A brief foray into Dallas, missing Kampala, and some thoughts on over-tourism

Grab Bag Wednesday

(I’ve been dealing with a lingering post-travel cold, running around renewing my passport (I’m close to running out of pages, which is an actual problem I never expected to have)¹, flying to Dallas for an interview (more below), and so in that hectic spirit, instead of one long essay, this week is a grab bag of shorter essays!)

A few more thoughts about Kampala from Dallas

I didn’t expect to be thinking about Kampala while sitting in an Irving, Texas Starbucks, much less longing for it, but the antiseptic strip mall (Las Colinas Village) I was in, the preceding eighteen hours immersed in a cold empty utilitarianism, made me nostalgic for the unruly masses of people, of a warmth that, while maddening at times, was at least human.

Las Colinas is a perfectly fine neighborhood, and anyone from the shanty towns of Kampala would be over the moon if they could live there, certain they’d won life’s lottery. It’s safe, wealthy, functional, clean, and most of all, a wonderful environment to raise your children, and if any Kenyan or Ugandan asked me for their advice, I would say yes, if you can, immigrate to Las Colinas, because as I’ve written, I’m not foolish enough to romanticize destitution.

Still, by moving to Las Colinas, or the thousands of other indistinguishable US towns, that person would be making a trade, gaining material wealth, while giving up an elementary part of being human, which is best described as communal, but is deeper than that. It’s about thriving and flourishing, in the ways people have for millions of years understood what that means.

There is a richness of life in Kampala (and Nairobi, Hanoi, Sofia, Ulaanbaatar, etc) that’s missing in so much of the US, that can’t be measured, can’t be displayed in a spreadsheet, but is equally constitutional to living a full life.

There is an atomized emptiness in Las Colinas, as there is across so much of the well-to-do developed world. You live in your climate-controlled duplex, a home no different than a thousand others, and when you leave it, shuttle via your F-150, or your Toyota RAV4, to another climate-controlled sensibly efficient building.

You are cocooned in a perfectly sterile world of efficiency and luxury, with chance encounters, such as bumping into strangers, rung out of life. Almost all the messy parts of being human, the muddled sloppy and organic parts, have been eliminated, or at least minimized, usually justified by an appeal to safety.

God forbid you should do something as crazy as trying to walk from your apartment to the strip mall, like I tried to do. Walking in Irving, Texas is the act of a mad man. Irving surprisingly provides sidewalks, but they are perfunctory, long, straight un-shaded strips directly next to loud eight-lane roads, that nobody uses, because walking along them is as pleasant as a root canal. A hot, loud, exhaust-filled, lonely journey, that nobody else is silly enough to do. The only other people I saw during my walks (or on the buses I eventually took) are physically, economically, or legally incapable of having a car, and lonely enough they don’t have friend or relative with one.

I can’t even give Irving a low walkability score because nobody is ignorant enough to want to walk there. You drive, you idiot! What type of backwards thinking is the idea of walking around? That’s poor-people thinking and my parents came here so I wouldn’t have to do that you silly man.

Couple that human emptiness with its repetitive, boring, but efficient, aesthetic — the bland tract housing, the pre-fab strip malls, the copy and paste franchises plopped down along the roadside, the built-in-a-week berm, heavy-flood prevention landscaping, that gives you absolutely no sense of place — being in Irving begins to feel mentally prison-y. So antiseptic as to be numbing.

I don’t mean to pick on Irving, because except for the sign names, and the particular climate, it’s no different from thousands of other neighborhoods scattered across the US. This form of living has become the dominate one for the US middle class. There are versions of it in upstate New York, Florida, Maryland, California, everywhere.

Again, I want to be very clear that these neighborhoods are not some hell on earth, and anyone from the rest of world would be smitten to have the chance to live in them. As I wrote above, if an average African, Asian, or Latin American asked my advice I would tell them to move there. It would be downright weird of me to tell them otherwise, given all I have, and how I live.

Yet, I would also suggest that by moving they risk losing something they might not know they have, and might not fully appreciate how important it is to them: A rich communal life. I know that sounds wishy-washy and I know it sounds cheap in an airport book best-seller way, but it is something, after the last four years of travel, I deeply believe.

More importantly, it doesn’t have to be that way. Material wealth doesn’t have to go hand in hand with atomization, spiritual emptiness, loneliness, and an aesthetic blandness, but that’s the trade we in the US have made, and seem committed to. We have decided it’s necessary to throw out the spiritual baby with the bathwater, a direction Europe hasn’t fully moved in yet.

Maybe I’m being too negative on the US, missing the communal richness beneath the miles and miles of six lane roads and berm heavy strip malls, and maybe after enough emotional deadening we are ripe for a spiritual revival in our country, but I’m not betting on it happening anytime soon.

Mannequins!

I don’t have more to say in this post other than Kampala has a very strong, and quixotic, mannequin game.

I especially love the “El Gordo” mannequins, which are out of place in Uganda, where I saw almost nobody who was overweight. The US needs them, although I’m not sure we are that into truth in advertising.

