Hey and welcome to The Upgrade, the podcast from the team at Lifehacker, where we help you improve your life one week at a time.

I'm Jordan Calhoun, editor-in-chief of LifeHacker.

And I'm Megan Walbert, Lifehackers Managing Editor. And today we're getting a lesson on how to be a better, more respectful tourist abroad. That's right. And teaching us how to be more thoughtful

tourists is veteran travel writer Sarah Clemens. The people you're going to hear from generally

in terms of promoting tourists are the people

who either already have money or who are making money from tourism. And you're just not going

to hear as much of the voices of people who are getting the negative impact. And you have to go

and look for that. Sarah is a travel writer and a former travel editor for the Wall Street Journal and news director at travel and leisure.

She's also the author of the book Away and Aware, a field guide to mindful travel.

Sarah recently wrote a piece for the New York Times opinion section called My Fellow Americans Let's Be Better Tourists.

And with a lot of travel becoming possible again, we thought this was as good a time as any to smarten up. Megan, have you had any awkward incidents while you've been traveling?

The one that would come to mind is when my then-boyfriend, now husband and I, were traveling

in Mazatlan, Mexico, we decided we were on a cruise. We were with a group, but we decided,

you know, we were really going to get the, the authentic Mazatlan. You know, we, we, we didn't want to go to the little touristy shops and, and by junk that we were never going to use when we got home. We wanted to really, you know, see the village and, you know, walk amongst the locals. And we wandered into this area that was just like these back alleys, like, just meat markets.

And, you know, very clearly the local culture.

And we stuck out like a sort of thumb.

I mean, it was just, we were very clearly tourists. We were very clearly lost.

And then we even started to worry that we might not make it back to the cruise ship in time.

Because you had to be back at a certain time. We didn't know where we were. This was before

you had smartphones and could GPS yourself out of a situation. So we learned then and there that,

you know, you need to do a little more research when you're visiting a new place.

You can't just go off on your own and hope that you're going to find what you're looking for.

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