So…

I finished them. For what seems like an eternity now, I have been creating guidebooks to every country of the world. At the heart of it all, is the working assumption that where people travel is determined by those who have been before them.

Let me back up a minute. For this project, I was asked to exchange work with someone else and create a thesis project using the other person’s point of view. It was a match made in heaven, as Leslie’s network analysis of online photo-sharing network, Flickr, was a great lens through which to re-examine my own thinking. My investigation began as a desire to characterize the collective conscience of travel.¹

I was compelled to quantify the global scale of tourist movements in a way that would shed light on where the most popular tourist destinations are and why travelers choose to frequent these places. Thanks to generous support from the UN World Tourism Association, I was able to gain access to a database of tourist arrivals by country. I translated their numbers into a series of books that cumulatively represent the global scale of tourist movements in one year. The number of pages within each volume corresponds to the number of documented tourist arrivals in 2005 (100,000 arrivals per page).

The resulting shelf of books is a snapshot of one year’s worth of information. I have been thinking of them both as guidebooks and as massing studies that form a physical world view². The books can be arranged and filtered in various ways³ as a means of comparing and contrasting the tourist potential (or lack thereof) of various places.

I won’t lie, it was a pretty daunting self-prescribed assignment, but I really enjoyed the process. With my crazy Excel sheet acting as a checklist, I chipped away at the countries over the course of our six-week Wintersession. There were skeptics at times (myself included), but I’m quite proud of the final result, as it gives a context to the rest of my thesis. It was important for me to understand for myself the scale and breadth of what I’m dealing with. Global tourism is peppered with all kinds of statistics, lists and quantifications. As the fastest growing industry in the world and the primary source of income for many developing nations, its effects and motivations are far-reaching. Within all this, I’m interested in unpacking the human drive to go somewhere, and to understand the patterns and cycles that occur within the context of tourism.

Guidebooks carry a strange authority in dictating where travelers go. In my own travels I often rely on a guidebook as a means of navigation, to get my bearings in unfamiliar places. But it’s also not uncommon for travelers to chart their every move by the book. Rarely do we question who is writing and editing and whether or not we trust their opinion. In a recent interview series I did with guidebook writers, I asked these questions. The answers I found were surprising. I’ll go into more detail on that in another post. But suffice it to say that within this I saw a connection between my collection of books and a shelf like this:

Due to the nature of the industry, guidebooks thicknesses are seemingly proportionate to the popularity of places. More visitors means more guidebooks sold, which in turn equals greater coverage by writers and editors of the most desirable destinations. It’s all cyclical, like so many things in tourism.

My first prototype was a stab at the most widely visited country in the world, France. Seventy-five million, fifteen thousand people visited in 2003. I played with the idea of adding postcards of the most popular tourist attractions within the country. These were later taken out of the final versions, as they seemed more like a separate idea.

I sketched out what a shelf of volumes of the entire world might look like and how the scale of the pages would work.

I then went into bookmaking mode.

You can view the fruits of my labor here. I’m going to be using these books to generate more projects. An installation of sorts? Posters? Movie?

1. Or rather, a desire to understand the similarities in behavior amongst leisure travelers. For example, posing in front of famous places is often done with an air of irony in this day and age, but one is made more comfortable knowing that everyone else around is doing it as well. [↩]
2. And it’s to scale! [↩]
3. For example, you could rearrange them by size or by continent, for starters. If you really want to get into it, they can be alphabetized. War-torn areas can be compared. Or you could separate out the islands for fun. You know, just in case you are looking for another rainy day activity. [↩]

The coast was packed. Browned bodies lined the shores of the Mediterranean like seals. I arrived in Nice on a Saturday morning, and (not surprisingly at this point) got lost while trying to find my hostel. I made the mistake of trusting Lonely Planet’s writers in their ‘top pick’ hostel. Not that the service was bad. In fact, it was excellent, and the amenities were good too (free internet access, big kitchen blasting Bryan Adams ballads..). They had to do something to compensate for the fact that they were located two miles north of town atop a frustratingly steep hill. I spent more time waiting for buses than I did seeing things. And the whole place was like a transplanted frat party. I’m too old for this shit.

I’ve noticed that the French way of doing things often involves a complete disregard for efficiency or common sense. For example, the ticket kiosks at the Gare Nice Ville were an exercise in absolute futility. They neither accepted bills or credit cards without a smart chip, rendering them almost useless (and yes, causing me to miss yet another train). That aside, Nice was a decent hub. Took the train out to Antibes, Cannes, and Juan les Pins. Got some sun. The Mediterranean is like a giant bathtub. So calm and nice. Due to another series of blunders, I ended up in St. Raphael, waiting for a later train to Marseille. It was hot, so I did what had to be done. The threat of terrorism has rendered many of the manual consigné machines useless, and there was no official baggage check at the train station. After paying a random employee at the bus station to watch my bag for three hours (because this is a much safer alternative..), I changed into my bathing suit in one of those coin-op bathrooms and headed for the beach. Passed the restaurant where I spent my 21st birthday. It seemed that all of France had gone on holiday there. It was impossible to find a spot on the beach.

Had been trying desperately to get into my book The Tourist by Dean MacCannell, but finding it really difficult to focus on tourism theory while on the go. My eyes would wander down the page while my brain was somewhere else completely. Eventually, I fell asleep in the sun and missed the train to Marseille, meaning that I had to take yet another night train to Carcassonne. Balls. In all, the Cote d’Azur was less relaxing than I had hoped for, but I did come away with a good tan.

As it turns out, Donatello’s David is in the process of being restored in a public setting. It was interesting that this meticulous act, which normally takes place behind closed doors, was now being made available to tourists. The restoratrice, the highly skilled sculpture doctor of sorts, had made judgements about what care the sculpture needed and had tagged each and every scratch and nick and flaw on the sculpture. She was sitting behind a little enclosed fence in the Barguello <sp?>, and tourists passing through the museum could stop to see the progress (if it could really be seen at all). The whole act was also being filmed in real time.

 My understanding of the situation is that this particular David normally sits up high on the side of a building, so it is unusual to be able to see it so close now. After hundreds of years of being exposed to the elements, including the blood shed from those who were hanged off the side of the building by the.. Medici’s? (can’t quite remember who now..), it was time for a little sprucing up.

When Doug and I were in DC at the Natural History Museum, we saw an area of the museum where you could watch the archaeologists at work in a little vitrine-like lab. But they were totally encased in glass and inaccessible to the public (and there were signs on the glass requesting that you not knock to try to get their attention). Interestingly, the restoration in the Barguello was totally open air, and you could reach over the fence and interact with the restoratrice (although she had a helper guy there to field questions from interested individuals so she could do her work). The lack of a real barrier made the whole experience seem so much more raw and live.

 And I know that were I not with Giorgio, I would not have known about the restoration or probably have seen it. There was practically nobody in the Barguello (they were all waiting outside the Uffizi, most likely). The narrative of Firenze has been so curated by the guidebooks, that it’s so easy to miss something as phenomenal as this while trying to do everything that Fodor, Frommer, Lonely Planet, Let’s Go et al. are telling you to do. I have found myself guilty of this on numerous parts of this trip. Sometimes, in a desire to find something good to eat (and after eating nasty seafood on more than one occasion), I would look to the guide for a recommendation, and then spend hours trying to navigate my way to an obscure destination when I could easily have just popped into a cafe on the corner that may have been equal in quality and value. It was like gambling, and it’s unclear to what degree I did or didn’t come out on top in following the book versus trusting my gut.