"In order to create a 'snowy' atmosphere the tourist village purchased cotton for the snow. But it did not achieve the expected effect, leaving a very bad impression on tourists who came to visit."

Chengdu Snow Village confessed on its website, quoted in From "China snow village ‘cheats’ tourists with cotton wool and soap/Chengdu Snow Village, in Sichuan, was forced to apologise after visitors were left feeling ‘insulted'" (London Times).

Other cheesy tourism trickery from China:

"My quest is to become the first person to cross Saudi Arabia north to south on foot, an expedition I’m completing in two parts..."

"It has really only just become possible for me to do this kind of trip, now that Saudi Arabia is opening up for tourism and welcoming non-Muslim tourists....  [A]t the border with Jordan... [w]e were planning to camp in the desert but when the farmer Abu Saqqar heard what we were doing he exclaimed, 'What God wills, what God wills, I must slaughter a sheep for you!'... This was my first taste of the Saudi hospitality that was such a delight on this journey. All the district notables were invited and we sat on the floor together to eat. I was the only woman so asked the men if they minded if I ate with them. They all politely invited me even though it may have been uncomfortable for them.... [T]he flat plains of pastel desert... were deeply soothing to the spirit.... The final stage will be a totally different experience as I head to the cool, misty mountains of the south, where the men wear flowers in their hair.... [T]he Saudis I have met on the way have been universally excited by the quest and desperate to show hospitality.... 'May God make you strong, may he bring you success, may you reach your goal if he wills it' are the words that will linger in my mind...."

Writes Alice Morrison, in "What I discovered on my journey to be the first to cross Saudi Arabia on foot/The explorer Alice Morrison describes the first stage of her 1,500 mile journey across volcanic fields and pastel deserts — and what she learnt along the way" (London Times).

ADDED: Here are some nice photos of those "Flower Men." The area is called the Asir province.

"The major issue is that for many, many years, we’ve been utilizing an extractive model of tourism that says 'numbers at any cost.'"

"Now we are in a situation where all these kinds of things are being implemented, like restricting numbers and tourist taxes as reactive strategies.... I’m not sure there is a solution.... Unless it’s people taking responsibility and saying, 'You know what? I don’t need to see Venice. I’m not going to go.'"

Said Marina Novelli, the director of the Sustainable Travel and Tourism Advanced Research Center at the University of Nottingham, quoted in "Bans, Fees, Taxes. Can Anything Stop Overtourism? Efforts to limit visitors in tourist hot spots have had mixed results, at best. Competing interests have a way of impeding attempts to stem the tide" (NYT).

My idea is to work toward the old Yogi-ism: "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

From the comments over there: "The first times I visited Venice was 1963. The last time I visited Venice was in 2010. In 1963 It was possible to have your companion take a picture of you in front of Saint Marks feeding the pigeons with the cathedral in the background. In 2010 the pigeons had been replaced by people and I don't [think] it was possible to take a picture of anything."

The people-as-pigeons are people you won't want to rub elbows with. They are, as one says, nobodies.

Do birds have elbows?

"I tend to think the search for authenticity in a new country is rooted in a desire for something we find missing at home."

"To live almost anywhere in the United States is to be surrounded by brand names. The supposedly authentic foreign experience is perhaps a sense of life untainted by the influence of global brands. Traveling abroad, we may find it only natural to dismiss anything else as less than the 'real' version of whichever country we’re visiting. Yet brands like KFC or McDonald’s are just as ingrained in the fabric of everyday life in Dublin, Paris or Tokyo as a given pub, bistro or noodle shop.... Fast food is indigenous to a world made by capitalism, you could say.... But step inside. Order something. Try speaking with the customers. You might even leave with a better understanding of how they live, what they struggle with and what they hope for themselves. In other words, by going to the most generic restaurant, you can learn what makes a place unique."

Writes Alex C. Park, in "Want an Authentic Travel Experience? Try McDonald’s. It’s a much realer version of the supposed authenticity we so often seek" (NYT).

"The government has assured tourists that Afghanistan is safe, scenic, welcoming — and a bargain to boot."

I'm reading "Ignoring Warnings, a Growing Band of Tourists Venture to Afghanistan/With the war now over, the Taliban are welcoming foreign travelers, even as governments advise their citizens to stay away" (NYT).

Taliban officials said they relied on tourists, especially bloggers and YouTubers, to extol the virtues of visiting Afghanistan... A small percentage of foreign visitors are women, tourism officials said... They are not required to wear burqas or cover their faces.... Male tourists, too, are expected to dress modestly, but they do not face the same intense scrutiny as women....

[When] Allen Ruppel, 63, a retired insurance company executive from Wisconsin... told his wife where he was going, he said, she joked that “I can’t stop you, but I might get an Afghan hound to replace you.” Mr. Ruppel, who wore a blue shalwar kameez, said he was surprised by how warmly he had been received by Afghans and by how safe the country seemed. He said he would encourage his friends to “open your minds and take a fresh look at Afghanistan.”

