag along whenever you visit a city and follow the average local on a typical evening of fun, culture and social interaction; “holding hands” so to speak, or as professor Yumi Janairo Roth of Colorado prefers, asking locals to share a tiny bit of their local knowledge by drawing a map on their hands. 
While Prof. Roth’s experiment is interesting, I prefer to learn from travel bloggers that have mastered the process of immersing themselves into whichever cultures they visit. At the top of my list are Lara & Terence from the Grantourismo blog who have made a profession out of mastering the local scene wherever they go in about 2 weeks. Of all the things they do, I find it fascinating how they can connect with locals that will share the best of their cities. Across the blogosphere the Local Travel movement is well represented (special shout out to Vicky of Going Local Travel). Their proponents suggest you should always try to experience a destination by discovering the places and activities enjoyed by locals so you can begin to understand their way of life. But how can you possibly figure out where the locals are and what they do?
If Benji Lanyado can manage to convince the rest of us, all you need is a mobile phone and the right tactics for what he calls Twitter Trips or trips where any plans are forsaken for up-to-the-minute recommendations collected from locals using Twitter. After more than a year of perfecting the practice he is certain that the notion of building a realtime guide based on feedback from locals connected to the same virtual channels you use can lead to more authentic experiences that reflect the zeitgeist of a city as opposed to whatever recommendations found in guidebooks, which may be months or even years stale. Hungry? Send a tweet with your location asking locals to recommend a restaurant nearby. Feeling adventurous? Venture into the city with nothing else but an alert from one of your local “followers” about a great venue.
Of course, not all recommendations have to be anonymous and perhaps the best part of this approach is the possibility of connecting with locals even if you didn’t know them in advance. A simple “loose” virtual connection can become a strong bond once two strangers meet face to face. This could very well be the motto of the new AFAR Connect (currently in private beta), a platform for travellers to define their travel ‘personality’ and connect with like-minded locals.
In the end, our ability as travellers to uncover the side streets where locals gather to buzz around all day, is perhaps the most critical skill to immerse ourselves into a new culture. Tools and tactics will probably continue to get better, but nothing will replace the fact that you have to meet a local, captivate them with your journey and listen to their stories. You should count your travels not by the number of places you visit, but the number of shared experiences with locals, as only these will have a lasting effect on you.
In a future post I’ll summarize a lot of things I’m learning these days about finding the best hosts wherever you go. If you have met a great host or love hosting travellers, please drop me a line to participate in a new project.
 coming soon: our guide to St. Lawrence Market, Toronto If you’ve been following our Global Culture Tour, you know our second destination is the St. Lawrence Market. A very lively neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, this area will also give us a great opportunity to explore interesting attributes that make places like these desirable to the global citizen. Could one of them be a good international bookstore where you can get your latest Monocle?
 coming soon: our guide to Coyoacán, México City Although I had already shown a little preview of our first photo shoot in Coyoacán, here is another teaser. One of the reasons I’ve delayed the posting of the final photos is because we were very fortunate to gain access to a museum in the area that will give this guide a very distinct visual identity. Our crew was back in this neighbourhood just a few days ago and soon you’ll be able to enjoy a very unique journey through one of the most serene areas of Mexico City.
I can’t believe we’re already halfway through October. It’s been a while since my last photo post on a Saturday. Hope you enjoy it.
Thanks to my friends at PlanetEye for the tools and the Mexico Tourism Board for the images, I was able to organize a collection of images depicting interesting regions that may not be as popular as the beaches. Again, just to make the point that tourism promotion is usually biased to send people on charters to the beaches, but there is far more depth to this and any country. At a time when everyone in the industry is wondering how to restore the glorious days, this is only one idea that deserves attention.
For best results, use the zoom controls (+/-) to get closer on the map and click on the markers to preview the images within that area. This is a very cool widget that will continue to be updated as I keep adding photos to the collection.
If you’ve been to Cancun, Vallarta, Los Cabos, Ixtapa, Acapulco, Mazatlan or Huatulco chances are you don’t know Mexico. Yes, you’ve enjoyed the privileged beaches, the top-notch hotels, a first-class experience and you fell in love with these places and the people that live in them. But you are probably missing the best part. As Manuel was saying a few days ago: “I dare you to find Holbox”. In reinventing tourism in mexico, I implied that all these beach destinations are going to have a really difficult time getting back on track:
Mexico has a privileged geography and has exploited it through the continuous development of its traditional hubs, usually beach destinations flocked by charters full of travellers that prepaid the entire experience back home. I believe those days are over, not because those people will no longer consider Mexico as an alternative and will gradually rediscover its benefits, but because there are far too many options outside of Mexico where the exact same experience is available: blue waters, white sand, palm trees, cheap drinks and lots of sun. The quintessential beach vacation. As people are forced to try other options, they will find them and will have no problem in evaluating their loyalties.
But because of the “celebrity” status of these destinations, people tend to stop looking further or deeper into Mexico. And there is a lot of Mexico that you should know about.
A few days ago I did a short road-trip to a little town called Papalotla, not to far from Mexico City, but distant enough that you can enjoy the traditional country life style so characteristic of the region: horses, “charros”, “toreros”, “haciendas”. While I’m a frequent visitor to the area, I was pleasantly surprised that for the first time the road was paved, literally, all the way to the town. I was told that many of the little towns in the Central Valley were getting the same treatment. Now, that is some important signal. Certainly, infrastructure spending is in vogue these days, but maybe this effort is also the response of a visionary government agency that understands that road infrastructure was one of the bottlenecks to further develop regional tourism in Mexico (as reported by The Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report 2009, page 273).
