Please Leave Your Tourism at Home
   By E.C. PHILLIPS

  I walked through the Khan al-Khalili  that timeless market that is the crowning jewel of street commerce in Africa.

The alleys were crowded with the usual mix of tourists, beggars, housewives and young boys. I was reveling in the romance of the long ramshackle alley; dusk was setting in and the muezzin’s call to evening prayer was sounding from the Al-Azhar Mosque.

     And then... and then a mammoth tour bus bombarded the tiny alley. Pedestrians scattered hysterically as the the giant vehicle beared down on them. I reached for a young boy who was in immanent danger of being run over by the rear wheels and pulling him to safety, looked up in to the windows of the bus from which several obese, gawking tourists were training their cameras at us, trying to capture on film the pandaemonium put in to motion by their air-conditioned conveyance.

    I would love to ban tour buses from the earth, but as that is not something I’m capable of, I entreat vacationers to make them obsolete; If travelers can shed the falsely reassuring pretense of package tours, buses and organized groups, we might be able to save the world from becoming a cultural theme park.

One pressing question that arises from the Egypt anticdote: Should people be visiting countries where they don’t feel safe enough to walk down the street; indeed should these people be traveling at all? Bored by reflecting on so many intrusive forays I pledged to find a way to get closer to new cultures. So I headed for tourist obscurity: Lebanon, Mozambique, Colombia and Zimbabwe. In my attempts to escape conventional tourism, I wandered further and further from the mainstream in my style and destination of journeys.
 

Once, I would have considered backpacking around Southern Africa a great adventure, but then I did it and saw that backpacker shuttles chauffeured people from one party spot to the next without interacting with locals, all of these people searching for adventure by doing the same thing every other backpacker under the age of thirty was doing. They flew 8000 miles and then they were too afraid to leave the well paved path; most people didn’t even know how to begin trailblazing. I was frustrated.
  

In Zimbabwe, I had an experience that closer approached my ideal of travel, probably because there weren’t any other tourists left in Zimbabwe to make me feel unoriginal. Still I longed for something more, something I couldn’t define. Other people wanted it too, that great joyous feeling of finding a new horizon, the star trek feeling , “boldly going where no man had gone before”.