The trip is a vital experience that involves going beyond the confines of one’s own world, opening the door to the unknown, to change, entering a situation in which many of the variables and elements that make up the daily life of the subject. Obviously there are many types of trips, but if we really talk about the experience of contact with new realities, they all share being an experience of transformation.
The open-mindedness that the trip implies involves facing the encounter with the other, with other ways of living, of feeling. Precisely this meeting will be one of the central elements in the transformation process. But it is not always easy to tolerate that risk of opening up, that risk of questioning one’s own certainties that comes from truly meeting the other, coming face to face with other cultures and worlds.
Faced with this transformative perspective of the trip, we have before us today the phenomenon of mass tourism, one of the central pillars of the consumer society, constituting the antithesis of the trip as we have raised it in the previous paragraphs.
The subject of today’s world, after living in a controlled, directed world, when he finally leaves it, he also does so in a hyperprogrammed, canned trip, in which the stereotype, the cliché and the prejudice replace the gaze, the listen to the unknown Frequently even the mass tourism trip itself is an imposture: the tourist goes to theme parks that reproduce distant pyramids, jungles, lost cities in canton stone, navigates simulations of cities furrowed with canals. In a Disney world, without any risk.
In mass tourism you avoid finding the other, having to question your own world. The traveler seeks that questioning. The foreigner takes a marked route, follows the guide’s flag that symbolizes his gregariousness like nothing else, his submission to the established social norm. The topic sells, reinforces security, allows us to believe that we live in a world that we control, without risks.
The mass tourist goes “all the way” visiting cities and countries. Hence the so successful title of that film: “If today is Tuesday this is Belgium”. He has to see at full speed and in the middle of a whole crowd that sprints from one corridor to another, La Gioconda, or the Rosetta stone. And it is not strange that he takes the opportunity to take a selfish (I have seen this with my own eyes).
Drunken tourism, Lloret, Magaluf…..Barcelona more and more, in which there are those who start drinking as soon as they arrive, even with a hose connected to the barrel of alcohol to get drunk as quickly as possible, would already be the zenith of the trip nowhere, with zero awareness of where one is, zero contact with the country one is visiting.
In relation to this type of tourism, the case that was explained to me by a woman who mentioned how wonderful a recent cruise trip had been, especially the gala dinner with the captain, comes to mind. Above all, she remembered the unforgettable moment for her, in which she descended the sumptuous steps of the ship (made of cardboard) clad in her evening dress (rented for the occasion) in anticipation of the dance with the ship’s captain (with whom finally did not dance) and said “as I went down those wonderful stairs I thought to myself that I was living something that really did not correspond to me, something that was not for someone like me”. And she was absolutely right because everything was a comedy, a farce!
As has been rightly said, mass tourism often consists of taking people who were better off at home to places that were better off without them. [email protected]