While “cultural tourism” may not be for everyone, I’m convinced the abundance of heritage destinations throughout the country could, one day, represent an important percentage of tourism receipts. Not only by targeting a different kind of tourist, but also by getting them closer to the people that enable the experiences. Without travel agents, global hotel franchises, charter operators and so on, the money spent on these types of trips is likely to help the people that live there.
So where is this unknown Mexico I’m talking about? Well, if you’re going to find it, I better put together a really good map. Luckily I know a couple of people that are very good at this. A few places that should be in the list: Taxco, Dolores Hidalgo, Janitzio, Tapalpa, Teotitlan del Valle, Bernal.
In The Art of Travel, De Botton suggested there are no more places left to discover. With the overwhelming amount of information available on each and every major destination around the world it is likely that I could discover the major landmarks just as well from my computer than walking through them. Of course travellers will argue that first-hand experience is what matters, even if millions of people have had the same opportunity. While exploring the best reasons to travel I had emphasized the quest for the “experience”:
The tourist that never leaves the beaten path is likely only exposed to an esterile experience that has been washed out of all its original power.
One could argue that the splendour of any famous landmark is constantly diluted by the ongoing attack of mass tourism, misguided by a market saturated of travel guides that most of the times reference the same top 10 or 20 landmarks not to be missed, while telling us every snippet of knowledge that travellers must know about these places, cancelling every attempt to make that experience unique.
The age of discovery is over. Every corner of our planet has been documented ad nauseam… or has it? The availability of super detailed guides and maps for every city in the world would certainly give us this illusion. But I bet that for every map which highlights 10 “points of interest”, there are another 10 not so interesting. And yet, I believe these are the places that will increasingly attract the independent traveller. The key to their rise will be their ability to offer new and unique experiences that may not include master art or landmark architecture, but showcase the modus vivendi of little known micro-regions and their people.
You probably remember that little neighbourhood in a foreign city that after an easy stroll made you comment “I could live here”. Some people will qualify them as charming and others will think of them as hip. I’ll venture a generalization and suggest that they’ve moved away from the pragmatism that governs every aspect of modern life and have found a way to decorate themselves with elements that seem superfluous or even luxurious. What sells us is the fact that their inhabitants have been able to transcend the mundane. Where are they? Well, that is where the discovery starts.
Just a few days ago I published a photo of Coyoacán in Mexico City, a wealthy neighbourhood in the south of the city that is often cited in travel guides. Most people will settle for visiting the main square, which is where all the action takes place. What few people have discovered is that just a couple hundred meters away there is a little public garden surrounded by cobblestone streets where the pace of life seems to slow down. I used to walk through these streets almost every day without giving credit to their splendour. The arrhythmic sound of shoes walking on stone was clearly heard in a city that is otherwise obnoxiously loud. I’m sure a few people have said they could live there. And yet the reviews found on the web about this corner of the city are sparse and uninviting.
Recognizing that the charm of these streets on their own is not sufficient to create a full experience and elaborating on the need to reinvent tourism, I suggest a well orchestrated effort is required to bundle all the various elements that will attract the visitor. In the same way that top hotels create an entire experience around their brand, these micro-regions need to be organized so visitors can immerse themselves into the perfect life-style balance achieved after centuries of fine tuning.
Travelling to Mexico in the wake of one of the worst tourism declines in recent memory, has been an eery experience: the occasional masked traveller, the non-existent line ups to check-in and a 319 with perhaps 20 passengers. But it isn’t the feeling of crossing some imaginary boundary to a forbidden land or the fear of catching some untamed virus awaiting at the arrival lounge. What makes this trip so uneasy is the realization that the millions of people that are not flying today may not be coming back to Mexico for a really long time.
Whether failures in policy-making, mass-hysteria, international press or just some random genetic mutation are to blame for the stampede the fact is that loosing its tourism edge, Mexico is posed for very dark times ahead. Suffice to know that its tourism industry is second only to oil.
In the midst of such a downturn the entire sector will have to rethink how it positions itself to re-engage with travellers. Yes, Mexico has a privileged geography and has exploited it through the continuous development of its traditional hubs, usually beach destinations flocked by charters full of travellers that prepaid the entire experience back home. I believe those days are over, not because those people will no longer consider Mexico as an alternative and will gradually rediscover its benefits, but because there are far too many options outside of Mexico where the exact same experience is available: blue waters, white sand, palm trees, cheap drinks and lots of sun. The quintessential beach vacation. As people are forced to try other options, they will find them and will have no problem in evaluating their loyalties.
Hopefully the prospects of such a decline will reenergize the sector and open the doors for a new generation of travel ventures that will restore the reputation of Mexico as a prime destination, not only a beach destination but a complex one that spans world-class historic sites, charming colonial towns as well as a very diverse range of cultures that cover its varied geography.
I’m sure the government is already planning how to spend millions of dollars on marketing its way to normal levels and all the major hotel chains are calculating how low they can go to compensate. But what is really needed is a grass-root movement that looks at each corner of the country as a potential magnet for a new kind of tourist: the kind that won’t run after the cheapest room, the kind that puts its heart into researching a trip for months because she knows it will be a life-changing experience. The eco-traveller that understands what kind of impact she can effect on a place, both physically and morally. The equivalent to the agro-tourism that has shifted attention to the Italian country. Reinventing tourism in Mexico will require the participation of people beyond the industry. I’m certain everyone will have something to say as we’ve all been to Mexico at least once. Haven’t we?
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