The Case for Independent Travel

      The Sicilian town of Taormina is remarkably beautiful, clinging to a cliff above the sparkling Ionian Sea. It is also quite inaccessible—the only way to get there is up a dizzyingly corkscrewing road, navigating an endless number of switchbacks.

      And yet: on a recent trip there, we found the tight, winding streets of this seemingly remote place filled with … tour groups. Blame the second season of “The White Lotus,” which was filmed here. Or just blame packaged mass tourism. 

      Endless groups of 20 or 30 people, their blue-tooth lanyards hanging from their necks, straggled through the Porta Messina, following the leader, the one at the front of the gaggle with the flag or the umbrella. When the groups would stop for a moment, to hear what the tour leader had to say about the Church of San Domenico or the Piazza IX Aprile, we stopped, too—because we couldn’t get past all of them. And while we waited, pushed against the buildings, we began to understand why so many places in Europe have recently reacted so vociferously against mass tourism.

      In Barcelona, residents have sprayed groups of tourists with water pistols. Venice has introduced a visitor entry fee for day-trippers. The Greek island of Santorini has instituted per-day caps for cruise-ship visitors and is charging additional levies for peak-season arrivals. Amsterdam has banned new hotels in parts of the city to try to reduce the growth of tourism-related accommodation and has launched a “Stay Away” campaign. 

      Look, in Taormina and elsewhere, we were tourists, too. But we weren’t part of an indistinct mass, frequently disgorged from enormous cruise ships, everybody pretty much the same, filling the streets, spending two minutes at this church, three minutes at that monument. We weren’t chained to a fixed itinerary, a cursory check-this-off-the-bucket-list trip.

      We also noticed something else about the tour groups. The group members—not all of them, certainly, but most of them—were older; they were our age. And, to give them their due, they seemed happy and engaged, delighted to spend an hour or so exploring Taormina or Wat Pho in Bangkok or Westminster Abbey in London.

      And I get it. Packaged group tours make traveling a lot easier. Particularly when you’re older. It’s why, undoubtedly, so many of us now opt for the packages where somebody else arranges the schedule, somebody else gives you directions, somebody else takes you from here to there, somebody else imparts a little bit of information about where you are and what you’re seeing, and—perhaps most important—somebody else schleps your bags.

      It’s all very attractive, especially as we get older and want to deal less and less with the uncertainties and definite difficulties of individual traveling. But here’s my plea:

      If you still can travel independently, do it.

      Go off on your own. Find the little restaurant that no guide book knows about. Interact with the policeman on the corner who, it turns out, was born in Brooklyn. Get lost and ultimately find your way back through a maze of streets that have never seen tourists. Don’t just be there for the day, stay for the night, when the crowded streets empty out. Strike up a conversation with the people at the next table who are from Bulgaria. Spend as long as you like imagining works by Aeschylus being performed 2,400 years ago in that remarkably intact Greek theater. Try to talk to the guy at the market selling ground-up pistachios.

      No longer tethered to jobs or children, people in our generation are traveling more than ever. We generally have the time, the flexibility and many of us have sufficient financial resources to travel at least occasionally. If you can, do it on your own. The surprises you encounter, the connections you will make, the insights you will obtain will more than make up for the additional schlepping.