Get lost!

I never get lost: I do explore.

That’s the excuse I give myself and anyone questioning my perfect sense of direction and my typically masculine reluctance to ask for the way even in the most labyrinthine city or featureless landscape.

Incidentally, I found a long time ago that losing your way is also the best way to learn the most about a place you’re visiting for the first time or even your hometown.

One night, in the streets of Prague, my reluctance to ask for directions led to a heated tongue-in-cheek argument with a long forgotten travel mate, which in turn led to some healthy if a bit coercive introspection to resolve the dichotomy explored in “The Sheltering Sky”. That was when it dawned on me.

Tourists ask for directions. Tourists do not want to get lost. When they do, they want to go back to the right way. Tourists need directions, because they are going somewhere. I have no problem asking for directions if I am just doing errands, even in the place where I live. But when I am “exploring” a new place, taking a longer or an unexpected route is not and should not be a problem.

It’s not about a snobbish, rather delusional rejection of a despised label: it’s about purpose. The people that we call tourists do travel to see something that they already know, which they expect and often demand to be as similar as possible to what they saw on a brochure, an ad, a film or on Instagram.

Those rejecting that label, either knowingly or unconsciously, avoid familiar perspectives or famous attractions and run away when they accidentally bump into a group of tourists being herded around. They want to see what brochures do not show.

Unfortunately, it works both ways.

I often say that I try to be invisible when I work, because people change their behavior in the presence of a camera. The hardest part of being a photojournalist is to capture the essence of what is happening or the spirit of a place while preventing your mere presence  from affecting them. This can raise serious ethical dilemmas in journalism, but in my opinion it is also the root problem with mass tourism.

Places are made of people and people change in the presence of strangers. Tourist places often feel unreal, like movie sets: people, either locals or visitors, are acting, playing along a script that the tourist industry framed them in.

If you manage to blend in, you can see places as they are when there are no foreigners around and take meaningful photos. I feel extremely flattered when roles reverse and locals ask me for directions because they don’t notice that I am a foreigner, even more when I am actually able to help them.

On the other hand, knowing what to expect leads to preconception and can distort what you see. I want no spoilers: whenever possible, I try to not read too much before “exploring” a place, challenging myself to discover important, conspicuous or hidden features to learn more about them later and return with renewed awareness.

Sometimes this can result in weird experiences, like when together with an EUFOR officer, who was supposed to watch over me, we¹ found an abandoned, spooky fortress in the outskirts of Sarajevo. Only after photographing, exploring, opening doors and entering dark rooms in the historical building, we learned that it was actually strictly off-limits because it was still heavily mined, booby-trapped and riddled with UXO, earmarked for robotic demining. Luckily, we didn’t know, and bees can fly because they don’t know they can’t.

However, working on assignments makes everything different.

Someone trusts you to do a job: your duty is to do it to the best of your abilities and, crucially, to bring the photos (and yourself) safely back. Most often there’s no room for aimless explorations or the thrill of discovery. Spoilers or not, subjects and logistics must be carefully researched beforehand.

I learned it the hard way during a fabulous assignment, which almost ended in disaster because of a tiny miscalculation.

I was on Raiatea island, the ancestral heart of Polynesian civilization, to photograph Marae Taputapuatea² that had been its holiest religious center. I traveled by ship and I had only one day. It was just my third day in French Polynesia, I was still jet-lagged, freshly inked³ and on a tight schedule: my research could not be very accurate and focused on the subject, not logistics.

Being on a tourist hotspot, I took for granted that plenty of buses, taxis or whatever would be available and eager to take me there. Little I knew that overtourism wasn’t a thing in Raiatea. I only found a public bus marked “Taputapuapea” and I hurriedly jumped on it. I knew it was the town with (almost) the same name, not the marae, but they certainly must be close to each other, right?

A tourist would have called a taxi. A wise photographer on assignment would have done the same. But a freshly inked, jet-lagged Piero, high on Polynesian mana and intoxicated with his own badassery, made quick calculations and eagerly jumped on the chance to “explore” and take photos along the way. I walked six hours in the breathtaking landscape, taking impressive photos along the way and eventually at the Marae too. Only, the supposed touristic hotspot was as desert as a desert island, with no transportation in sight and no way whatsoever to get back to the harbor, 31.5 km away, before my ship’s departure.

In such circumstances, besides feeling like a complete jackass, I try to think like a local. Befriending locals always helps and it surely helped that time, with the extra bonus of a great local music soundtrack and big hugs and laughter when we made it on time.

I can think of worse outcomes of losing a job than being marooned on a Polynesian island and sure as hell I made many mistakes. But as I see it, getting lost in unknown places to find new perspectives, trying to capture what others don’t see even in famous locations, is never a mistake. It is my way to find the sense of travel.

1  Quote: “it’s always ‘we,’ madmen always find each other.”

2  The word “Tapu,” which Hawaiians pronounced “Kapu” and was transcribed by Europeans as “taboo,” means “sacrifice” and it is repeated twice in the name as a superlative. Somehow I missed the warning.

3  Some travelers’ centuries old traditions must be respected.