To the editor: I too was part of the overtourism drawback. (“Vacationers have made Europe a nightmare. I used to be a part of the issue however gained’t be once more,” Opinion, July 26)
For 45 years I produced travelogue films. Like Rick Steves, my message was to only get on the airplane and go. However I by no means might have imagined the explosion of journey.
In 1985, I made a movie on an Alaska cruise that two ships with 600 passengers apiece made every week. Even then, the small port cities had been crowded. Right now, no less than 20 ships make the journey weekly, many with passenger capacities of three,000. The attraction has vanished.
In 1974, I spent eight weeks in Venice, Italy, making a movie. To say it was magical is an understatement. Right now, Saint Mark’s Sq. is extra like Occasions Sq..
However the saddest factor is no one is taking a look at what they got here to see. On my first journey to Paris in 1968, I stood in entrance of the Mona Lisa and reveled within the second. Right now no one seems on the Mona Lisa — they’re too busy taking selfies, by no means spending a second trying on the portray itself.
Sure, the Mona Lisa is Instagram prepared. However what did you see? What did you be taught? How had been you moved?
Doug Jones, Los Angeles
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To the editor: We’re octogenarians who’ve traveled internationally, as vacationers, for many of our lives. Final month we had been on a tour of Scandinavia, a spot the place neither of us had been.
We began in Bergen, Norway, and arrived two days earlier than the tour started. We prefer to discover locations by ourselves for a number of days and recover from jet lag, so we walked throughout Bergen.
We prefer to see how individuals stay in no matter cities we go to. We ate at native eating places, talked with the locals and wandered round, discovering what life is like “off the grid.”
The remainder of our journey, an organized tour that included Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Estonia, gave us an amazing publicity to life and tradition in that a part of the world. Sure, there have been a number of vacationers within the standard locations, however going out by ourselves on foot gave us marvelous experiences in locations we by no means knew.
Once we can now not do these far-away journeys, we are going to at all times journey to be taught one thing new — even in our personal great metropolis.
Frima and Michael Telerant, Westwood
