What does "ethical travel" actually look like? What does it actually mean to be conscious of the impact of your tourism? How can you be decolonizing your travel? Taranath doesn't really have answers for you but offers great frameworks for self-reflective travel from "rich" countries in the poor countries. She offers fantastic ways to kindly critique that oh-so-flashy type of travel so common now on instagram and the like where skinny white ladies trample over natural places to pose with things they do not understand the context of. This was written before the pandemic but is MORE important within it now that it's not just class that makes travel so unequal but also vaccine access and health safety.

Travelling abroad harbours the promise of adventure and experiences but are travellers really prepared for the surprises that await them?

Through Beyond Guilt Trips, Dr Taranth critically analyses the before, during and after of the promises international from various travel stories. The book targets readers who are from the global north wishing to travel to low-income countries to broaden their horizons. However, it will also be a useful resource for people on the other side of the pond to understand well-intentioned and curious Westerners.

From her own travels as a college student and those of her students, she found that harder questions than easy answers were raised while travelling to low-income countries. Hence she advocates for mindful travel, "...involves slowing down our thoughts and learning to stay with our feelings. Mindful travel is also these uncomfortable stories in uncomfortable situations, and sitting within our discomfort." Throughout the book, she reiterates the importance of building empathy; She quotes Helena Maria Viramontes, "Empathy is the glue that makes the words of a writer stick to the reader, and this era of globalization, understanding and feeling the life of another through the narratives is a non-violent act of sheer human importance."

She acknowledges that there is no magic bullet to various institutionalized problems like racism, poverty and other forms of inequalities. Rather, she offers that international travellers should study history and geopolitics to begin to understand the communities that they will be visiting, This also helps them view the people and cultures with the lens of intersectionality and empathy. She is a big advocate for "charity begins at home"- Westerners should first seek to do good at home before attempting to go abroad. Because social injustices are cross-cultural and cross-geographical.

Taranth does a commendable job of weaving academic sources, her experiences, various anecdotes as well as providing questions for reflection in this short text. Readers will appreciate her insights and going forward, be compassionate with those who are culturally insulated because you really can't blame people for who what they do not know.

I just could not get interested in this book. While the subject matter seemed intriguing when I requested the it, I found the actual book to be boring and uninteresting. I don't want to penalize the author by leaving a bad review,
as others may find it to be worthwhile. I won't post this to any of the sites that I leave reviews with. Sorry!

This was an interesting read, as I have never thought about the differences between the people that study abroad and the people in the countries that they study in. I found this to be an insightful read about something I typically do not hear anything about.

Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World by Anu Taranath is written largely from the perspective of an individual from the Global North traveling to the Global South. It investigates why these travelers feel guilty and uncomfortable when going overseas because they start to experience how invisible global systems privilege them over others in the lesser developed countries they travel to.

The most interesting parts of the book were the actual scenarios that played out these abstract issues in real time. For me, as a traveler/expat who was born and raised in the Global South and who wrote about meaningful travel for GoAbroad, this book raised serious issues about how privileged travelers should engage with the locals in the Global South and how they should deal with the attention, negative or positive, they may receive from them.

For me, these are some of the book’s important takeaways:

1. We should pay attention to difference because difference is real and noticing difference is not a bad thing.
2. Some travelers from the Global North crave difference as a product, something to eroticize, commodify, and consume.
3. How far or close we are from the “mythical norm” determines how we perceive ourselves and how other perceive us.
4. We hold many identities and some of these identities are visible while others are invisible. Our identities are never fixed but fluid. We are different in different contexts.
5. Global travel often capitalizes on the legacy of imperialism, where relationships between travelers from the Global North and locals in the Global South still rest on the premise of unequal systems.
6. In the final analysis, the author says that “trips abroad must intersect with our local lives… Otherwise we’re just exoticizing difference abroad while refusing to engage with it at home.”

Overall, it was a good read that asks important questions about travel and privilege and I really hope more Western travelers read this book carefully before they embark on those "well-intentioned" trips to the Global South.