There's a photo captioned: "A Chinese visitor from a tour group in front of the remains of the 1,600-year-old Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 in Bamiyan." Imagine posing in the empty niche of a colossus and posting on Instagram. I met a traveler from an antique land....

"Anyone with money can live abroad. It’s a sort of an extended holiday. The true test of an expatriate is holding down a job, learning a language, paying taxes..."

"... passing a local driving test, negotiating the culture, truckling to unbudgeable authority and now and then enduring the gibes of co-workers. I was conspicuous in Africa as a muzungu and as an ang-mo-kui (red-haired devil) in Singapore, and very often an English person would begin a sentence, 'Well, you Yanks….' There is also an existential, parasitical, rootless quality to being an expatriate, which can be dizzying: You are both somebody and nobody, often merely a spectator. I always felt in my bones that wherever I went, I was an alien. That I could not presume or expect much hospitality, that I had nothing to offer except a willingness to listen, that wherever I was, I had no business there and had to justify my intrusion by writing about what I heard. Most travel, and a lot of expatriate life, can be filed under the heading 'Trespassing.'..."

Writes Paul Theroux, in "The Hard Reality American Expats Quickly Learn" (NYT). And that's a free-access link, which I'm giving you because I love Theroux's book "The Mosquito Coast," and the book is connected to the topic under discussion, as he explains. Also there's a great Mark Twain quote and a pretty decent JFK quote. So, please read the whole thing.

"Many basically ordinary activities conceal, or can conceal, vast amounts of effort. Packing, for me, has turned out to be like..."

"... staying fit, or being well read, or cooking a decent weeknight dinner for a family of four, in that it requires a surprising amount of consistent work over time. The effort isn’t just practical but intellectual. You’re a better packer, for instance, when you master the concept of a 'distinction without a difference'... there might be no appreciable difference between two distinctive-seeming garments.... Overpacking has the effect of deferring decisions, shifting them from your house to your hotel room. When you understand this, you become more motivated in your packing: it’s senseless to add not just to your physical load but to your mental one.... My new goal is to become as organized in life as I am on the road; my hope is that packing will end up being a kind of laboratory for the development of a more rational me...."

Writes Joshua Rothman, "Why Can’t You Pack a Bag? Our overstuffed suitcases burden us more than we realize" (The New Yorker).

Front-load your decisionmaking, and don't look back. You know, some people travel with just the clothes they wear and pack nothing at all!

"Over the summer, everyone I know went to Greece. From Greece, everyone I know posted one picture: octopus suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea."

"The picture was a picture of an octopus (suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea), but it was also a subtle message that the person behind the camera was (1) traveling, (2) traveling to Greece, the summer-vacation spot of 2024, and not Puglia, the summer-vacation spot of 2023, and (3) not taking a selfie, but (4) you know, not just taking a picture of the Aegean Sea, which would be basic, unlike this one, which (5) managed a sort of high-low effect, given the octopus was dead and clipped to a clothesline. It would have been the perfect picture of an interesting summer, except everyone else was taking it too, stuck replicating one another in an effort to be perfectly interesting."

From "Going Dull/Being interesting is a burden. Is there relief in choosing to be bland?" (NY Magazine).

I think the problem here isn't being interesting. It's trying to be interesting, AKA trying not to be dull. Just stop trying. Ironically, that's your only real shot at interestingness. Let the chips fall where they may.

"It just seems to encompass literally everything. It bleeds into everyday life and every interaction you have with other people, and so that’s very stressful."

Said Mallory Roelke, 35, from Dallas, about presidential election politics, quoted in "Exhausted by the Election, Some Americans Are Catching Flights Abroad/For some voters, the campaign season has felt draining. Some are recharging by heading to Mexico City, Barbados or the English Cotswolds, to name a few," in the NYT, which seems to be ever on the alert for new ways to promote travel.

The banality of the photographs at that link is enough to make a sensitive person swear off foreign travel forever. Sample caption: "Mallory Roelke traveled to the Greek island of Santorini in late October, just as the Election Day in the United States was approaching." Don't go to the link and look. You know exactly where Roelke is standing. Other Roelke photos include her standing in front of the Parthenon and a closeup of a glass of white wine held aloft in front of a vineyard in Sicily.

Credit..."

"Exposure to other tourists... can improve our mood and enhance cognitive function. And travel can lead to healthy eating."

So says an expert quoted in the WaPo article "Travel can slow the aging process, new study says/According to researchers in Australia, positive tourist experiences can help you live a longer life."

This gets my "things not believed" tag, of course, but here's a picture my son Chris sent me this morning from Tokyo:

"I told [my 12-year-old daughter] she needed to read because novels are the best way to learn about how people’s insides work."

