Forget luxury vacations: These days, the wealthy fork over cash for 'local experience'

If you were a child of the Lonely Planet age, you trotted the globe on a shoestring, sleeping on trains, holing up in youth hostels, eating in private kitchens and subsisting in ways that would embarrass your friendly neighborhood hobo.

The “Lonely Planet” guidebook series was the Bible of this age, telling us of the attractions mainstream tourists never saw, and which dishes at which restaurants provided the most calories for the dollar.

Things have changed.

Today, instead of guides to traveling on a budget, there are guides for wealthy Americans who, according to the New York Times, want to escape their “cocoon of luxury” and get out there and meet a few people who can tell you what life on a daily basis is really like in Myanmar.

“Tourism has become the sort of activity where you don’t touch the reality of the people living in that place,” Laura Arciniegas, a sociologist in Barcelona, Spain, lamented in the Times.

OK, but isn’t that the point of being rich? So you don’t have to share a public restroom with Grady from “Sanford and Son?”

Remember when “seeing how the other half lives” referred to middle class people treating themselves to dinner at Le Dôme? Today that’s been reversed, and involves America’s 1% enjoying (mercifully brief) encounters (for a small fee) with the hoi-est of the polloi.

Fortunately, the Times has some helpful hints on how this is to be accomplished:

“A meal is a window into a way of life according to Dr. Arciniegas, who works for the company Eatwith, which pairs travelers with locals for meals.” For $285, Eatwith will give jet setters the “experience” of supper in the home of an “authentic” non-American.

Something tells me these hosts are about as authentic as a Civil War town gift-shop bayonet — you’re not going to sit down with a family of Vert-Saint-Denis pipefitters and listen to them prattle on about the gilets jaunes movement.

It’s also weird that the same people who are going to the good time and trouble to keep immigrants out of the United States are now paying to see them in action.

Adding to that, all we’ve talked about so far is how gratifying it is for rich Americans to meet average people from around the world; I wonder if, for average people, the feeling is mutual. “Uh-oh, Dingularah, it’s another bejeweled American couple in matching Lorenzo Uomo sweaters— better get the coffee on.”

You don’t even know what to say about this trend, although American tourists appear to be dazzled. In Marrakesh, Morocco, you can pay $88 to go on a jog with a local. He’ll even drop by his own house so you can watch him rototill his garden.

“They had their own cattle, their own chickens and they grew their own vegetables,” an American traveler gushed. “It was my most unique experience.”

Fantastic. Who knew the people in Morocco weren’t still using stone tools? And far be it from me to break the spell of childlike wonder over a rooster, but you want to tell this person that he doesn’t have to fly halfway around the world to see poultry. Here in the United States we are perfectly capable of scraping together our own chickens.

But that’s the thing. Home-grown squalor isn’t interesting to them. You couldn’t pay an equity-fund manager to visit a doublewide in Eastern Kentucky for a dinner of scrapple and scrambled eggs with ketchup. But that same guy will blow a few bucks toward a Moroccan jogger for the privilege of seeing the neighborhood.

There’s something that to me is really oogie about this. Because let’s be honest, if you were to pay a wildebeest $88 there wouldn’t be much difference between these “authentic” encounters and a zoo.

But at least they can come home to their Manhattan penthouses and tell Jeeves what it was like to see a chicken.

For 3.5 glorious minutes, we looked up — and forgot about all the troubles below

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Rich Americans search for 'real' experiences abroad