Wagons ho and wheels up

Humanity is doomed.  There is no hope.  I have the proof.

Tourists should be the pinnacle of human development.  These are people who are earning enough money to travel for leisure, and have the intellectual curiosity that compels them to visit new places and experience new cultures, rather than spend their holidays on the couch with a box set, a behaviour by the way I hasten to add I do not judge or condemn.

Like early man, tourists are tool users, unlike early man they have pull-along suitcases, and access to room service, and access to people possibly living in fear of deportation back to a country they certainly did not leave with tourism on their minds, to fold down their bed sheets and fold the end of their toilet roll into a point.

Indeed a tourist, in particular a foreign tourist, is more of less using all of the knowledge and development of human civilisation to this point, from the airplane that they travelled on, to the sophisticated fabrics in the sort of colour that once only an Emperor could afford to keep the rain off.

Why then, are tourists such fucking idiots?

Tourists exhibit, for a group that have travelled, have gone to the time and expense and inconvenience of leaving their couch, presumably to go places, baffling behaviour.  For a class of people whose very existence is predicated on movement, why do they love stopping so much?  And not at convenient places, but rather at busy intersections or, my particular favourite, the entrance to a railway station.  These are people who have so little self awareness that they decide to stop in a doorway to consult each other, their mobile 'phones, a map, or for all I know the spirit of a long departed ancestor for advice.

I've got some advice, walk forward ten fucking steps so you don't block the busy entrance to the place like a cagoule cork.

That problem is as old as the Aussie backpacker who thinks that the bottom of an escalator on the Underground is an excellent place to halt to get his bearings.

A more recent phenomenon actually harks back to the early days of pioneering, with tourists with wheely suitcases forming a wagon train along the pavement.  Actually this I don't mind so much, because at least it's picturesque and ordered, and one can always anticipate the spectacle of the tourists circling the suitcases if they come under attack.

Full disclosure, I have done this wheelie suitcase thing myself, forming a very short train with Mrs GandP.  It's actually rather pleasing to glide along, as long as you are aware of your surroundings.

Of course, being at the pinnacle of human development and being a fucking idiot are not necessarily mutually exclusive properties, it's just that I'd like to think they are.

Maybe the explorer, rather than the tourist, is at the summit of the pinnacle, traditionally an explorer is somebody who does not pause when they come to a entrance, especially if it is of a tomb and there may be some bling behind the door.

Oh, and for the avoidance of doubt, if you call yourself a 'traveller' rather than a tourist when visiting a place, then unless you are doing so in a caravan and your arrival prompts headlines in the local version of the Daily Mail and text alerts in the local community about locking up their pets, then you are not a traveller, you are a tourist.  Visiting somewhere where there is a hostel and sporting half a dozen different bracelets on your non-dominant wrist does not make you a traveller, nor does constant reputation of the term once you get home.  You are at best, a visitor, like when you visit a National Trust property at the weekend, except that it is hellish difficult to get a decent afternoon tea in downtown Laos.