Do tourists irritate you?

I wonder if newer residents of London, New York, Paris or San Francisco feel this way. I’ve noticed over the past couple of weeks that I’ve come to feel quite resentful of tourists, which is a bit rich, considering that I myself was one until a little less than six months ago.

I noticed it while taking the ferry to the Circular Quay last Sunday. My husband and I were on our way to meet with a friend he had last seen when they were in high school back in the platteland; they had found each other after eighteen years — how else? — thanks to Facebook. Much to my irritation, after stopping to pick up passengers at the Cremorne Point wharf, the ferry chugged in a wide arc to the left, towards the Taronga Zoo.

Soon the boat and its cheerful, if dated, red seats normally occupied by the bums of Financial Review-reading, iPod-listening corporate wage slave types was occupied by throngs of screaming, yelling children, their parents grappling with strollers and huge plush giraffes and crocodiles that sell in the Zoo shop for hideous prices. People of every description were aboard the two decks. It was like the United Nations on board; if by some horrible accident the Borrowdale had sunk in the middle of the shipping lane past Fort Denison, it would have made headline news across the planet.

The cacophony was most disruptive on a Sunday afternoon. It reminded me of the surging throngs in the Blue Mountains, waiting to flood into the cable car at Scenic World in Katoomba. All those crowds of Chinese tourists making V signs to the camera, the Babel Tower of languages, the cars and coaches and tourist tat — for some reason, it annoyed me.

The funny thing is, back in South Africa, I never minded large groups of tourists. In fact, I was thrilled to see them and their lovely foreign currency. Ditto for the other places I’ve visited as a tourist. But here, in Sydney, these visitors with their cameras and socks with sandals rub me up the wrong way. Perhaps I have started to feel territorial about Sydney, and am overcompensating for my freshly-off-the-plane status. I’m a local now; I use this ferry every day and dammit, it’s an unwanted inconvenience when my chosen mode of transport is overrun.

Maybe I’ll know I’m a real Sydneysider when the day comes that I don’t mind the tourists on the way back from the zoo.