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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

If you want to avoid unpleasant tourist traps, go off the beaten path to smaller towns and villages. You'll find a much more beautiful, and genuine experiences talking with real locals, who aren't just trying to sell you overpriced crap. You'll get the real food, and the real place you're visiting. Famous landmarks really don't stick with you like the experiences you get meeting new people.

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> If you want to avoid unpleasant tourist traps, go off the beaten path to smaller towns and villages.

That only works until someone with a sufficiently large follower base promotes it on instagram. Instant tourist influx. Many of the tourist traps started out as hidden treasures.

The trick is not to look for "hidden treasures". Don't try to find something special that nobody else has discovered yet. Just go to ordinary places which are nonetheless different from what you're used to.

Sure, someone might promote precisely the completely ordinary place you have selected and cause it to be overrun, but given the number of places you can choose from, that's not very likely.

Of course that only works if you don't travel to see unique and famous sights, but in that case you can never avoid other tourists anyway. If you just want some new experiences, the selection is effectively unlimited.

Actually being one of those influencers, I can tell you that most people in this world don't care what someone on Instagram says. Those that do pay attention are there for the fantasy, and not actually jumping on a plane to a remote location because one of us posted a pretty picture. The rest of the planet is going to see the Taj Mahal, and Fontana de Trivi, because that's what you're "supposed" to do when visiting a foreign land. It doesn't take much effort to find a quiet home outside of a major city, and see what's really going on. There are nearly infinite places on this Earth to go, only a handful are being 'promoted' because they are already popular.

btw, the Taj Mahal is indeed beautiful, but it's a very small oasis in the literally the most vile city(Agra) I've been to in all my travels. Absolute filth. The best thing to do is drive there, see it for an hour, and then drive back to the place you came from.

> That only works until someone with a sufficiently large follower base promotes it on instagram. Instant tourist influx. Many of the tourist traps started out as hidden treasures

Or go really off the beaten & easy path.

I just spent a year traveling North to South in West Africa, I can count the number of tourists I saw on two hands. It is breathtaking and well worth the visit, but it's also very difficult and demanding.

I get what you are saying, but you still meet new people at the tourist traps, in fact I would wager that you are more likely to meet people willing to talk to you in the popular tourist destinations. Having been off the beaten path I can tell you first hand that many locals aren't interested in chatting up foreigners, they have jobs and lives of their own. Not saying it's not an actual experience you could have, but you can have just as fulfilling experiences in unpleasant locations.

Most of those villages are already on Airbnb and booking.com! They have internet too!

Your suggestion sounds like a recipe for destroying the remaining unspoilt places. On the contrary, I would say: please go to the established tourist traps, or better yet, stay home. The whole concept of tourism is ludicrous.

Tourism is part of traveling. Surely, you don't think traveling is ludicrous.

it was clearly a sarcastic post.

"Tourism is part of traveling. Surely, you don't think traveling is ludicrous."

I love travel, but no, "tourism" isn't automatically the same thing.

Modern "mass tourism", in particular, consists of taking a big boat or a big bus with a bunch of people who are just like you, to places that local people never go. Then you take a picture, post it somewhere to show off to your friends, then you buy some trinkets and go to the next place.

Setting aside the question of whether or not international travel is sustainable for (say) all of China, this form of travel is ludicrous. You might as well stay home, look at pictures on Instagram, go to a buffet and and visit the mall.

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