“I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

A friend and I once had a long debate about whether or not cruise-ship holidays really qualified as travel in the ‘learn more about yourself and the place you’re visiting’ kind of understanding of travel. At the time I had just returned from a 5-day cruise in the Caribbean where I fell in love with cruising. I was reminded of the conversation last weekend when, randomly paging through the travel section of the Sunday papers, I came across an ad for a cruise from Cape Town to Namibia which sounds gorgeous.

The disadvantages of a cruise is that you spend most of your time in what is basically a floating luxury hotel. Which may not sound like a disadvantage to most people. The thing about spending all your time on a luxury floating hotel is that you never really get to meet the local people and really understand their lives. Or at least, that is the argument.

This, believe it or not, is where I differ with many other people. I disagree on two points. Firstly, I think the suggestion that riding public transport and staying in low-cost accommodation brings you closer to understanding the local people than the few hours of visiting a place – perhaps including museums and tourist-friendly cultural packages – is probably wishful thinking. The argument basically goes that you need to get closer to the local people and experience some of the way they live in order to understand them. I don’t think you do understand them. I don’t think that taking a few local taxis or walking through poor areas allows any real insight into the realities of these people’s lives. Perhaps I am jaded as a result of watching foreigners come to South Africa, spend a few days or sometimes even a few weeks travelling from backpackers to backpackers, popping into townships and talking with all the poor people they can find and heading back to their cosy reality in the belief that they truly understand how local people live and the complex challenges of culture, race, socio-economic status and a rapidly changing reality. I don’t think that they have any more real understanding than tourists who stay in hotels and only visit safe and pre-packaged ‘culture’ and ‘reality’. Reading books and researching a place is probably a far more efficient way of learning about the reality of ordinary people and has the added advantage of often including some of the social and political and cultural history which has shaped the place and which the poor locals who are visited by tourists are unlikely to talk about, even if they are aware of it.

Which brings me to my second point: when I visit a new place to learn about it, I’m not there primarily to understand the plight of the poor people living in shacks. That is not intended to sound callous. It’s just that there seems to be a general perception that everyone who has money, everyone who is wealthy (relative to those around them), is the same in every country, that all rich people are really the same everywhere and it is only the poor who really still retain the difference from other countries and that they are therefore the really interesting people in a country. In support of this, there are lots of arguments about how more wealthy people (generally meaning everyone who lives in a brick house and above the poverty line) all just buy into the American cultural hegemony, so you can see them at home.

I’d argue that, in fact, poor people are the same everywhere. That may sound horrible but it’s true. People who live in informal settlements in shacks have fairly similarly dreary, deprived lives everywhere. Sometimes there are interesting variations in how they build their shacks based on variations in locally available materials. Sometimes the meagre diet of mielie-meal is replaced by one of rice or plantain or cassava. But on the whole there isn’t much difference. The voices of opposition would come back that they don’t have access to modern technology so aren’t as strongly affected by western cultural hegemony. Which is a nice idea but is completely blasted out of the water by the fact that cellphone technology is almost more prevalent in these areas than in areas with higher general socio-economic status. Cellphone technology which brings with it modern music and culture and the latest games and social networking technology. They may be poor but they’re not primitive.

In fact, it is often those with a little more access to money who are able to maintain and care about their cultural roots. The only poor people who really live according to their traditional ways of life are the rural poor who live in places where tourists very, very seldom venture. A tourist who comes to South Africa and visits Kayalitsha and thinks he/she now understands traditional Xhosa life would be shocked to visit the actual Xhosa heartland and see how differently rural people live.

All of which basically comes down to arguing that there are poor people everywhere and the ‘realities’ (which tourists are trying to understand) of those who are accessible to tourists don’t differ that much from country to country. That’s probably why it doesn’t sit right with me to spend my time in another country finding out about the lives of the poor living in ghettos/informal settlements. I feel somewhat hypocritical going to another country to find out about what I could have seen just as easily – and probably more easily because there is a common language and heritage – in Joburg or Cape Town.

I’m not saying that I want to avoid the poor. I just have a problem with what feels like sentimentalizing poverty and focusing exclusively on how the poor are living when learning about the country. I find it equally interesting to see how the ordinary, middle-class people and the rich and famous in other lands live. One of my favourite places in Mozambique was Inhambane because I felt like it was one of the few places where I got a sense of how ordinary people – not extremely poor, not extremely rich – went about their everyday lives. Not that I understand. It would take so much longer to understand. But I got a sense. I think it’s possible to get a sense of a place, to get a basic impression, in a few hours or a few days.

Which is one of the reasons that I’m okay with cruising. It does not allow, as backpacking does, the freedom to spend many days getting to know a place, but you still get a sense of it. After spending just a day or so in each place, I can tell you that Cozumel is fascinating, fun, full of life and relatively poor and Key West is heavily touristed and trying very hard to sanitize it’s history and pretend that it is part of the unitary American past, which I find annoying.

The other joy of cruising is that you get to meet other people. They’re not necessarily the people of the place you’re visiting. In fact, they’re almost never locals. But they’re, frankly, often far more interesting people than many of the locals. If you get lucky, they’re the kind of people who have travelled widely and are interested in people and places and politics and history. So, the time spent on the floating luxury hotel is not wasted time, as some would imagine.

I suppose, ultimately, when travelling, I’m interested in all people, not just the ones who come from the country I am visiting and certainly not only those whose stories are exclusively about overcoming adversity. A friend has argued that part of the value of travel is that it forces you to face and live in unfamiliar situations. Having grown up in small town Eastern Cape, floating through an unknown sea on a luxury hotel is actually less familiar to me than visiting real traditional people who are still living in huts in villages. Perhaps that is why going on a Cruise actually has as much meaning, and as many opportunities for growth, for me as a backpacking holiday.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling that I’m unlikely ever to convince my favourite travel companions of this, which would be a significant disadvantage to cruising as opposed to backpacking, so I imagine backpacking will probably be the preferred travel style, at least for the next few years.