"She said she could learn more from watching the people she followed on social media, who were all about spilling their insides. I said books offered storytelling. She said, 'Netflix.' I said books taught history. She said, 'The internet.' I said reading would help her understand herself and she said, 'Um, no thank you. I’ll just live.' I promised, extravagantly, that I’d buy her all the books she wanted and construct bookshelves in her room, so that she could see the spines of all the books she loved from her bed. She said, 'Mama, welcome to your dream.'... So I decided to cut through all the reasoning.... I told my 12-year-old I would pay her $100 to read a novel.... $100 if she finished the book within a month. We then embarked on a beach holiday, along with my boyfriend, to a romantic Greek island...."

Writes Mireille Silcoff "I Paid My Child $100 to Read a Book" (NYT).

Should you use money to get your kids to do things you can't reason them into doing? Money becomes the reasoning. Money talks, as they say. 

I don't know. But I do know you shouldn't take a 12-year-old daughter along on something you call "a romantic Greek island" "with my boyfriend."

What was the "romantic Greek island"? Santorini?

"I used to seek remarkable sites, events and people. Now I notice more supposedly unremarkable moments..."

"... which as it turns out are why we are here.... Dew, stars, Neal’s apricot tea roses — variations on a theme of sparkle.... On any unremarkable day, there will be a number of what Neal and I call Alzheimer-y moments, more and more — some funny, some scary.... The fear of missing out has lessened greatly. In its place, we have the fear of being pressured into gatherings we don’t want to go to. Luckily, at 65, along with your Social Security check, you earn the courage to beg off: 'It sounds lovely, but I have other plans,' those plans being to stay in, eat popcorn and settle into the current TV binge. Saying no to things that deplete or bore us becomes an essential skill. To me, nothing is more wonderful than to crawl between the sheets again, with a book and the cat, and to say our prayer: 'Oh, well.'..."

Writes Anne Lamott in "Living for the unremarkable moments/Age grants us permission to be curious about every ordinary day" (WaPo).

It was nice to run across that right after seeing these 2 articles: 1. "Popular tourist spot is 'total chaos' with cars stuck in 4-hour traffic jam: 'Horrific experience'" (NY Post)("The people who work in the Fairy Pools car park have said visitors say it’s like a warzone driving there"), and 2. "Was This the Summer European Tourism Reached a Breaking Point?/Overwhelmed destinations made high-season visitors the targets of a major tourism backlash" (NYT)("Protesters staging hunger strikes against tourism developments. Local officials threatening to cut off water to illegal vacation rentals. Residents spraying tourists with water pistols").

"Rawdoggers seem to believe they have invented a new form of meditation, and who am I to say they have not?"

"Whereas the Buddhist might accept the captive circumstances of a long flight as an invitation to let go of worldly snares, the rawdogger seeks to overcome them through refusal and its public performance. He rejects the movie. He rejects the frail crinkle of the plastic airline-refreshment cup. He rejects the tender sorrow that cruising altitude somehow always amplifies. Having ascended thanks to the ingenuity of humankind, the rawdogger now rises above the very idea of ascent.... The practice evolved from the broader rise of asceticism, especially among (young, very online) men.... What is natural... about being hurtled through the troposphere in a pressurized metal tube burning petroleum distillates refined from dinosaur debris?... But to pursue a state of purity—even a fictional one; even a made-up, obviously impure one—still feels righteous. To act on an attempt to become closer to nature, or some imagined state of unadulteratedness, also makes one feel as if one is getting the best of it...."

Writes Ian Bogost, in "Young Men Have Invented a New Way to Defeat Themselves/Rawdogging is a search for purity that cannot be achieved" (The Atlantic)(free-access link, in case you need "rawdogging" defined, etc.).

I'm giving this my "scrupulosity" tag.

"During the pandemic, we recovered the spaces and customs that tourism had forced us to abandon. You could have a coffee at a table..."

"... in front of the cathedral, or chat calmly with your neighbors on the street. There were even beautiful scenes like children bathing in the fountain in the Plaça Reial."

Said Daniel Pardo, 48, co-founder of the Assembly of Neighborhoods for Tourism Degrowth, quoted in "'The Demand Is Unstoppable': Can Barcelona Survive Mass Tourism? This summer, thousands of local protesters in the Spanish city denounced overtourism. With more crowds expected for the America’s Cup, we visited the areas where tensions are highest" (NYT).

"I have harbored a strong dislike of summer activity dating back to a series of failed attempts at camp during childhood...."

