Think ______ is Great Now? Oh Please, You Shoulda Seen it in the ‘70s.
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 06.11.07 | 8:53 AM ET
Photo of Kathmandu by 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.”
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
Terry Ward 06.12.07 | 12:47 AM ET
This is so true, Finn nailed it. I was going on and on about Bali recently to someone, as I tend to do (love that place), and they said to me, ‘But isn’t Bali, like, super touristy?’ (in other words, ‘Isn’t it ruined?’).
It was, it is bouncing back after the bombings (happily, for the locals) and it will be super touristy again soon, with any luck.
Sure, visiting Uluwatu back in the day would have had its own charm - when you had to hike miles in just to catch a glimpse of the famed break, as opposed to the current hardships, which involve sipping a banana smoothie at a warung built into the cliffside with a stadium view on some of the planet’s best surf. But since changing when I was born isn’t an option, I’m all for just trying to make the most of these tough travel times.
Sheila at Family Travel 06.12.07 | 1:19 AM ET
I’m sorry to be so cranky, but many folks that I know don’t take the time to explore their own backyard, and are way too enamored of getting to the next cool place “before it changes when everyone else gets there.”
The most magical experiences are often with people right under your nose, in your time zone or even city/county/state. Go find them. Don’t be that New Yorker who never visits Ellis Island but wants to prattle on about how Cambodia “used to be.”
Gaak.
Lauren Nicole 04.06.08 | 10:03 PM ET
Just remember wherever you go—THESE are somebody else’s good ‘old days.
I weep for the future….