Finding a MacGuffin

In which I wonder what tourists actually do all day

Hello all,

In the middle of last week, I booked a ticket for an open-top bus tour around Madrid, wondering why I’d never done such a thing before.

Look at these excellent cacti, seen in Madrid’s Real Jardín Botánico

I’d been seeing these buses for decades, lumbering around the small medieval town where I went to university, and plying the streets of London when I was a courier. As I travelled farther afield, I started noticing them in other cities, and realised that these tours are offered by a few similar-looking companies, who operate all over the world. You can see the sights of Miami, Abu Dhabi, Cartagena, and even Llandudno from the upper deck of a bus, along with dozens more cities, including some I haven’t even heard of.

I was amused by the amount of snobbery (my own and other people’s) I had to fight through before I booked my ticket for this apparently very off-brand pursuit. No one I know has ever mentioned going on a bus tour, and I’d never considered one myself – but why not?

I, and a lot of people I know, seem to have a terrible squeamishness about being perceived to be acting like a tourist but, as I reasoned with myself, I didn’t really have any other choice. I was visiting Madrid for the first time, and staying less than a week. I didn’t know any locals, or have any sort of community waiting for me. There was zero chance I’d get anywhere near the authentic soul of the place. I might as well just enjoy what was immediately on offer, and stop fretting over whether I was getting it wrong. Plus, I was very tired by that point, and looking for a way of exploring the city that didn’t involve hours of walking.

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Don’t laugh, but I often find myself wondering how you’re supposed to go on holiday. The vast majority of my travel has involved some sort of daily project (usually cycling; occasionally writing) that takes up my time and energy, and means I absorb my surroundings organically, by watching them scroll past as I ride, and by enthusiastically escaping to them when the writer’s block hits.

The first time I went travelling on my own was a long-anticipated trip to India when I was 22. As you’d expect, I was both over- and under-prepared, made all sorts of silly mistakes, and worried constantly that I was missing the point. A few years later I read Are You Experienced?, William Sutcliffe’s satire on gap year travellers in India, and laughed with recognition when his protagonist wonders “what backpackers are supposed to do all day.”¹

I enjoyed my visits to Amber Fort and the Taj Mahal, but I didn’t have the stamina for an entire month of visiting historical buildings, I didn’t have the money to shop very much, or a camera to take photos, and I quickly became bored with my own company. (I had never managed to make the sort of friends who might want to travel with me, one of the reasons I was a relatively late starter.) Eventually an acquaintance put me in touch with an NGO near Kolkata where she had worked the previous year, and I spent a couple of weeks helping out at a local school. Finally, I had something to do.

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When I’ve mentioned this conundrum to people over the past couple of weeks, and revealed that I’m not sure how to spend my time when I’m on holiday, they’ve laughed kindly at me, and said “relax?”

But relaxation means different things to different people.