I don’t hear anyone saying that they want to be known as a tourist. If anything, when I find out someone has just got home from a cruise, they sometimes feel the need to explain themselves. They explain that they got away from the group every chance they got to have a ‘real local’ experience. What is a real hard-core traveller supposed to do, with travel so easy and cheap, it seems like everyone is doing it. Don’t fret! Here are the top five tell-tale signs to separate the hard-core traveller from the cruise-line tourist:
1. Tourists go and buy travel gear at travel stores before they leave – Travellers go and buy the more expensive travel gear at travel stores before they leave.
2. Tourists learn a few phrases of the local language before they go. Travellers explain that they could not possibly learn a few more phrases since they travel to so many other places in a year. The tourist is grateful when a traveller helps out, not with a few words in the local language, but with an iPhone app.
3. When walking down the street in a new country, tourists make eye contact with other tourists when they see one another. Travellers will pretend not to see each other.
4. Tourists say, “Where are you going on your next vacation!” Travellers respond with a world-weary sigh and suggest “When you travel as much as I do you don’t always know where the road may lead …” Travellors know that eager desire to see new places is not cool – Yoda-like pronouncements are cool.
5. Travellers call themselves something funky like “expats” or “temporary nomads” – tourists call themselves ‘travellers’
What do you think? Are you a traveller or a tourist? Is the word ‘Traveller’ just a newer hipper word instead of ‘Tourist’?
Got any more to add to the list?
Mark Crocker