The Tourist, the Resident and I

Cambridge is a small place. Cambridge is an old place. Cambridge is a famous place.

No, I haven't had a stroke/converted to a career in teaching English as a Second Language (not equivalent, but may produce similar sentences at times). I'm merely providing you with three facts which, when locked in a room together with ample booze, devise a simple yet malevolent plan to make life in Cambridge difficult. Once their forces are joined, all they need for detonation is a drop of that widely available resource: the tourist. The plot is executed and within moments you're mowing down Spanish kids on your cycle-cum-deathstar, in one fell swoop ruining the photos of fifty Poles with an ill-timed intercession between Mikhails and the Harry Potter Architecture they're climbing over one another to capture. It's not even a ticking timebomb. It's a bomb that ticks while it explodes. For three long months.

Cambridge can feel crowded at the worst of times, especially during the gloomier term months where the students are in town and the academic machine is in motion. Town planners back in the day obviously had stuff on their plate which both affected their work, in the sense of killing them, and affected their view of their work, in the sense that they didn't feel long-term planning for increased population to be a priority. Wars, bubonic plagues n' stuff. The physical size of central Cambridge means it struggles to perform the role of regional hub which has landed in its lap after the technology revolution (whenever that was): high tech industry has flocked here, and the population is growing accordingly. On winter weekends during term, the centre heaves with students doing what they do: shopping, going to the pub, entertaining their parents in exchange for much needed goods and services. It also heaves with professionals from Cambridge and surrounds doing what they do, probably similar to what we do, much as we'd like to think it not. But then change seasons. Add the tourist packs and you have a town - at least for the busiest hours of the day - in pedestrian gridlock. To walk is to brave an obstacle course of moving objects, even with the streets reclaimed for foot use out of sheer numerical dominance. To cycle is to power your bike with alternate steps like a shambling tortoise, the modern equivalent of a Flintstones foot-powered mobile. Forget about momentum. And if you can't forget it, you'd better have a damn big bell. And a damn fine mudguard to protect your jeans from sloshed blood. For in the class warfare pitting two wheels against as many feet, there will always be blood.

I've never had to negotiate space with so many tourist bodies on a daily basis. Wait a minute, pipe my ever-vigilant critics. You're from Sydney; hardly the sewage treatment plant of world tourist destinations. Yes, I reply. Thanks for paying attention. But it's a simple matter of scale. Sydney is a gigantic sprawling metropolis, meaning inside escape is never far away: walk from the centre to Wolloomooloo and you're instantly rejuvenated by less bustle and more used syringes. Some kind samaritan may have left you something for your trouble, if you're lucky. And even in centrum, where the tourist hotspots are most concentrated, you never feel suicidally claustrophobic. The footpaths are adequate. The roads are wide enough to store stationary traffic in comfort. If it all becomes too much, you can sit just that little too near the couple who are themselves just that little too close to having sex in the Botanical Gardens. Or jump into the harbour after a thunderstorm has filled it with condoms and tampons. As I get grosser, you no doubt get the idea. In general, I find that the presence of water (i.e. harbours, the ocean) makes an enormous difference to a city's psychological landscape. As a camp interior decorator would say of a mirror in a room, 'it really opens the space up.'

None of that in Cambridge. The crowds scribble all over the romantic facade and swell the city to its ever-present potential to become what it is: a very flat prison. The funniest thing that's come from having to regularly deal with these herds is the primitive mindset of entitlement, rising up in me, without fail, almost automatically. A tourist, god bless 'im, in his whale-of-a-time-not-a-care-in-the-world-except-for-the-pressing-whale-problem laxity, unthinkingly steps back and forces me to get off my bike and walk over the bridge. Instead of slapping him on the back and saying 'it's ok, it's not your fault, it's just what happens when the people are too many and the place is too small; watch out for locals on bikes though; they can be cocks; have a great day, sir!', I roll my eyes, grunt ever-so-audibly, and scowl like Gollum. Look at him. Standing there in his white shorts and ill-fitting cap, bouncing a camera off his beer-belly as if he were playing some kind of spastic game of middle-aged totem tennis. 'Hey, juicy prune! Maybe if you thought a bit about where you were going, a) you wouldn't form a key obstruction in my mission to purchase digestive biscuits from Sainsbury's and hence retard my digestion by a crucial three seconds, b) you wouldn't leave the house because you'd be too busy thinking about where you were going, c) your flights of imagination would save the world by replacing your sooty carbon footprint with cleaner fantasies...you filthy Ryanair pervert!' - thus I speak, communicating not via words but through glare. And I stomp extra-heavily to emphasise the energy tax of walking over a hill from stop as opposed to gliding over it from a rolling start. Aah, the gestural eloquence of irrational anger.

