Think ______ is Great Now? Oh Please, You Shoulda Seen it in the ‘70s.

There’s at least one person in nearly every great place you travel to who will look you in your dazzled eyes and tell you in no uncertain terms that you really missed it, that you should have been there 5, 10, 20 years ago, when the place was truly magical and not overrun with people just like you. John Flinn calls it the Kathmandu Syndrome. As he defines it: “Every place used to be better, at least in the eyes of those who were there then. Now all these places are blighted, charmless, overcrowded and hopelessly touristy.” In a fine column in the San Francisco Chronicle, he explores this all-too-common expression of the hyper-competitive streak in some travelers.

Flinn, like most of us, is always too late.

“I was born half a century too late to experience Paris in the 1920s, I was only 10 during San Francisco’s Summer of Love and I never made it to Prague in the 1980s,” he writes. “Somewhere in the world right now, some place is in the midst of what people will one day call its Golden Age, and you can be sure I won’t find out until it’s too late. On the other hand, there are those who invariably define a place’s Golden Age as whenever it was that they were there. That’s the root of the Kathmandu Syndrome.”

Photo of Kathmandu by Marc van der Chijs via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

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