"Maine takes up a lot of my mental space, probably because I don’t go there. People in Maine have undiscovered hamlets where everyone has been coming for ages and they barbecue amiably with authentic locals at night. Others belong to Old Families with a private island off the coast tucked into the family tree, a place where only family have been allowed to go for hundreds of years. On this island they have sailboats and clambakes and croquet and break out periodically into song. These kinds of summers are plainly out of reach. The 1 percent of the 1 percent don’t need to plan summer because they have it built in. They have a place on the Vineyard or in the Hamptons. They belong to a club where everyone speaks golf and there’s a long waiting list even for those who can afford it. Summer is when the maw of income inequality gapes wide open and only people who summer are allowed in.... I marvel at people with second homes when I can barely stay on top of my one, and summer traffic stresses me out. And what did I miss, really?..."

Writes Pamela Paul, in "It’s Too Late for Summer Now" (NYT).

"Tourism is a curse."

Tourism is a curse.
The place becomes unlivable. Real estate values rise but future generations priced out of the market. Convenience stores become luxury outlets. Natives move out, jet setters own empty apartments..

The planet is too small & everybody wants to go to Venice. pic.twitter.com/xFXyZVJmNb

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) July 7, 2024

Here's the article, "Barcelona residents protest against mass tourism/The city's rising cost of housing, up 68% in the past decade according to local authorities, is one of the main issues for the movement, along with the effects of tourism on local commerce and working conditions" (Le Monde).

Under the slogan "Enough! Let's put limits on tourism", some 2,800 people – according to police – marched along a waterfront district of Barcelona to demand a new economic model that would reduce the millions of tourists that visit every year.... The second most visited country after France, Spain received 85 million foreign visitors in 2023, an increase of 18.7% from the previous year, according to the National Statistics Institute. The most visited region was Catalonia, whose capital is Barcelona, with 18 million....

All you need is a high enough tourist tax, right? 

"No music, no streaming, no snacking, no sleep."

"'Raw-dogging' has become the buzziest travel trend of the summer, seeing stealth plane passengers forgo the modern comforts of flying to stare at either the in-flight map or nothing at all during lengthy trips."

From "Men are ‘raw dogging’ it on flights — here’s what the weird travel trend means" (NY Post).

This gets my "meditation" tag.

"More than 1,300 people died making the Islamic pilgrimage of hajj in Saudi Arabia this month..."

"... the vast majority of whom the Saudi government said did not have permits.... While pilgrims with permits are transported around the holy city of Mecca in air-conditioned buses and rest in air-conditioned tents, unregistered ones are often exposed to the elements... [walking miles] as temperatures surpassed 120 degrees.... Entry to Mecca was barred weeks before hajj for visitors who did not have permits. Yet many pilgrims were able to evade the restrictions, arriving in Mecca early and hiding out, or paying smugglers to ferry them into the city...."

The NYT reports.

Two of the dead were Americans, a couple from Maryland, who spent $23,000 on the trip but did not have the permits. The article ends with a quote from their daughter, the classic statement: "They died doing exactly what they wanted to do."

"For those of us who love to travel, the question of whether to revisit a place you’ve been to before is a repeated conundrum...."

"You’ve changed and the place has changed. You’re visiting not simply a place, but a place captured in a moment in time — one that exists for you in the past and to a past version of yourself.... Every traveler has been told on one journey or another, 'You should have been here 30 years ago.' You missed Angkor Wat when it was largely abandoned. Beijing when the sky was still blue. Iceland before Instagram. It can seem like you’ve always arrived too late...."

Writes Pamela Paul, in "The Joys and Perils of Return Travel" (NYT).

I would think that any place that turns out to have been worth traveling to once is better seen on the second visit. This principle applies to many other things, such as seeing a movie, reading a book, eating a food, and — most obviously — meeting a person. If your reaction to a first encounter is once is enough, then, in retrospect, you're seeing that it didn't really meet the better-than-nothing standard.

After The Washington Post lists Boise, Idaho as one of its "10 destinations that hit their absolute peak in summer"....

... the commenters over there go crazy, politically crazy. The article just enthuses about the Boise River Greenbelt, the Whitewater Park, the Urban Wine Trail —"a collection of wineries and meaderies with tasting room" — and the Boise Idaho Potato Trail — with various potato-based "restaurants, breweries and other eateries."

Eateries and meaderies! Sounds indulgently wholesome, one might think.

Oh, but not to the commenters! The most-liked comment is:

"No one should travel to Idaho. No tourist dollars should go to a horrible, near-fascist state that so denies the rights of women and people of color...."

To sample a few others from the top of the most-liked:

• "... Idaho is just filled with crazed militia types and all MAGA all the time. I wouldn’t feel safe there at all."

• "Do not spend one vacation dollar in the Fascist state of Idaho."

• "Boise Idaho- maga central?! Pass!!"

• "You forgot the warning for pregnant women traveling to Idaho."

• Responding to "Oh good—I was hoping a travel article would lead us to a conversation about Donald Trump": "That's the reality MAGA has created in this country. No, it's not a both-sides issue here, it's all on bible-thumping MAGA."