But unfailingly, I plough down the back side of the bridge with guilty readiness to dodge, a weak compensation in the form of brief deference to this species. For I too have been known to wear shorts, hats and giant cameras, bumbling clumsily through new places that don't have half as many people to trip over as Cambridge. Tourist-hating, as fun a pastime as it might be, is actually a milder and more transient upsurge of that same feeling that makes tabloids rant against immigration, and people read the rants. 'This is our town, bitch. Stop taking our jobs.' Of course, tourists are actually giving people jobs. So maybe: 'this is our town, bitch. Stop taking our space.' would be better for our purposes. What interests me most is the seniority one instantly gains from being a 'resident' over a 'tourist' - as if one can claim ownership rights and high status for being unlucky enough to be born in the U.K., or stupid enough to move here (ouch...sorry). I ain't talking about public services; of course a distinction between citizen and non-citizen needs to be made in the case of limited resources. But tourists, at least in Cambridge, are literally second-class citizens wherever they go. They pay to enter the big sites and colleges. One could say that charging is a regulatory mechanism, preventing too many tourists passing through and disrupting academic tranquillity. To this I say: 'Oh, John, we've come all the way to Cambridge to see Trinity college - but it costs three pounds.' 'I'm sorry, Martha. I know it's your birthday. But we just can't afford it.' No tourist is deterred by having to pay; just lightly annoyed and marginalised. Does the fee help colleges with expensive maintenance? Yep, but definitely not the damage caused by shameless tourists with their walking habits and whatnot. How much can it cost to replace a scuffed stone now and then? If I were a tourist, I'd walk around St John's court with extra abrasive stabs of the feet, just to do my three pounds worth of damage. Confession: I do it anyway.

There's a fine line between 'respecting the people that live here' and propping rigidly against a wall to salute them every time they walk past. Though it happens elsewhere, the clear relationship of dominant resident/subordinate tourist is more pronounced in Cambridge because it's a town that has always thrived on exclusion: 'enter here, if you are rich and brilliant*.....*former is prerequisite, latter is optional'. As a tourist here, you're experiencing in miniature what the 19th C chimney sweep (resident!) must have done every time he passed the forbidding Trinity gate: sorry pal, no cash, no college. Chimneys could do with a sweep though. In a perverse way, perhaps that's what tourists come after in visiting Cambridge: to have your non-qualification thrust in your face. Cambridge. Pioneering exclusionary tourism for 800 years.

I'm all for the Lonely Planet low-impact 'tread on tiptoes and don't forget your manners' approach to tourism; but it just strikes me how much the advent of mass transit and increased mobility have changed the social status of the 'guest'. In Ancient Greece - well, the poems that I read - the guest/foreigner/visitor was nothing short of divine. When you played host, you gave your guest everything: you filled them with piles of meat, got them smashed on strong wine, clothed them in the choicest garments before you were even allowed to ask their name and nationality. The rules of engagement were clearcut: honour your guest, or Zeus god of hospitality will fuck you up. Now the tourist (for these generalisations read 'I as tourist') is so apologetic and embarrassed about his touristness that he'll be hesitant to remind the shopkeeper of his small oversight in shortchanging him by 26 Euro. I like to think I'm no slouch for courtesy when at home. But I become so paranoid about being a target of local hatred when I travel overseas that my politeness and tolerance blow up the considerate-o-meter. Sometimes I wonder what I would do if threatened with a knife in a foreign country. Projecting from previous behavioural patterns, I think I would take off my shirt and sketch out nice little permanent marker frames around my vital organs. Please sir, be my guest. It's your country.

