[acquisitionsilk]

This response is quite the surprise - I am explicitly saying that I think this article reduces travel to "a pissing competition", as you put it, and that it is shocking to me to see it done so shamelessly.

The author will be describing interesting things about the place in a neutral or respectful tone for a line or five, and then suddenly switch to a sort of review-and-compare-mode, as if it were not a real place with 12 million people in it, but a product that just arrived in the post with this feature and that.

Or like a pokemon card, as I said, but for grown-ups. I have a Tunisia, it does xyz. It's good at this and bad at that. I mean that metaphor seriously, I think it really applies.

I mention the idea of putting in the extra effort to interact with locals - through volunteering, or whatever - not to make some comment about myself, or make some appeal to purity, but rather because it's a very good way to avoid turning travelling into stamp-collecting. It's a way of forcing yourself to see the subtlety and variety in a place.

The one assumption I felt myself to be making was that he reads Wikipedia, but that's hardly a heinous crime or anything. It was of no relevance to my point anyway.

Otherwise, regarding ranting - that's just, like, your opinion, man