mke1963's VirtualTourist Home Page

UPDATE
I have "left the building" and am no longer an active VT member. A few years on VT has been wonderful for me, but I need to move on to other things, other challenges and other pursuits.
I no longer respond to VT e-mails at all. Hope the Tips are useful. Happy travelling!

- Mark

We are all tourists, no matter how hard we try not to be.
Most of us want to see the world, and never know why.
What do we seek when we travel? People who look and talk just like ourselves, or people who are completely different from us?
The age of mass transportation enables many people to travel across the entire planet to see or experience something different.
In the post-industrial world of the West, tourism has come to define the middle class. Thirty years ago, travel and tourism was the preserve of the rich, and their low numbers meant that they got to experience a world we now perceive as being largely unspoiled and unaffected by modern-day ills.
As tourism becomes a routine part of the lives of so many in the West, the romance is considered to have gone from air travel, the beautiful places are changed forever, and we are content to blame others for this.
The ever-increasing numbers of guide books promise different experiences, usually based upon someone's definition of culture, but so frequently travel becomes a proxy for our mundane everyday lives. How many tourists look for comforts, food, bars, entertainment that associates them with home? How many of the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet travel tips centre on finding 'twenty-something' bars or backpacker cafes serving pancakes and decent coffee?
The very word "tourism" is becoming despised, especially by those with more money and the young, yet these people are the epitome of tourism: travelling from place to place to place, seeing nothing of everywhere.
Most people know little about their own culture, society, street or neighbourhood, but affect a knowledge of remote tribes on the basis of a one-day trip in a jeep in Vietnam, China or Ecuador.
The unfashionable, dowdy types that we laugh at for travelling back to the same Mediterranean, Florida or local beaches year after year are surely more integrated with the society and culture of where they travel.
We have all become travel snobs because we tick off new destinations from a global shopping list of destinations, especially those that are remote (to us..nowhere is remote to the people who live there). We travel because we can, not because we have any real purpose in travelling.

But whatever the reasons - or lack of reasons - for wanting to travel, many of us seek information about places and hope to find it on Virtual Tourist. VT is a wonderful kaleidoscope of people, and forms a community of people that have a wide variety of reasons for being here.
Some provide little practical information, and their entries are more a personal journal of their lives away from home. Others create mini guide-books, although the poor indexing of Virtual Tourist creates little opportunity for really using these practical reviews.
Others paint vignettes or create a historical, social or political context for places they have visited.
All this makes Virtual Tourist an interesting web-site, with places all over the world ready for exploration through the eyes of others.

And me?
I just write. I am lucky enough to live in China. I am even luckier in that my job takes me to different parts of China regularly.
I do not pretend to understand China or its people: I try but it is hard to really understand a culture that is so different from my own.
I am a tourist here every day, and will always be a tourist here, even if I spend the rest of my life here.
I do post about the main tourist sites in China, especially in Beijing, but I encourage you to look also for the places away from the World Heritage sites, not just in China but everywhere. The smaller towns or those boring industrial suburbs or rural villages are "your street" in China - full of people whose lives are very different, very challenging and very interesting because they are very ordinary. You will not see China at the Great Wall at Badaling or on the Bund in Shanghai, just as you will not see America at the Statue of Liberty or England at the Tower of London.

Take your time. Stop awhile. Join in.

ADDITIONAL NOTES
I'm compiling a "Best of VT" listing of great sites from all over the world.

And please.....be a responsible tourist :)