A rare portrait

On busy street corners in Nairobi are young men with semi-professional cameras and light boxes, who will take your portrait for one dollar, which they send to you via WhatsApp.

They’re very popular, especially on weekends, when they’re used by couples going out for the night, families, and anyone who wants a new social media avatar, replacing the old time portrait studios.

I’m pretty shy about posting my picture (I’ve written before I think travel writers insert themselves into the scene far too often), but as a photo fan, I couldn’t pass by the chance to use Eric, who managed to take one of the more flattering pictures of me I’ve had in a long time.

He was kind enough to let me take his picture (with his camera), but I don’t think I did as good as a job.

These young men (almost all are young men) collectively have a great photo library, and I believe someone connected to a gallery should go through them to curate a show on contemporary Nairobi street photography.

I’m not much of an art world person, but that’s a project I would fully support. So if there is anyone out there who is interested contact me and I will do my best to help as much as I can, or if it is something that has already been done please let me know.

Ok, lets talk about over-tourism

Now that I'm considered a travel writer I’ve become tangentially immersed in the latest travel gossip/news and much of it is currently some form of hand wringing about over-tourism which, while an issue in certain select parts of the world, does make me giggle a little given some of the sources the discussions are coming from.

What exactly did the travel industry expect to happen from all their hyping of the intellectual, psychological, and spiritual benefits from travel?

What exactly did the globalists think would happen when they successfully shrank the world, making all the patches of our human quilt easily accessible?

The more nuanced discussions come when it’s the residents of the neighborhoods in question who are complaining about over-tourism, although as a cynic I can’t help think there’s bit of a live-by-the-sword-die-by-the-sword thing going on here. Once you sell yourself to the world, the world these days can come full force at you in ways you didn’t expect.

It reminds me of being in a Red Hook, Brooklyn bar in the early 2000s, as gentrification was in full swing, and listening to everyone complaining about all the new arrivals and the changes they brought. After a few minutes of complaints I meekly asked how long everyone had been living in Red Hook, and except for one older man who had clocked over a decade in the neighborhood, the other answers were all less than three years.

Still, I have a lot more time for the complaints from actual residents, since at the end of the day they are the ones who should have the loudest voices in how their own community is managed.

The general discourse within the travel industry I’ve seen around over-tourism falls into two basic camps, and while both are united in saying it’s a real problem, they suggest different solutions.

Camp one washes their hands of having anything to do with it, by saying if people had only listened to them, and traveled differently, then we wouldn’t be in this mess. These articles read a bit like self-help guides, that usually end with them offering to solve your problem, for a fee. Something like, “The answer to all this unseemliness is to go with me, a PhD in something or other, on a two-week exclusive guided insiders’ tour of the museums and treasures of Jordan."

Camp two is a bit more introspective, a bit less scolding, and says while over-tourism is an issue, it’s one that can easily be avoided by changing your own approach, which is to be more mindful of where you go, and when. My own, and constant, contribution to this camp has been to tell readers to quickly get out of the “must see” neighborhoods and cities and try more mundane places, because that’s where a nation’s culture is the strongest, and least performative.

Simmering beneath the current conversation is two unaddressed points that I want to address.

Point one is the assumption that over-tourism is an endemic problem, when it’s really only an issue for a handful of spots in a handful of towns in a handful of countries and the vast majority of the world still wants visitors to come. Kampala and Nairobi, would love more tourists spending hard dollars, although I’m not sure either of my pieces read as promotions for them².

That’s true of more than Africa. In my four years of global travel writing, all over the world, from rich countries to poor, I’ve yet to find a place where I haven’t felt welcomed. In fact if I have any complaint, it’s about being suffocated by good intentions, curiosity, and a genuine warmth, rather than feeling I’m imposing.

Over-tourism is also easy to avoid, thanks to all the online guides supercharging the current tourism trends. If you are going to X, google “things to do in X” and you’ll get plenty of handy top-ten lists of things to avoid in X, unless you have a strong personal reason for some of then, (such as, I want to see the Mona Lisa before I die), and then use common sense to visit during quieter times.

The second point to me is the far more interesting one, which is why are so many people traveling now? I know half that answer, people are richer than ever before, flights (compared to the past) are cheaper, more extensive, and the overall process is less of a hassle than it used to be.

Still, that people do travel so much is, when you take a step back, a little surprising. Travel isn’t necessarily relaxing, or easy, at least the getting to a place and coming back part.

What’s the point of lugging you and your bags through a global maze, flying ten hours to a new place, sleeping in unfamiliar beds, and then reversing the entire process only a week later? It’s an odd way to spend what little free time one has in their life.

You would think, given how much I’ve thought about this, I would have a quick and insightful answer, but I’m not sure I do.

That I travel as much, and as extensively as I do, I partly chalk up to my odd childhood. My parents traveled all the time, way back when it wasn’t a popular thing to do, and brought all their kids along for the ride. I was born in Spain, lived in Nigeria, and spent time in India and Nepal before I’d stopped sucking my thumb.

