You are in a restaurant that you found in the Lonely Planet travel book, in a town that the guide said was a “charming, undeveloped village with lots of local flavor.” The travel book promised this restaurant and town would allow you to see the real country you are visiting, far away from the crowds of tourists in more developed areas . You have sat down in a booth for an early dinner and relax as soft music drifts through the open courtyard that surrounds you. You smile as the owner of the restaurant, who is also the chef and waitress, hands you a menu and chats with you casually as a friend, and you sit in relaxation as you order a drink to sip while you chat before thinking about the meal.
The door opens behind you. You look over your shoulder expecting a pair of locals and see two very uncomfortable looking Europeans standing in the doorway. They have a Lonely Planet guidebook open and one peers over the other’s shoulder as their finger points down at a page in the book, clearly trying to ascertain whether or not they are in the right place. Your authentic local friend smiles and seats them, and as they do you look over your shoulder and see another couple outside with their finger pointing at the exact same position on the same page in the same green book.
Half an hour later the owner is running around the courtyard with no time to chat serving 10 different tables. You overhear a conversation about how to say “not too spicy” in Spanish mingling with an explanation of the difference between bananas and plantains. As you do a German walks over to the table and greets you, and you go into autopilot mode as you begin to explain where you’re coming from and going, and how long you are staying in Central America; repeating the exact same conversation you had 3 times at the hostel that afternoon and twice at the bus station in the morning. In the middle of the conversation you are interrupted by a familiar greeting of “Hey!” and look up at the 3 guys from Cali you saw at the last charming authentic “tourist free” village 2 hours east of here, after seeing them two days before at the tourist attraction an hour further east.
There are obvious advantages to using a guidebook when traveling in a foreign country, and in following an established tourist itinerary in independent travel. For many backpackers and travelers, meeting other travelers from around the world is an exciting part of the experience, and I have personally learned more about Europe and the rest of the United States from traveling in Central America than I would have ever thought possible. Obviously, tourist itineraries like the infamous “gringo trail” through Guatemala also take travelers to beautiful and incredible places. There’s a reason people go to the Grand Canyon and the Eiffel Tower, and I would have to wonder about the sanity of someone who went through Paris without seeing the Eiffel Tower because they wanted to avoid tourists with cameras.
Tourist destinations also come with tourist infrastructure. Areas where backpackers tend to congregate offer cheap, simple hostels and laundry service, while areas where honeymooners travel tend to have hotels that are luxurious and private. They also tend to have better infrastructure to see their tourist attractions: while national parks in “touristy” parts of any country have shuttle buses taking tourists to marked trails, in other places the most beautiful waterfall may be 4 hours down a dirt road on a public bus that only leaves at 6 AM followed by 3 hours of hacking through jungle up the face of a mountain.
But traveling an established tourist route also has enormous drawbacks and limitations. You tend to have the same conversations over and over about travel routes, overpay for everything, and get looked at more as a customer and commodity than in less touristy places where travelers are welcomed more as guests. Obviously tourism also changes any place, and ironically takes away the feeling of being surrounded by a foreign culture that most tourist strive to achieve.
So if you are a traveler who wants to experience both a foreign country’s tourist attractions and its local culture, what should you do? I’m not really a travel expert, and much of this might seem either extremely cliché or extremely obvious, but here are a few pieces of advice from my personal traveling experiences. I have lived in Honduras for 6 months and have experienced Central America both as a confused resident and as a tourist redefining the word “budget” during this time. In this list I am trying to give advice while also talking about lessons I’ve learned from living in a different culture. I hope at least some part of it may be useful to you or make you think about something in a different way.
1.
Slow down. Breathe. Just relax.
In Central America you run into so many people whose weekly travel agenda reads like a geography lesson on a whole region. “Yesterday I got to Honduras after taking the 22 hour direct bus from Cancun. I really like this lake I wish I could stay longer! But I’m taking a 4 hour bus ride first thing tomorrow and then a boat to the islands, then I have to be in Nicaragua by Wednesday, because I have to reach Costa Rica on Friday and I want a couple days there so I can really understand the culture of the country.”
