Bangkok -- 12/31/01 6:28 PM

I’ve been running over the distinction that is sometimes made between travelers and tourists.  Generally this distinction is made by travelers who feel that they are in a position to judge the correct way for people to move about the planet.  It’s a value judgment and I’m trying to get at the root of it.  You see, I’m having a hard time figuring out which category my fiancé and I fit into.  So we’ve been doing a little research into this heavily charged dichotomy, and here, for better or worse, are our results based on our own travels and also, importantly, our experiences in that epitome of hubs; Bangkok.

 Somewhere or other I recall reading a nice distinction between tourists and travelers to the effect that “tourists begin missing home as soon as they set foot in their destination while travelers feel at home wherever they may find themselves” (I apologize if this is a famous quote from someone whose name I should know).  At the time I felt that this was a really succinct and non-judgmental distinction between the two types of voyagers (now there’s a nice non-judgmental word) but upon further introspection I have found it to be flawed.  You see, despite the fact that I’ve lived and worked as an expatriate for a full fifth of my life I often miss my “home” (here I mean my apartment in my working country) when I’m traveling. In fact even when I am vacationing in my homeland I feel pangs of homesickness for my apartment and my life back in my working country.   So you see this runs contrary to my initial understanding of the above quote in that “home” comes to mean “where I hang my hat” rather than “where I can trace my cultural roots”.  So given this understanding of the word “home” coupled with my desire to sometimes be back where I “hang my hat” I must be a tourist.  Alright, so now we’re getting somewhere…or are we?  Now, see the other implication of the quote is that a person can be labeled a traveler if he or she can somehow feel “at home” in more place than one.  Being an expatriate, and having already established that the place where I hang my hat is not the place where I acquired all of my unseemly cultural baggage it stands to reason that I am a person who is capable of feeling at home in more than one place.  Actually, when my fiancé and I travel we tend to stay at the same hotel as on previous visits and after a few iterations of a certain destination I start to feel at home there as well.  These developments make me wonder if maybe, perhaps, (I’m a little nervous with hopefulness now) I can call myself a traveler too!  Now wouldn’t that be something.