The author deliberately eschews the travelogue conceit of visiting "hidden, authentic places" and visits the most touristed places in Europe and Asia. What he finds ranges from humorous to shocking. Grescoe contends that people travel in bubbles, staying with people from their own culture, eating familiar food, rarely interacting with locals. Furthermore, there are "tourist ruts" that people travel in, seeing the same places everyone else goes, places that have entirely adapted themselves to tourism. The ultimate in this bubble is the cruise ship where the ship is the attraction, the world just passing scenes through a porthole window, or in theme parks where simulacrums of world landmarks substitute for the real thing. Grescoe fleshes out his own nine-month journey with the history of tourism ranging from the ancient pilgrim trails to the Grand Tour taken by English gentleman in the 18th century to the founding of Club Med. Interesting in how little things change, a backpackers ghetto in Rome where college kids band together with people from their own country, drink a lot, and rarely interact with the locals except for sex being the modern day version of the Grand Tour. Far more disturbing is the sex tourism in Thailand, and exploitative eco-tourism treks that are damaging a culture and economy unable to support mass tourism. This book really makes me think twice about my wanderlust, at least how I'll think about things when I get the travel bug.

"Americans paved their nation with a 68,000-kilometre network of interstates, ensuring that anything of interest could be reached by anybody who happened to be interested (somehow making everything less interesting in the process). - p.35

"That's the problem with auto-tourism: you never really feel like you're fully anywhere. Freedom of movement reduces your attachment to any one place, and if you're mildly dissatisfied with one piece of topography, you can be somewhere else in ten minutes." - p. 47

"…the essence of tourism: a bald-faced denial that one's experience was anything but unique…even tourists long for authenticity, the evidence of some real encounter with the foreign…You are the traveler, the old quip had it; the tourist is the other guy. Now that I was in the company of people who were undeniably, manifestly, tourists, it was interesting to note that even they seemed to hate tourists." - p. 77

The Royal Road to Romance - Richard Halliburton

"For all the incursions of modernity, I know that the authentic is all around me. But getting to it requires work: learning languages, listening carefully, offering friendship… Traveling well means not traveling further, but finer; it means establishing connections and maintaining them…Real travel is a matter of keeping one's eyes open and working to understand real lives, rather than being satisfied with the ongoing reality show of staged authenticity." - p. 307 ( )

“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.” ( )