Obviously this is an exaggeration for most travelers, but seriously. However fast you’re traveling, just slow down. If you’re happy in a place, no one says you have to see every other place in the world at the cost of enjoying where you are. Even in a “touristy” place staying for a few days longer than most travelers do can allow you to really get to know people there and see what life is like. Experiencing life in a different culture will usually make up for whatever you miss in seeing other attractions. I actually find that I sometimes take pride in not getting to see or do things on my itinerary.
One of my favorite experiences traveling was on the extremely “touristy” island of Utila off the coast of Honduras, which is famous for its scuba diving, white sand beaches on deserted islands off its coast, and a canal that you can kayak through down the middle of the island. I spent a week in Utila and didn’t get to do any of that because on the first day I met some local people who owned a little restaurant there. I was enjoying talking to them about life on the island so much that I relaxed for a few hours after my dinner and listened to stories about their lives. I ended up spending the whole week hanging out with these Honduran islanders, experiencing local life and learning what running a business was like there. I feel like in one week I developed very legitimate friendships with these people from a totally different world. I now take pride in telling people I went to Utila but was having enough fun already with the friends I made there (and maybe the help of a couple of bottles of rum) to not even have time for the tourist attractions. Am I saying to plan on skipping amazing scuba diving and beaches? No, but be open to the idea if you accidently stumble on a different amazing experience.
In many other cultures, life moves at a completely different pace than it does in the States. In the Honduran village I lived in going to the little store down the street to buy eggs often took an hour because I would run into 3 or 4 neighbors sitting on their porches wanting to talk in the two block walk to the store. Then the owner of the grocery would offer me coffee and a taste of some new product he was excited about and I would chat with all the other customers who came in, and the owners son would then come in and I would repeat the whole process again as I drank another cup of coffee with him.
If I were in Boston I would have just left my building, walked half a block to the store quickly, and got my eggs without saying a word to anyone. Nothing happens fast in a place like Honduras so you might as well embrace it and try to adapt your mindset to the slow paced life. Try not to complain about it taking two hours to get your meal in a restaurant, but rather be thankful for the chance to relax in the restaurant during the time you spend anticipate your meal.
2. No seriously. SLOW. DOWN.
On the edge of a national park in Honduras there was a small restaurant run out of a poor family’s house that a friend and I went to after hiking in the park. We were tired and it was raining so we stuck around the house for awhile. Half an hour after we got there the coffee came, but we relaxed as we enjoyed talking to the older couple who had lived in the forest by the park for their whole life. A little while after the coffee they gave us honeycombs they had just taken out of a bee hive, feeding us fresh, ridiculously sweet honey. They then showed us the bee’s homes where it had been made. Half an hour later they showed us where some beautiful hummingbirds lived, and then soon after showed us 6 newly born puppies who were running around their mother jumping on her to breastfeed. We ended up staying around for awhile enjoying the nature and chance to play with the puppies. All of this was in a tiny one room house with mud floors that we would have walked past if we weren’t tired, cold and in need of coffee after the hike. If we had rushed out after coffee because we had another tourist attraction to see we wouldn’t have seen the puppies, the bee homes, or the hummingbirds!
You never know what you might be missing if you dismiss a place as boring or uninteresting too quickly, which so many serial travelers tend to do after seeing so many places. You really have to stick around a place or a person for a long time to understand what makes them special. All the things those people showed us weren’t really anything spectacular to them, and they didn’t share them with us until we had stuck around for most of an afternoon. So stick around and relax, and who knows what you might experience or find in the most unlikely places.
3.
Bring small gifts/something interesting to show people.
I carry my huge backpack and my other duffle bag up the steps of the old yellow school bus, and slam my backpack into a woman by accident as I try to juggle the two oversized bags down the narrow aisle. The slam of my bags against her sends me off balance and I fly forward into the lap of a young woman, getting far closer than is appropriate in any culture I can imagine existing. I awkwardly pull myself off the poor girl, and stumble down the aisle embarrassed, looking anxiously for a free seat. The bus is relatively packed and I manage to cram into a seat next to a larger woman who has 2 children on her lap. I look around and 30 dark black faces are staring at my very noticeably white one. No one is really smiling but no one is hostile, as they adapt one of those “wait and see” type poses. The woman next to me is staring with an extra intensity, and the awkward shy smile I give to her children is not returned by anyone in the family.