Still, I’m not entirely sure why others travel as much as they do.

I’ve tried to answer this question, most recently in my piece on Brussels, a city dealing with the impact of too many tourists.

I’ve covered this ground before when I wrote about thick travel, but I’m still fascinated by what most people want from going to Brussels, or Paris, or wherever people go.

My current answer is familiar novelty. That is, they want something different, but not too different. They want a change of scenery, but not a change of lifestyle.

So for them Brussels becomes effectively a different, slightly odd, neighborhood in their own country, where they can do what they always do (go to the bar, party, have a nice meal, spend the day out with the kids, etc), without the accompanying drudgery of the routine.

I don’t have a lot of problems with that, although it’s not what I’m trying to get out of travel. If you have a busy life, and can’t get a lot of time away from the job, doing a week in Brussels makes sense. It is a fun and interesting escape.

That desire for the familiar novelty is one reason people tend to crowd together in a few select spots, causing over-tourism in them, when the world is so vast. There’s only so much change people want, enough to feel different, but not so much to feel out of sorts.

Yet lurking further beneath this desire for familiar novelty is a more fundamental belief that travel makes you a better person, by both relaxing and refreshing you (a form of therapy), and by educating you.

Which one of the two, relaxation or education, is someone’s primary reason for traveling mostly breaks along class lines. Once hedonistic beach vacations became inexpensive enough so any working stiff could cosplay as a Rockefeller, the elites have largely pivoted to educational enlightenment as their cardinal goal for visiting another country³.

Although most people travel for a mix of both, they just don’t go to the beach, they also take day trips to the local museums, art galleries, and other packaged cultural experiences, which makes for an educational relaxation win-win. A guilt free hedonism.

Few tourist, myself very much included, can go on a trip without extensive documentation. We take a very modern approach to our leisure, collecting as much stuff as possible during our vacations, including experiences that we prove with photos, videos, or with us intellectuals, through essays on personal growth. This mindset is also an ideology behind over-tourism, since it leads to a bucket list mentality.

I was thinking about this when a friend forwarded me the book “Leisure, The Basis of Culture” by the theologian Josef Pieper, which to be fair, I’ve yet to buy and read, and have only skimmed online.

He defines leisure as “an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to perceive the reality of the world.”

I understand that to mean, true leisure is wanting to, and being able to, lose yourself in whatever you’re surrounded by, without the need to either document it, or get something material and tangible out of it. To exist where you are, quiet and still, without a secondary goal of getting X or Y out of it.

That to some degree is what I strive for when I travel, with the long “pointless walks” my form of prayer or mediation, my form of losing who I was and opening myself to the reality of the world as it exist around me, but with the massive caveat that I very much document what I am doing, both as a photographer and writer⁴.

Travel is literally my job, and Pieper is pushing back at our modern work culture and the idea leisure should be viewed only in the context of your job. Or as another writer describing Pieper wrote,

“Leisure, properly understood, is not simply the absence of work. It is a self-opening, contemplative encounter with the reality around us, often assuming the form of amazement, a neglected essential of human existence.”

To tie these disparate essays together, I absolutely felt amazement while in Kampala, so often that I became overloaded and unable to process it. Which is why I eventually shut down when I was there, and why I want to go back to try and understand it better, despite what I’ve written about it.

I’m not sure I felt any from of amazement in Irving, beyond being vexed by the lack of it, because in the US, in our desire to maximize safety, wealth, and happiness, in the most efficient way, we’ve eliminated amazement, certainly the organic type, except as a packaged thing you pay to experience when not working.

So more and more we travel, to try and reconnect to that, but that almost always fails, because we immerse ourselves in the “slightly new familiar”, which doesn’t take us far enough away from where we came to allow ourselves to perceive the reality of the world, and truly be amazed.

Or, like me, we continue to bring a very US “I’ve got to get something out of this” work attitude towards our trips, which might be great temperament for building a safe and wealthy nation, but I’m not so sure it’s conducive to building a happy one.

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I leave tomorrow for a three-week drive/walk around the US, to explore what the American Dream means to Americans now. The plan is to head to El Paso, via the south, and come back via Denver and Michigan.

So the next few pieces will be a little different. More focused on the US, both politically (there is an election I’ve heard) and socially.

I still have one more piece to write on faith in Uganda, my apologies for the delay.

So until next week!

1. You cannot now add pages to your book without getting an entirely new passport.

2. Re-reading them, both are too hard. Something I tried to address in this piece, but I also want to write more about in a few weeks..

3. Yes, there are many exceptions to this, but in aggregate, elites are far more likely to say they travel for intellectual purposes.

4. I was reading the novel Mating, a book I’m not crazy about, but the below description of a photographer was spot on, in a depressing way. The inability to be part of the world, because we are so focused on “getting that shot".

“He was a professional photographer. He was someone totally permeated by his vocation. He related to the world composition-ally … Men whose raison d'être is to wring images out of everything around them … (His) stance was to be always alert to the parade of images that constituted the world, because one of them might be a classic “