How far do you have to go to become a tourist?

This is a question I ask myself a lot. Obviously I’m a tourist when I’m in a country that’s not the one I live in. I’m a tourist when I go to London. Am I a tourist if I go glamping at the cute little place a twenty-minute drive away? Am I a tourist in the town where I do Brownies? Am I a tourist if I go to a part of my hometown where I don’t live?

Me sitting on a bench while out on a country walk while glamping a 20 minute drive from home.

Let’s start by defining “tourist”, shall we? The OED has two definitions. The first one, a noun, dates back to the 1780s and is “one who makes a tour or tours”. The second, from the 1950s, has it as a noun and says “to travel for pleasure, as a tourist”. Love that the definition of tourist is to be a tourist. Nice one, OED. So, making a tour. “Tour: going or travelling round from place to place”. So a tourist is someone who goes somewhere. Note that a tourist isn’t someone who goes to all the same places as all the other tourists carrying an oversized camera (or more likely an iPad these days), wearing an unfashionable shoe and sock combination or reading a guidebook. As far as the OED is concerned, there’s no difference between a traveller and a tourist.

By that definition, the 2.3km loop of four local roads that I walk most days for the sake of walking makes me a tourist. I’m going from place to place. I’m making a tour. If I walk around the field I can see on the other side of the road from my window, I’m a tourist. Ergo, we need a new definition.

An alleyway between two rows of back gardens, mostly blocked from view by 6 foot fences. This is often part of my daily walk route.

So let’s try that. We’ll add in a purpose. You’re not a tourist if you go somewhere for exercise, for example. You’re a tourist if you go somewhere for interest or pleasure. Not necessarily somewhere new – after 17 trips to Iceland over the last thirteen and a half years, I’m still a tourist although if you were going to set a number, it would probably be below 17. Somewhere you don’t live. What if you have ever lived there? I’d still consider myself a tourist in Switzerland after living there during my third year of university. Then the next question might be “how long do you have to be somewhere to say that you live there?”. I see a lot of travel creators go off to live in other countries for a while – but are they living or are they on an extended holiday? Is “living” spending an extended period of time somewhere while going about your daily life without increasing the proportion of leisure to normal life? What is normal life, anyway? Work? Is your status of living vs touristing dependent on your economic value? On where you pay taxes? That doesn’t sound like the right definition at all. Besides, I absolutely lived in Switzerland but I was a student on an exchange programme. I earned nothing, unless you count the grant the Swiss government gave me. Is it about legal status? I had a residence permit for the year. But if I moved to London for two months, would I be living there? I’d be doing my regular 9-5 job and I’d probably go to the office a lot more than I do now. But is that enough to count as “living” there?

Me sitting on a train in Switzerland looking out at the snow, wearing a red jumper and a rainbow-striped hat with earflaps.

Still no conclusions. Living vs an extended trip is complicated. What about a short trip? How hard can that be? If I only spend a long weekend, maybe a week, maybe two weeks, maybe even a month, in a place, I’m not living there, right? I’m just visiting. I’m a tourist. So now we bring in the next question, which is the one of distance, the one this whole thing started with. How far do you have to go to become a tourist?

I’m going to go back to Brownies. I drive maybe 10 or 15 miles to get to Brownies every week. I also drive there once a month for Trefoil Guild. In the summer, I try to go every week to swim. And we have events – we’ve taken the Brownies to the pantomime, to civic events like Remembrance and the carnival, we’ve done sleepovers at the hall, and we have district meetings there at least three times a year. All in all, I spend a reasonable amount of time there. But I don’t live there. I definitely don’t feel like a tourist there, even when I go to visit the museums or wander down a high street I’m not really familiar with. But unlike many of the leaders who do live there, I don’t know all the members of the town council or every elderly lady who pauses and leans out of her car window to say hi as we walk the Brownies past. As a Brownie leader, I’m undoubtedly a pillar of the community but I’m not very familiar with the community. I only have the vaguest idea where the schools are. I don’t know the teachers. I don’t know the religious leaders.

Taking part in the carnival with Brownies. We're all dressed as jellyfish, with clear umbrellas decorated with strips of coloured crepe paper. I'm the red-yellow-orange one at the back and in front of me are a few Brownies half-hidden under their umbrellas but with their faces blurred for good measure.

But I don’t know any of these things in the place where I live, either. Neither do most people. Well, I know one of our town councillors because he’s an old-school eccentric and you can’t miss him. As a Ranger leader, I’m part of the community again. I’ve talked to town people at events – the man in charge of the market, the volunteers at the museum and the tourist information centre. That’s about it. My parents haven’t even done that much. So it’s not about who you know.

It’s about intention. I’m here to enjoy and experience the place, not merely to escort my little yellows and pick up some shopping before I go home. I’m not a tourist in London when I go straight from the train to the office and back to the train, but I’m a tourist when I spend two days at the office and use my evening to roam Theatreland and talk to the Thames as it reflects the light of Parliament. I’m a tourist when I go up the road to stay in a shepherd’s hut and get away from my regular life for 48 hours. I may be exploring no further than the hot tub six feet from the hut door but I have travelled to a place for leisure.

Me in the hot tub, with green fields behind me, drinking something red, fizzy and non-alcoholic from a champagne flute.

And if I leave the suburbs of my home town and go and explore the museums and exhibits I’ve not previously done down in the centre of town? No, I’m still a local. I’m just a local who hasn’t made the most of the place before. I reckon local – for me – applies to about a mile in radius. There’s a small town less than a mile and a half from where I live. Other than the occasional Girlguiding event, I never go there. Not for leisure, not for practical purposes. If I did go, I probably wouldn’t sit in the pub and proclaim myself a local. What if there was a campsite less than a mile away and I went and stayed there? Because I would – camping is about spending a weekend in a tent rather than at home scrolling. I wouldn’t be a tourist at that hypothetical campsite and I’d probably get odd looks from the owner when I explained that I live less than a mile away. It’s hypothetical – there’s no campsite that close. I wouldn’t be a tourist if I stayed in the hotel in town. I have done that – it was my sister’s wedding so we all stayed, even though it’s barely a mile away. No, not a tourist.

So my definition of tourist, having waded through all that is: someone who travels at least a mile from home with the intention of having leisure. Not working, not volunteering, not doing errands. There for the purpose of exploring or relaxing or of just being away from home and responsibility. I’ve concluded that if I camp, glamp or stay in a hotel twenty or thirty minutes away, I am nonetheless a tourist and when I pick up some juice and milk on the way back from a Brownie planning meeting, I am not a tourist.