When the trip can become a big disappointment, by Alberto Piernas

During a disastrous trip to Malta – heavy rain, drunken tourists in the hotel room and food poisoning in between – the presence of a certain Sleeping Lady He never left me, like a kind of guardian angel: he was present in tourist brochures, large banners overlooking the highway, various souvenirs and lavish replicas.

This clay sculpture in the form of a voluptuous lady reclining in eternal sleep was discovered by accident at the beginning of the 20th century in the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, the oldest underground sanctuary in the world and located on the main island of the archipelago. A unique piece of Maltese prehistoric art, it is currently housed in the National Archaeological Museum of Malta, in the capital of Valletta.

It remains to be seen whether we have already seen it all or whether the world of travel is guilty of being less honest on some occasions.

“You should go see the Sleeping Lady“Our greatest pride, you will not be disappointed!” they said in the tourist offices. And of course, after a week of expectations (and eating a lot of white rice), one expects to find the second coming of Christ in the form of a sculptural heritage. “Come on, the lady’s room is at the back.” Well, well, a room dedicated to just one sculpture! But what a surprise when, upon entering, you discover an enormous halo of light pointing at a tiny sculpture of barely 12 centimetres. Was this the Holy Grail of Maltese tourism that occupied large posters? It was a disappointment, of course, but not the only one we have encountered in our adventures. In fact, travel disappointments even have their own syndrome.

It was in the late 1980s when several Japanese tourists who arrived in Paris began to experience nausea, dizziness, vomiting and headaches after visiting Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. The reason? Disappointment at discovering that the City of Love was not as they had imagined it all their lives. The so-called Paris syndrome It spread to such an extent that the Japanese Government even decided to provide an emergency telephone number for all tourists who experienced this unfortunate disappointment.

Perhaps many of us did not need a direct line to express our displeasure when we realized that Bali’s Heaven’s Gate did not reflect the sky in the lake and it was all the fault of a good Instagram Photoshop. The little Mermaid Hans Christian Andersen’s Copenhagen was not that big, or that Times Square was overcrowded. In an era in which we have been sold the idealized image of so many places, we can only wonder if we have already seen it all or if the world of travel is guilty of being less honest on some occasions, especially in times when social networks viralize and exalt the new tajmahales, machupicchus y chichetitzas shift.

Something that reminds me of a recent poem by Mayte Gómez Molina called, precisely, Paris syndromeincluded in his latest book, Closed circuit surveillance (Cielo Santo, 2024): “I got there and everything was / exactly the same as in the photos / except for the trash, the rats / the / homeless people / the police everywhere / The Five Guys on the Champs-Élysées / I felt / sad /.”