SEPTEMBER 9, SATURDAY

TWO WAYS OF TOURING

I came back from Montevideo on Thursday and while the experience traveling solo and clueless is still fresh in my mind I want to wonder about it a little more.

I live in a tourist town, Asheville, N.C.. When I moved here almost 60 years ago I had never heard of Asheville. I was looking for a job and was offered a teaching position at Warren Wilson College, in Swannanoa, N.C. (often called Swannanowhere) just outside Asheville, N.C.. One thing that made coming here to teach attractive was the Blue Ridge mountains and I later learned that it was these mountains that draw tourists from all over the world to Asheville.

But what I am wondering about is the difference between Asheville, Land of the Sky in the tourist brochures, and my hometown Asheville and Taco Temple, where I am going to eat with Susie tonight, which is not mentioned in the brochures.

My friend Sheldon Neuringer some years ago visited Buenos Aires, where I just spent four days. He remembers the evening with a marvelous steak dinner followed by a Tango dance show. I passed up the Tango dance show which was one of about 6 things listed as a must do in Buenos Aires. It occurred to me that no one who lives in Buenos Aires ever goes to a tango show. The show, along with the expensive dinner, is for tourists.

Tourists visit a place to be entertained and startled and delighted. If they visit as part of a tour every hour of the day is designed to be a highlight and almost none of the activities are things that people who live in the town would do on a Saturday night. Tours are expensive because everything on the tour has to be stimulating. The hotels have to be first class, the tour bus deluxe, the meals marvelous and every activity intensely stimulating.

So I look at a listing of things to do in Asheville, a tourist town. Half of the activities are strenuous outdoor activities such as rafting on the French Broad River, hiking in DuPont Park or on the Appalachian trail, or they are seeing the wonders of the outdoors at the Great Smoky Mountain National Park or riding on the Blue Ridge Parkway or spending and afternoon at the Arboretum. The major indoor attraction is the Biltmore House and Estate, built by George Vanderbilt a robber baron‘s son, with art and architecture from the great houses of Europe. And finally there is mention of a rich restaurant and craft brewery culture and the artist‘s studios in the River Arts District. That is why people come to visit Asheville, along with the cool weather.

But if you live here, like me you go out once in a while to Taco Temple and that is it. The only time I‘ve done any of the activities mentioned above is when friends come to visit Asheville and I show them around. I have never been on the Grey lines tour, never been on the famous comedy La Zoom bus, never rafted on the French Broad River, haven‘t been to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the last twenty years, rarely drive in the Blue Ridge Parkway, almost never go to a fancy restaurant. If you come to visit Asheville for three days once in your lifetime, you try to squeeze in as many activities as possible, including the Biltmore House which costs close to $100 per person per visit. You stay at a nice hotel and spend a fortune in three days. If you are a lifetime resident you live in a completely different Asheville and get your exotic meals frozen at Trader Joe and rarely do anything mentioned above.

So when people ask me what I did in Montevideo or Buenos Aires I have little to report. I saw an outlet mall and an indoor flea market and took one long Big Bus ride around the city. If I go to Buenos Aires and live as everyday inhabitants of Buenos Aires do, I walk around the block and see the sights and spend most of the time in my apartment, just as they do. If I go as a tourist on a tour I see a Buenos Aires that has been developed just to delight and amaze me. I visited Colonia, Uruguay on my own on the way to Buenos Aires and it cost me the price of an ordinary meal as I guided myself around. A day long guided tour from Buenos Aires costs $260. My 7th floor Airbnb with food from a local grocery store cost $45 a night, a nice hotel with elegant meals would cost 5 times as much or more.

When I spent a month in Paris a year ago and Susie and I made most of meals after shopping at Carrfour, a French grocery chain, we found living in Paris was no more expensive than living in Asheville and we rarely ran into tourists. Tourists all go to the same electric places: Sacre Coeur, Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Montmartre, Notre Dame. As a result these places are shoulder to shoulder with tourists being stimulated. But in the rest of Paris there are few tourists and if there are it is hard to tell who they are.

So what was made more clear on this trip to me is that there seem to be two ways of traveling and each has its advantages. One is visiting only the places that are stimulating and on everyone‘s tour for that reason and therefore packed with tourists. If I had not taken the few guided tours I took in Montevideo I certainly would have missed some interesting things. The other is exploring the ordinariness of the culture and feeling your way along, stimulated not by the famous places which you are guided to by tourist guides with little chance of anything going wrong, but being stimulated simply by trying to order a meal or to find your way on the metro or to avoid appearing like a damn fool. This is a completely different kind of stimulation and the more confused you are the better time you have with little things like looking at shop windows or gardens or graffitti or meeting odd people you connect with somehow, all seeming very special.

But of course you miss out on a lot by feeling your way along on your own and you have very little to report. One of the reasons that I think people take so many of what I call selphies, photos they take of themselves or their friend takes of them with the Mona Lisa behind them, is not the Mona Lisa but to prove they were there. When they return home they can show photo after photo of themselves with something famous as background proving they really were there. On the two tours I went on I got asked again and again if I wanted to have my photo taken as I stood in front of something famous. If you are wandering on you own and avoiding the tourist sights you‘ve got no stories to tell (except about your own bloopers and blunders) and no famous places to show. People might wonder why you even went. When they ask you what you did you have nothing to report. I cab take a photo of myself with Taco Temple in the background this evening and no one will be impressed. In fact, I‘ll do it and see how impressed your are. The high point for me yesterday was the guy in the elevator who pulled up his shirt and let me take a photo of his tattoos. That is the high point of my arrival in Asheville, not the shots of the Biltmore House from the plane.