The majority of tourists travel for ostentation, and it is not certainly something that is invisible in this social media era. That doesn’t mean they aren’t genuinely interested in the location they’re in – it still happens once in a while – but nothing screams “I have an interesting life” than showing pics of yourself in a town surrounded by other people taking a selfie just like you. However, for some tourists the ostentation isn’t about traveling in that certain place, but the more general concept of traveling: for them, it’s not just about saying “I have an interesting life”, but also, and most of all, “I am an open minded person”.
This one is the pretentious tourist, a person who doesn’t go on vacation, no: they go on a journey. In fact, they’re not even a tourist, but a traveler, like they want to tell everyone else. Any word commonly associated to tourism is offensive to them, despite fully taking part in it.
What is the pretentious tourist like? In general it’s a young guy (up to the millennials’ generation), with a passport from a Western country, a medium to high education and a financially solid family that can support them in their vacat- ok, ok, journeys.Having their age’s natural tendency to exploration, and the means to do it, they satisfy as much as they can and take pride in it. But being well educated also means that they know a little more than the average person, and the person that knows a little more happens to show off their knowledge much more than actual experts, who know too well how little their knowledge is compared to the whole subject. The subject, in this case, being the place the pretentious writer travels to, and the expert being any actual local resident.
But where exactly does the pretentious tourist travel? The necessity of being different from the mass starts from home, when they desperately look for a place where mass tourism still hasn’t arrived. However, once they have excluded all the zones in the world that aren’t calm enough to let them backpack in a hostel, the countries remaining are all European, or Western-style countries, at best South-East Asia. No problem, though: the pretentious tourist will still search on the internet for potential hidden gems that haven’t still been discovered by classic tourists. All right, yes?
After arriving in the country, and hopefully when they did they have avoided taking local cash in the airport’s ATMs, it’s time to get to the place they’ll stay in. Which is never a hotel: that is for tourists, and they are a traveler. Still, they will sleep in a place that is made for people like them, that is, tourists that don’t want to be tourists. The most classic option is a hostel, where to meet other fellow pretentious tourists, the most modern one is an Airbnb, where to have the illusion to stay at a local’s house, and not the property of some foreign investor who has never been in that same place. But let’s be fair, some manage to learn to use Couchsurfing and convince another pretentious tourist who’s currently home to host them.
Once settled down, comes the fun part: discovering the local culture! Not the monuments, not the sightseeings, but the culture. Because the pretentious tourist is convinced you can get a full understanding of a foreign country by spending a handful of days in it, and doing activities every local does there every day, like walking around towns without a single job. And so they wander around, in search of an authentic local experience that will make them get a real taste of the country, or at least make them believe so: the most egregious examples being restaurants, their writings like “Traditional local food” in English and their microwaved food presented as a delicacy – but after all, when it’s the first time you eat it, you don’t have the means to realize it.
In all this, they nevertheless have visited all the sightseeings all other tourists go to, because they are must sees, it would be stupid not to go there. The pretentious tourist stays there, admiring that so famous landmark with joy and at the same time feeling a tingling irritation in their mind at the sight of the regular tourists around them, all taking selfies, wearing backpacks in front of their bodies, traveling in organized groups with a guide... But it’s ok, if they weren’t present, the pretentious tourist wouldn’t have the opportunity to think about how they’re not one of them, that they are a traveler. Oh, and those hidden gems mentioned before? They appeared in lists published in websites that have optimized their content to appear first in search engines, so when the pretentious tourist goes there, instead of finding the solitude they hoped for, they’ll meet other pretentious tourists who read the same website. Luckily, the selective cancellation of memory will activate, and the pretentious tourist will still believe to know the place better than everyone else.
Finally, it’s the end of the memorable journey. It’s been days passed at watching touristy landmass, eating at restaurants made for tourists and sleeping at places made for tourists, but the pretentious tourist doesn’t realize all that. They have learned a lot about this beautiful country and the wonderful people coming from there, knowledge generously given by the museums they went to and the landmark signs they read. Why can’t their own country be more like this one? Don’t they see how people here are happier, more relaxed, more sympathetic? Only a very tiny minority of pretentious tourists actually did the big step and slowly started to realize how many cultural elements of their country had always taken for granted, and now that those are no longer there, it’s emptiness for them every day. Meanwhile, they’ll still proudly share on their favorite social media posts saying something like “Never stop exploring” with some footprints going through a beach, and fiercely say they never visited any souvenir shops during their journey, apart from that one time because their mother asked them to bring something nice.