Go See The World, Just Don’t Be A Moron About It

As a compulsive traveller, seeing and experiencing new places is obviously one of my favourite ways to spend my time. But I believe that with the privilege of travel comes a responsibility; go see the world, just don’t be a moron about it.

I have a personal style of travel, I don’t believe in ticking off the top 5 or top 10 most popular things to see and do in a destination. I like to wander about, off the beaten track, and just feel the “vibe” of a place. Of course I do a little pre-visit research and choose some stuff that’s on my own personal “must do” list, but most often not what the average tourist would want to check out.

But many tourists seem to have a very different agenda when they travel. Selfie fever has taken hold of an entire generation of travellers. Just last week, 2 grown women who were competing for the perfect selfie spot at the Trevi fountain in Rome got into a verbal confrontation which actually ended in an 8-person brawl when the families of both women became involved.

Several questions came to my mind when I heard about the incident. The main one being this…WTF is wrong with you people? Having the opportunity and the means to travel is such a massive privilege, whether we go a few miles down the road or to the other side of the globe. It is an experience that so many people can only ever dream of. So those of us who are fortunate enough to travel, we have a responsibility to treat the places we visit, and even more importantly, the people who call those places home, with love and respect.

Yet, here we have 2 grown women, wasting the time of the Italian police who are forced to intervene and break up a brawl at one of the top tourist attractions in Rome. Is a selfie really THAT important? So important that you choose to embarrass yourself, your family and your own home country, rather than wait 2 minutes until the person in your way moves along and you can quietly slip in there and take your precious photo?

Of course it is normal to want photos to remember our travels. Memories fade, no matter how much we try to hang on to them, so we have pictures to fill in the gaps for us. And as somebody who doesn’t particularly like photos of myself, I may be a bit harsh towards the selfie kings and queens. I am often guilty of allowing far too few photos to be taken of me, leaving me with a bunch of impressive photos of the places I have been, but with no real proof that I was actually there.

Kristin Addis of Be My Travel Muse writes “For the first couple of years of my travels, I was absent from almost all of my photos. I came to feel kind of sad when I looked back at them and thought “this could have been anyone’s trip”.

But have we perhaps become so preoccupied with documenting our travels, so that we can show other people that we were there, that we spend far too much time viewing the world through the screen of a phone or the viewfinder of a camera, leaving ourselves with limited time to just look at things with our eyes, and to allow the beauty of the world to take our breath away?

It seems that so many people have just become so disrespectful of the environment and the world around them, with the emphasis always on having the most outrageous photos, often taken in off-limits areas. In another separate incident in Rome, 2 Canadian visitors were fined €450 each for bathing in the Trevi fountain, while a group of tourists in Yellowstone National Park ignored park signage and walked through a fragile thermal area containing a dangerous hot spring, just so that they could take photos.

For every respectful, environmentally conscious traveller out there (take Jackson Groves and his “adventure bag” project as an example), there is a seemingly higher number of those who are just on a mission to tick destinations off a list, who will throw litter and berate other tourists who dare to get in the way of their selfie. We are on this planet for such a short time, and we may never have the time or the opportunity to see all of it, but those of us who are blessed enough to see some of it, we should at least TRY not to be assholes.

This world of ours has been wowing audiences for many, many years, long before any of us came along. It would be so great if we could leave it intact for the generations who are still to come. So go see the world, wander and wonder at the natural beauty and the man-made masterpieces. If selfies are your thing, go for it. Just remember that the place you are visiting owes you precisely nothing. You are a guest, so remember your damn manners.