Most travellers you meet enjoy offering their opinion to you on other travellers, critising anyone from tour groups, gapsters, israelis, backpackers (generally), anyone who spends less that six months in anyone given place, someone that rides anything but local transport like colectivos or doesn`t hitch-hike their way around. The list is endless and I guess they`re all trying to me that most travellers haven`t really experienced South America; they don`t know the place; they have managed to travel for six months or so and haven`t picked up rudimentary spanish. They`ve followed what is known in the biz as the gringo trail and never left it; drinking with gringos, eating with gringos and sleeping with them, barely having left the hostel to partake in said activities.
But then surely to claim to know a place is also folly: a town, a city, a country, let alone an entire continent. By learning the language and leaving the hostel yes, I agree, you might end up having a richer more diverse and colourful experience. But what is South America? I`ve been told that on more than one occasion that Santiago and even Chile is not really part of South America. It`s too expensive and the kids wear designer clothing and their parents drive european or japanese cars on sealed roads, I am told. There are no crazy stories about riding on the roof of a petrol tanker in this country, no. One Australian,Adrian and I had the misfortune of speaking with, told us that he had felt like he had left South America as soon as the graffitti had changed from political slogans (Viva Eva Morales etc) of Bolivia to the tagging of the Chilean middle class. But what are we saying here, that South America is all chicken trucks and poverty and illiteracy and Jesus shrines in taxis. That you haven`t truly been South America until you`ve bribed a cop or had a gun pulled on you. Christ the worst that`s happen to me here is a kid threw a banana peel at me in Arequipa (it missed too). Is getting to know a gay Chileno a waste of my valuable time, since being gay is not particularly South American? How can South America have only one story? How can Santiago have only one story for that matter?
Besides all this talk about Santiago being more European than South American disguises not only the self interest of your average tourist but also the fact that Chile is expensive for Chilenos too and that the wealth here is actually concentrated in the hands of very few. According to this guy I met in San Pedro de Atacama (I know great research), Chile has the second biggest gap between rich and poor in all of South America.
All this talk about knowing a place seems to me as problematic as only leaving your hotel to visit Macchu Pichu; it ringing of colonialist adventureteering.
But what is all this about: this travelling thing? Why do we feel compelled to leave our sunny shores? Is it something noble, like the desire to expand our horizons, explore strange new lands etc? Or something more base, like the freedom to act up, drink and have sex when one feels that mummy can`t see you? Maybe it`s just about saying I did it, pointing to a map and saying I`ve been here so we can say we didn`t waste our lives.
Really when you think about it, being a tourist is kind of problematic in itself. There are extremes of course such as sex tourism, but on the whole what purpose does leaving your home to seek that of another the sole purpose of your entertainment? I mean seeking out the exotic, seriously? We are truely the direct descendents of those colonial explorers, that those in camp left deride so. Is a traveller no different, sticking our fingers into everything and ruining whatever we touch?
Is there a good way to travel?
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