'I'm just a tourist.' 'I'm just visiting.' As a professor over here pointed out to me last year after a revealing blunder in the seminar, 'just' is a big word. People tend to assume - people including tourists themselves - that there's something inherently frivolous about the very process of tourism. You're just a part-timer. You can't be serious. Sure, the concept of the lazy 'holiday' still presides in entrenched western rhythms of work/play. But people can be deeply serious about their travel. They save their hard earnt moola to visit a destination for which they feel some passion, or connection; about which they might even know a whole lot more than the locals, who thought that church was just a nice curtain to the periodic appearance and removal of graffiti. Tourism can come from real interest, real commitment. Naturally residents will chisel out the cynicism when some Johnny-come-lately comes along - lately, too! - and looks with earnest admiration at the same things for which they can only dredge up a numb apathy. It's just (!) a bite of the old green-eyed monster.

In this way, tourists have sustained the heaviest casualties when it comes to the commonwealth's war on enthusiasm. I say commonwealth because I've now lived in centre and periphery of the old empire; and I'm pretty sure Australian cynicism is deeply bound up with the British variety. The other half of the dichotomy lies across the Atlantic: America. I was talking to an American mate of mine, and he proposed that one of the things that tells against you most as an American abroad is your pure energy, your culturally sanctioned keenness. Keenness is so not cool in Anglo-Australian terms. But cross the pond and you're in the land of milk, honey, peanut butter m+m's, and unadulterated positivity. This must have something to do with the fact that in my mind, the archetype, or caricature, of a tourist is...a Yank. 'Believing you can do stuff and then doing it' - that was the title of my submission for a new American national anthem, but the letter must have been destroyed in a rush of enthusiasm for one thing or another.

I've opened a can of beans prematurely with the question of how nationality affects one's reception as a tourist; so I'm going to cut before things get too windy. In conclusion, consider this: tourists are the poorest (most wretched) rich people on the earth. Their reward for wonderment and cash injections is ridicule and inflated prices. They are universally despised: not only by the residents, who assume tourists will range from ignorant to neanderthal unless proven otherwise, but - and this is the icy nail in the coffin cake - even by their own kind! As a tourist, there are few things you hate more than a fellow tourist. Look at her. Look at those eyes. Greedily snatching up the authenticity of MY EXPERIENCE. And you don't even appreciate it. You're just there, swilling your beer, chowing your feed, paralysed in your repertoire of basic conversational noises, like a parrot being electrocuted. Give me MY EXPERIENCE back! There is no solidarity between tourists, for every tourist perceives every other tourist as a competitor, battling for the finite resources of recordable experience and genuine 'difference.' The tourist is at her smuggest when she has found a restaurant populated only by locals. And she is at her most defeated when she sits down, orders her food in a mumble of badly pronounced pleasantries, closes her eyes, and hears: 'Oh look, Marge! This is perfect! So authentic! I knew it would be just great from the guidebook description.' She shudders once at the crude voice, but then again, and harder, when she recognises her own voice within it. The paradox of a Lonely Planet featuring an 'off-the-beaten-track' section comes a-flooding through her mind.

Tourists, you have my sympathy. You are fighting foreign and civil wars at the same time. You are hated, you hate each other, and above all perhaps, you hate yourselves. If you at any point feel my bike tyre on your calf, maintain some perspective: my scowl will mean 'I feel your pain.' As you dust yourselves off and shout after me with dignity 'don't worry, sir. It's your town. I'm sorry I obstructed your important business.', perhaps my callous bubble will burst. I'll help you up and orate: 'Sir, you are no tourist. You are a temporary resident. And what of us? We are but jaded tourists trapped as residents: excited mice grown into sluggish rats. Give me your hand. For we are all, in some sense, both residents and tourists of the one globe.'

It would be delivered with just the right balance of earnestness and cynicism. I'm an international student: the disfigured offspring of an illicit love affair, when tourist meets resident. We can't procreate; but we can flit between our maternal and paternal camps at will.

End of Tour.