The great American writer Paul Theroux once said: “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been; travellers don’t know where they’re going.”
This multi-layered statement highlights the profound questions created by our ability to travel anywhere at a keyboard click and about our voyeuristic, fleeting and selfish interest in many of the places we visit – some of us, purely for the “Insta”. It also reveals elitist snobbery: distinguishing between traveller and tourist, sneering at the latter, just like the thousands who demonstrated against tourists in Barcelona at the weekend.
Those campaigning Catalans squirting bemused visitors with water pistols on La Rambla joined the ranks of locals from Malaga to Mallorca, Venice to Bali and even Mount Fuji in........