I envy Toronto for only one thing. Its relative lack of tourists. Another tourist season is closing here in Vancouver and thankfully the tourist flood is ebbing. They come from all over the place, Asia, the States, Europe, and other parts of Canada. And each year the local tourist industry rubs its hands in greedy glee and tries to tell us that tourism is good for the local economy. What they don't tell us is that tourism is bad for the local soul.

But don't get me wrong I'm not against travel as such, I simply hate industrial travel, wide body airliners filled with wide body tourists. I consider this sort of tourism a form of cultural pollution. It turns us, for one thing, into a city of cringing menials, sucking up to boobies from afar for tips. There are other ways to travel, ways that honor the places you visit.

The industrial-strength tourist knows nothing of honor. I hate that awful gawking at street signs. The torn map flapping in the wind. And perhaps even worse are the bored natives with nothing to do and nowhere to go, who offer help without being asked. How do you say, piss off, I'll find my own way, thank you, in Bulgarian?

Call me an idealist, but I think I owe it to the place I am visiting to know it, really know it, before arriving. I want to be able to go from A to B in a straight or meandering line without having to check every street name and direction.

I hate particularly the hesitations in front of odd buildings about which I know nothing because I did nothing to prepare myself for the visit. Sure, a guidebook will help with the monuments, with the tarted up icons of the local heritage industry. But who cares about Disneyland-on-the-Canal Grande. Haven't you seen the bearded deadhead standing in front of San Marco with some horrid, green guidebook clutched to his chest, finger tapping his chin, going for thoughtful? Horrid sight.

When it comes to a place's monuments, I do my homework first. Like all serious athletes, I 'visualize' the race or game beforehand several dozen times. On first looking into the real Venice some fifteen years ago, I remember that I had already cognized a mental Venice via a curriculum of intense visualization thanks to Giulio Lorenzetti's magnificent Venezia e il suo estuario and a half dozen lavishly illustrated art books.

So, when I sauntered unburdened --- no book, no camera, no identifiable marks of the lumpenvisitor ---- to the campo and church of Santa Maria dei Frari one April fifteen years ago, I was able to walk by heart Lorenzetti's itineraria undecimo from the Frari church to the church of San Giacomo dell' Orio and then on to the vicinity of the church of San Silvestro and the ancient Byzantine arch of the palazzo Barzizza.

You could say I re-cognized every inch in flesh and blood for the first time. What does it matter if I tell you how much pleasure and delight the sight of the fading, worn arch gave when I found it. This is pleasure (a strange kind of visionary pleasure) that no money can buy. It is consummated only by the most arduous labor of love. And discipline. But let me repeat for those of you who think money can buy anything, you cannot have this pleasure by money alone.

But don't get me wrong, travel is not only about monuments. I want to know about that other little Venetian campo, in the steadfastly unfashionable Castello district, where I heard of another distant evening in April five young girls singing the most charming songs as the tide brought the water's tongue to the quay's lip.

I go back to that place in Venice, but not because of a historic church or the five sweet voices, who are now all grown up anyway and gone. I go back because this is, in a way, my neighborhood now and I want to see how everyone's doing. I want to know what's happened to a place that holds real memories, unsullied by the itch provoked by guidebooks.

Luckily, there is nothing here for industrial tourism to scratch. Tourists occasionally peer into the open space, see nothing of interest, can't find anything in the Michelin, and quickly pursue other prey in their exacting patrols. They don't want to waste time on nothing. And nothing is precisely the prize.

The geographer Hugh Prince once wrote in a landmark essay ("The geographical imagination") that a "knowledge of places is an indispensable link in the chain of knowledge." And certainly that's true. How can you know who you are or what you are, indeed how can you know what you know, if you don't know where you are?

The problem with tourists is they don't know where they are. They don't have the place by heart. Yes, they do know bits and pieces of information about a place. A building here, a public square there, a monument, a gallery, a shopping district, a club or two, and that's all. But they don't have the knowledge. The personal knowledge you acquire little by little over a period of time. This is the nothing that the tourists turn away from, clutching their squalid little guidebooks.

I love the nothing of my little campo. I like the buildings and the space. I like the way the white stone well holds the experience of the space in place. How everything always returns to that nondescript, unused, slightly ugly knob.

Signora Anonnini can never cross the campo from her door to her son's grocery store without stopping for a proprietorial moment at the well. Not for the well's sake, mind you, but for a chance to rest her ample body at the very center of this little world. It is the best place from which to take in the whole. The campo embraces her. The ritual pause, with her informed hand on the well's wall, gives her leave to submit her body to the caress of home. And, anyway, her feet hurt and from that vantage she can see if Signora Finazzi is back from visiting her sister in Mestre.

My love for all of this has nothing to do with aesthetics. I like it because this is a world with a center. I'm beginning to fit in here. I may even be moving towards the status of a family member. A distant cousin maybe. Or an uncle who visits home only once in a while bringing small gifts. I think the people can see I'm here to stay, even when I'm gone. Every time I come back I find again the soul I always leave behind.

Tourists are bodies that never fit in and they never leave anything behind except their money. And the soured clowns among us who have to serve them. They are at angles to the spaces we call home and their movements and tempi jar with our currents. And their money is, at best, an insolent apology for having intruded their ignorance into our knowledge.

Give me the visitor who does not 'tour' but does us the honor of knowing who we are by learning where we are. Such a visitor actually lives with us for the span of her visit. May she be blessed for having us by heart.

(John Xiros Cooper teaches at the University of British Columbia and writes about culture and current affairs from Vancouver.)

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