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That said, travel is work. As the author said, “At times it was fun, mostly it was work and waiting….The good was tempered by the bad.” So, we plan to take a couple of vacations from our travels. We are setting aside time to chill out on a beach or a mountain and relax. For me that is the difference between travel and vacation. So we’ll be travelers and tourists. And I’m ok with that.

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Wonderful thoughts and provocative article. Thank you.

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It’s everything that falls in between that’s questionable. Does it matter though? Doesn’t this just lead back to holier-than-thouism that’s been featured here as well?

There are degrees in which we absorb a place/culture, depending how we interact with that place/culture. Living and working somewhere is up there. Joining in community events, making friends, being local, this I guess is the pinnacle.

But even as I write this, I’m thinking, so what? What’s the point? In a way I agree with Turner about not wanting to see this debate anymore, but not for the same reason. Not because “it will never be settled”, because that shouldn’t stop a discussion.

The traveler vs tourist debate seems to be more about who’s better than who, and not focused on things like benefits to community, environmental impact, understanding etc like Sarah mentions. These are questions that are best discussed as specific questions.

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The whole traveler/tourist distinction is really at the heart of the way we think about travel, of the way we think about what the meaning and purpose of travel is, and whether it’s beneficial to local communities and to the construction of a healthier more empathetic world, or not.

“I wasn’t on vacation. Instead I was living ordinary life in an extraordinary place.”

I think that sums up what I’ve come to realize about myself as a traveler–I backpacked across South America, learned Spanish, and loved every second of it–but now, I want to live some place, I want to drink coffee there and walk around on Sunday mornings and come back to a neighborhood where I live. That’s what I’m doing in Japan, and what I do in Mexico (although much more temporarily in the former, and permanently in the latter).

When you live and work somewhere, you inevitably have to become familiar with the daily rhythms of at least some part of the local population. Even if I never talked to a Japanese person, I’d have to take the subway every morning and every evening and that process brings about a sort of absorption of local place and culture, although obviously I’d never use that to claim I understand Japan.

It is an entirely different thing than traveling somewhere. And I think that’s what John has hit on here, in a really eloquent way–the difference between living and and working in some place and passing through as a traveler on “vacation.”

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It’s a debate that never going to be settled. The “abortion argument” for travels, to put it in a blunt analogy. I think you raise some good points and have some good stories, obviously, but I wish we wouldn’t keep rehashing this.

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