I was thinking about Georgia when the recent war broke out. I didn’t think about Tbilisi, or the Stalin museum in Gori or the politics. I thought about the toasts. In Georgia, they have long dinners where everyone gets up and makes a toast. They can last a minute or an hour, but they’re always funny or mischievous or controversial. And everyone loves a great toastmaster, whoever they are. Listen to a toast, and you get the authentic Georgian experience. Here’s another thing I remember: white wine is a real man’s drink in Georgia. Women drink red. And you never, ever toast someone with beer. That’s a real insult.
What is authentic about that anecdote? I think it’s this. This summer we saw pictures of Georgians as victims or aggressors, statistics or pawns in a geopolitical game. I thought of them making toasts with tumblers of white wine. I felt I knew them a little better. The same with Iran. In Iran, I discovered people who love picnics, and shopping, and certainly don’t obsess about religion. That’s not to say that the Iran you see on the BBC is fake. It’s just not the Iran you see as a tourist.
Authenticity in travel and tourism is something to celebrate. And that’s the first point to make: you are eligible for an authentic experience as a ‘tourist’ just as much as you are as a ‘traveller’. Just because a place sells postcards and is known to half the world doesn’t mean it’s not true to itself. I remember thinking this in Petra, listening to a couple of English visitors complain about the noise and the soft-drinks hawkers. Petra, built at the crossroads of the great ancient trading routes, was always a place of hawkers and noise – and tourists for that matter. When it was unearthed from the sand, it rediscovered its authentic purpose.
We’ve striven to make ourselves feel better about tourism over the years, by adding words that sound like a mitigating plea: responsible tourism, eco-tourism. Authentic tourism, a more recent coinage, is growing in popularity because it’s more inclusive, more liberating – and maybe because it’s more open to personal interpretation.
An authentic destination is simply this: somewhere that’s comfortable in its own skin, however many outsiders visit. What’s ruled out? Places that fake their own history. Places that hand their culture over to someone else’s because they think that makes more money. Places that over-package their natural attractions.
Still, it’s easy enough to choose exotic and controversial places like Georgia and Iran for your authentic experiences. So how about somewhere most experts agree has been blighted by tourism? Torremolinos, for example? In fact, the main town of Torremolinos is an authentic Andalucian town. People have their churros and coffee at 11, they like long lunches of fried fish, and keep out of the sun in summer. A couple of miles away on the coast there are several thousand English and German tourists living a very different sort of life. But the two coexist just fine. Phoenicians, Romans, Moors and Castilians have been unable to shake the roots of Andalucian culture: a sunburnt army of scantily clad northern Europeans aren’t about to.
