PETER HITCHENS: I wish I wasn’t a tourist. I hate the word. If Spanish locals sprayed me with water pistols, I’d see their point

I hate being a tourist. I know that, if I go to Paris or New York City, I become this awful thing. And I am secretly ashamed of what I do.

If locals were to demonstrate against me, as they have against tourists in Majorca, or spray me with water pistols, as they have in Barcelona, I would see their point and shrug, rather guiltily as I hurried to the safety of my hotel.

I think it is perfectly reasonable for Venice to charge a special fee to tourist invaders, though I loathe the crowds in that city so much that I do not think I will ever go there again, except perhaps in the very dead of winter, wearing Wellington boots against the floods.

I will never live, as a proper resident, in these cities. In the case of New York, I have no desire to. In Paris I could never be rich enough, thin enough or arrogant enough — though this last requirement is easier than the other two.

But I wish I wasn’t a tourist. I even hate the word. If anything is described as a ‘tourist hotel’ or a ‘tourist restaurant’, I will avoid it. I like to think of myself instead as a traveller.

I am astounded by Americans who actually buy luggage bearing the prominent brand name ‘American Tourister’. Are they proud of it? I would sooner don a baseball cap than haul such bags around in public, and I have so far resisted all attempts to get me to wear such a garment.

Even in Manhattan or on the banks of the Seine, I try to go to places where tourists don’t go, to eat where they don’t eat, to do things tourists don’t do, or to do them differently from everyone else, at different times of day.

And I behave apologetically towards the locals. Yes, apologetically. This is not much use in New York, where they probably don’t notice. But it is vital in Paris where the inhabitants are constantly amazed by the basic bad manners of so many visitors.

The great rift that lies between visiting Americans and Parisians, which has seethed for at least a century, is largely caused by a simple failure of manners, which many Americans do not even know they are committing.

If you walk into a French café or pharmacy, it is extraordinarily rude not to greet the owner or manager. You must say ‘Bonjour’ before beginning any transaction, or you will appear to them to be an oaf.

But travel, rather than tour, in the rest of France and things are wholly different. My wife and I will never forget a journey we made by bicycle through Brittany and Normandy, and the welcome, friendliness and encouragement which we received from the small French hotels and guest-houses which we had booked in advance by letter.

Slip away from the main routes, travel alone or in pairs, and you find another country. And not just in France.

Visiting Prague in the freezing darkness of the Cold War, we found ourselves invited to the hotel room of two black Cubans on a mission for Fidel Castro, anxious to practise their English (one was called Nelson) and to ply us with rum.

The city was wildly beautiful in a way it has now lost: empty, poorly lit streets lined with coal-black ancient buildings just about held up by crude timber scaffolding.

Nobody else was there apart from a North Korean trade delegation, with their unmistakable hairdos. Once-grand hotels, with no customers but us, explained that 90 per cent of the menu was fiction and all we could have would be the eternal Czech diet of pork, dumplings and beer.

This sort of thing does not happen if you go on a package tour. It took a lot of doing: visas which took weeks to get, railway tickets which had to be written out by hand in a hard-to-find booking office at Victoria Station in London, and the obtaining of out-of-print guidebooks and obscure maps to a city where we did not speak a syllable of the language.

A decade later, when Prague exploded back into life and freedom, those travels stood me in good stead. In fact, they always have. The experience of being totally abroad in a place where even buying a grilled sausage is an achievement is very good for the character.

I am astounded by Americans who actually buy luggage bearing the prominent brand name ‘American Tourister,’ writes Peter Hitchens, pictured below on a trip to Washington DC

Travel is just better than tourism. You don’t live separately from those you go to visit. In the sleeping cars of the Soviet state railways, food and vodka were routinely shared and I was usually able to enhance the journey by providing scarce lemons, bought with hard currency in Moscow, to improve the Soviet tea from the samovar.

In the brief interlude before I and my companions were surrounded by an angry mob in the precious metals belt of Katanga in Africa, we had the delight of looking round the formerly Belgian colonial city of Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi). I’ve never seen anywhere like it and still think about it almost every day.

It was full of decayed imperial buildings, but illuminated by the heartbreaking optimism of modern Africa, which it changes your life to see. It was in a once-grand hotel there that I encountered the largest mosquito I have ever seen in my life, rising angrily from behind the plumbing, having somehow survived the clouds of poison I had pumped into the bathroom the night before.

If I didn’t kill her, she was going to give me Malaria, good and proper. It was her or me, and fortunately I struck first.

It is not great comfort or elaborate meals I mostly remember. One of the best nights I ever spent was in the Upland Goose Hotel in the Falklands, after a delicious dinner of proper roast mutton and a bottle of good ordinary claret, with the never-resting wind endlessly rushing and whispering round the corrugated iron roof and wooden walls.

Now obviously most people can never have my immense good luck and go to mad places like North Korea’s Pyongyang or the Kazakhstani capital, Astana. Though it is possible.

But by a little extra effort, and especially by taking trains rather than cars or planes (or even by bicycling) you can reach much further into other people’s countries.

If you can, go a bit out of season. Read the guidebook before you set off. Try to get the absolute basics of the language, such as ‘hello’, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.

And above all, remember that the place you are visiting is an inhabited, living city, not a Disneyland set up for your inspection and entertainment. Try not to destroy the very thing you have come to see.

I see this all the time from the other side, as I have the great good fortune to live in Oxford, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. How can I object if anyone wants to examine its ancient beauties?

But is that why they come? Most of the thousands who visit seem barely aware of where they are or what the lovely buildings mean, as they surge about in their baseball caps, staring at their phones while the last enchantments of the Middle Ages tower over their unseeing, oblivious heads.