Can a (shudder) package tour actually deliver an authentic travel experience?
At 6:30 on a Sunday morning I stood in an alley in Guangzhou, China, wearing a bright orange baseball cap. I look really dumb in baseball caps, and orange is my worst color. But my new friend, Mrs. Chu, stuck it on my head with a warning: "You must keep this on so the bus driver and the tour leader can see you easily. Otherwise they may drive off without you! Do you want to be left behind in Jiangmen or Chikan?"
My tour group and I, all 50-odd of us, were waiting expectantly in the alley, munching on the free breakfast provided by the travel agency—a box of soy milk and a puffy white pork bun sealed in cellophane. I would have killed for a coffee, but I knew that at this hour, in a tea-drinking country, I could forget about it. A bus idled at the curb, spewing thick exhaust fumes into the smoggy air of this ancient city once known as Canton, now dubbed the capital of "China's world factory."
The tour leader blew her whistle sharply. The bus doors swung open, and we all pressed forward, scrambling for a seat. Soon I was settling into mine—and into my new role as a "Chinese" tourist.
With China's economy booming, the Chinese have transformed themselves into tourists. China's tourism board estimates that Chinese citizens took more than 1.8 billion domestic trips in 2009. So when I signed on for a Chinese bus tour last winter, I wasn't just going on a day trip. I was joining the world's largest travel community.
As I sat on a bus wearing a silly cap, eating pork buns, and being serenaded by a karaoke-singing tour guide, I had to laugh at myself. Not that many years ago I was so allergic to anything remotely "touristy" that I even refused to carry a camera when I traveled. I kept a list of "not for me" places—popular attractions, neighborhoods, even nations, that I refused to visit because I thought they'd be "too full of tourists." I considered myself a class apart, a traveler, and that meant going places nobody else did, and going, mostly, alone. Tour groups? No way.
Then one summer I was in Slovenia, figuring out what to do with an empty week before my flight back to the U.S. The travel agent at my hotel offered me the last space in a charter group leaving the next day for a mass-market sea resort on a Croatian island. The word "group" made me nervous, but the deal was too sweet to pass up: airfare and a week of hotel and meals for only $200, all-inclusive. I figured if it was awful, I'd bail and still come out ahead on the airfare.
Then I hooked up with Mila, a Slovenian filmmaker who took me under her wing when she saw me, the lone American among a hundred Slovenes, waiting for the charter flight. Mila introduced me to Vlado and Marija and Andrej, and pretty soon I forgot I was on a package tour and got into the Slovenian tourist swing. In the cafés of Brac island, I learned the refrains to old folk songs (one of our fellow tourists, it turns out, was the "Slovenian Bob Dylan") and how to sling back shots of slivovitz, the local firewater. During long afternoons on a pebbly Adriatic beach I got a crash course in the twists of turbulent post-Yugoslavia politics.
"It is not so bad to be tourist, is it?" asked Mila, laughing, at the end of one of those perfect afternoons. She had a point. This trip with the group was more enjoyable—and culturally enlightening—than my earlier, carefully researched solo forays to the area.
My stint on a Slovenian charter holiday forced me to reconsider what had been, till then, one of my basic assumptions about travel: that one should never, under any circumstance, be a "tourist." Playing tourist on another culture's bus is, in fact, a real treat. To experience a place with the people who know it best is about as authentic as travel gets. And it's lots of fun, too.
I'm not about to abandon my solo travels for a lifetime of following guides with bright yellow flags. But now when I travel, especially to countries where tourism is a big part of the culture, I consider putting in time on the bus. During my last trip to Japan I ignored guidebook warnings that Hakone hot springs was touristy, and went.
I'm glad I did, for I would have missed a charming weekend among hundreds of happy Japanese following the well-worn Hakone circuit of walks, cable car rides, and dips in sizzling pools. Trailing alongside families negotiating the steaming paths in the volcanic Owakudani area, I ate the famous black eggs boiled in the sulfurous pools. At each attraction I scoured the gift shop for the best Astro Boy mug, the most perfect Hello Kitty key chain. And, of course, I took pictures of everything and everyone. My tourist day in Hakone was every bit as authentic a Japanese experience to me as a stay in a traditional Kyoto ryokan.
The day on the Chinese bus? Well, to be perfectly honest, it had its ups and downs. The unbelievably cheap price for these tours—$7 for transportation, a guide, and a free lunch—is offset by the commissions from the many roadside stands that the bus stops at along the way. Even without the orange cap I need not have worried about being forgotten in Jiangmen, or Chikan, or at the factory that processed a rare fungus used in medicinal soups. The bus driver waited patiently until every last passenger had purchased something—a handful of sweet dried plums, a brown paper bag filled with farm-fresh cashews. As a result, by the time we reached our tour's advertised destination we had no time left to explore. Stuffed with nuts and sweets, half asleep under our heaps of red plastic bags, few of us cared.
"It was a very good trip," proclaimed Mrs. Chu as we staggered, 12 hours later, back into Guangzhou. "These tours are such a wonderful way to see China."
"Yes, Mrs. Chu," this "Chinese" tourist agreed, "they certainly are."