We humans have had from our beginnings a desire to see whatever might lie over the horizon.

We humans have had from our beginnings a desire to see whatever might lie over the horizon. After the Roman Empire made a large part of the world safe for travel, guidebooks much like the ones tourists use today began to appear. For wealthy families, the good life required a visit to the public square in Athens, where 900 years earlier Socrates had held forth, or to the pyramids of Egypt, which even then were already 2,000 years old. Such trips in those days required months to complete.

What got me thinking about this is the latest wrinkle in tourism: cruises to see such places as the Amazon Rain Forest or the North Pole “before they disappear,” as an article in The New York Times put it.

For $22,000 or so, tour companies will deliver you to the Pole aboard an atomic-powered icebreaker equipped for gourmet dining, and featuring an indoor swimming pool and saunas. Their ships have naturalists on board to explain what you see. Professional artists and photographers are available “to help you create your own personal arctic masterpiece,” as the brochure from one company puts it.

The whole endeavor offers about as much relationship to what explorer Robert Peary experienced in 1909 as would a trip to Sea World’s “Wild Arctic.” A real connection with life in another part of the world requires a little more effort.

In the early 1970s I dwelt for a time in Guadalupe, Spain, a tiny village in the mountains about 150 miles east of Madrid. More metropolitan parts of Spain, even then, had already entered the 21st century. Guadalupe was rooted in times long past. Villagers lived in the same whitewashed houses Christopher Columbus saw when he went there to pray at the Church of Santa Maria de Guadalupe before he set sail in 1492.

My purpose, as young and aspiring writer, was to pretend I was Hemingway. In the mornings, I walked with the goatherd as he took his flock to graze in the mountains. In the evenings I joined neighbors drinking cheap wine during the paseo, when just about everyone shared the gossip of the day. On sunny afternoons, I might sit in the plaza in front of the church, reading books and drinking in the life and the history of the place.

My best friend, Saturnino Garcia, worked in a sawmill. Nino, probably about the age I am now, could neither read nor write, yet was a man of dignity and wisdom. One day, he showed how to grind up the seeds of a certain plant and sniff them to ward off an allergy. One night, under a full moon, we went to a place in the hills where the elderly of the village practiced an ancient ceremony in which they prayed for the Virgin’s protection of children.

Nino lived with his sister and his mother, who was blind and slowly dying, in a house of just three rooms. In one, his sister and his mother shared an iron bed. Another was Nino’s. The third room served as both kitchen and parlor.

One night Nino and I sat there drinking coffee and anise, a sweet, powerful liquor. After a while, he grew pensive, and tried to explain why it was his fate to work with his hands, and mine to work at a typewriter. Then, he told a story about growing up in Guadalupe. Though my rough Spanish did not allow understanding of every word, I got the gist of it.

In those days, he said, farmers would post boys to guard goats against wolves lurking on the fringes of the village. One night, a wolf killed a boy. He paused, and stared. “But stories like this might not interest you,” he said. “For these are the stories of the poor. The rich were asleep in their beds.”

His words stung. Also, however, they were a gift every writer might use: Look at ourselves as others might see us.      

From those early beginnings in ancient Rome, tourism has grown into the world’s largest industry. What better metaphor for its excesses than the image of an atomic icebreaker, appointed with the utmost in luxury, ripping through the Arctic on its way to the Pole? These folks think they are doing something moral. What self-indulgent nonsense.

I have often wondered how Guadalupe has fared with tourism over the years. Last week I looked it up on the Internet. Hawkers now pack the plaza, and souvenir shops surround it. The Web site also advised that other than the church and what it described as “some local color,” the village has few attractions. Tourists need schedule no more than a couple of hours there before they move on, it said.

Perhaps if they tarried a little longer, they might discover more. You have to know how to look.

Dan Hall is the former editorial page editor of Messenger Post Newspapers. E-mail: danwriting@aol.com