Adventure Or Self Aggrandizement?

A look at travel in the age of Instagram.

For more than thirty years, my family have been traveling to a beautiful fishing village on Mexico’s Pacific coast. What began as a sleepy local town with a few surfers coming each winter has blossomed into a bustling new city built on Instagram Feeds, and profiles of adulation from the New York Times and Condé Nast amongst others. It is, simply put, no longer the same place.

I first came to Puerto Escondido in the early 1990’s with my parents. On my first visit there were almost no Americans. It was difficult to get by without at least a little bit of Spanish to nudge the conversation along. What foreigners we did see were a handful of Canadians or Europeans. The weather each day was in the mid-80s. The sun shone each day from rise to set. And oh, what a sunset over the glorious Pacific.

As we continued to travel back regularly over the intervening decades, Puerto grew in fits and starts. New hotels and restaurants began to pop up, and gradually, with each succeeding year we saw more a…