21 April

Nomadic Matt trying to assuage his guilt. Not his fault, it's the 'tourists'. He's as much as part of it as anybody else, his solution won't work. Tourism is like the debates around city versus country. In reality the 'country' is just a mini-city, and once a regional town gets big enough it's clear that it was just a city-in-the-making all along. City and country are actually the same thing, seen through different lenses. Ditto with tourism, the underlying model - of 'seeing the world' - is really just extending the tourist's lifestyle to new places. Eventually the tourist destination becomes just some new offshoot of the tourist's home country. Not a reason not to travel, but a reason not to be naive about it. It's delusional to think travel doesn't change the places you go to see. Often in very bad ways.