I am clearly finding myself in a precarious, uncertain situation on my trip abroad. It is time to dig into my emergency “I need friends” stash, to bust out the high-tech extra special “winning hearts and minds” counter-insurgency toolbox I have brought along. I reach into my pocket and pull out 2 silly bracelets, the brightly colored ones that are shaped like different animals, and set them down on the seat to allow the children to choose one. They instantly smile and the mother does too now that I have bought her at least 15 minutes of happy children. The tension is quickly broken by their smiles, and as we begin talking she recommends a restaurant in the town we are headed too.
I wonder if maybe the U.S. would have had an easier time “liberating” Iraq if we had just sent in thousands of people with silly bracelets shaped like animals to pass out rather than dropping bombs. We could have just given them out to children on buses and smiled at them and seen what happened. How many of the children who saw that would grow up to want to kill Americans? It definitely would have been cheaper, so maybe we should have tried first, and seen whether it made more us more friends than dropping bombs indiscriminately on their villages.
We’re all human, and almost universally in any culture humans respond well to even a simple act of kindness. The gesture of giving a gift, no matter how small, can make such a huge difference in life, whether you are traveling or in the same town you were born in. I like to take silly bracelets when I’m traveling because they are cheap, light, and fascinating to all children and most adults. While they cost almost nothing, the act of offering anything at all to someone you’ve never met is significant, and can open up a new friendship wherever you are.
Showing something interesting to someone from a different culture also works well to break the ice and as an act of good will. An example is a friend named Malcolm, who is a bird watcher who has spent about half of his life traveling in India, Turkey, Morocco and Central America, and carries binoculars wherever he goes. He says he can universally make friends in any culture in the world by letting children look through his binoculars, especially in poorer places where they might not have seen them ever before. In places where foreigners are in oddity people will often try to make a quick decision on whether the outsider being there is a good or bad thing. Having a small gift or something to show the people who stare at you may make a big difference in swaying this decision.
An important travel note to go with this is to not bring anything interesting with you that you don’t want people playing with. It’s unbelievable, but I’ve met travelers who have taken pictures of slums and then not let the people in the pictures look at the little screen to see the pictures because they’re paranoid that the camera will be stolen. If you’re that scared of losing it, don’t take it, and especially don’t take it out around people whom you don’t trust to touch it.
4.
Eat “street food”
It seems like everyone who travels in poorer parts of the world has a different rule that they swear by to keep from getting sick off the unfamiliar foods. Don’t eat this and don’t eat that, and don’t eat in this kind of place or anything similar to it. One of the most popular pieces of advice is to never eat food that’s served on street corners or in bus stations.
I’ve got brutally sick twice in Central America, both times to the point that I only left bed to go to the toilet for several days. One time was after eating food I bought in a WalMart owned American style supermarket, and the other was after eating at an up-scale American style hamburger restaurant. I also ate with an extremely poor family who cooked outside under a small tarp with their legs ankle deep in mud 3 or 4 times a week for months. I never got physically sick from anything they fed me, although the mind-blowingly large portions they served me gave me stomach aches a few times.
You never really know what will make you sick in a different place, and I think it’s silly to use generalizations like “don’t eat street food” to try to keep yourself safe. I know many people who serve food on street corners and take enormous pride in everything about the meals they prepare, including the hygiene. I also am sure there are real life examples of Tyler Durden in Fight Club, who worked in a fancy five star restaurant and tainted food in resentment of his bourgeoisie clientele. Like it or not, it’s usually impossible to know where your food was before you eat it or what might have happened to it, especially when traveling and needing to make decisions quickly. Often what you think you know might even turn out to be completely backwards in these types of situations. In the city I’m living in now I went to the upper class supermarket to buy meat for a couple weeks because conventional wisdom said it would be more sanitary there than at the less sanitary open street market. The meat from the supermarket went bad within two days, and we talked to some local friends about where to buy instead. It turns out the supermarket sold the exact same meat that was available at the open air market, yet it sat in storage for a couple days before being sold at the supermarket, and was therefore much less fresh.
Street food is generally the cheapest option in a developing country, and usually ends up tasting better than you ever would have imagined. Sitting in a central park or downtown area in the middle of the bustle and chaos of a city or town is a great way to see a culture, and eat the food that local people usually eat. I don’t think there’s any basis for believing this leaves you more vulnerable to stomach infections.
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