Written by: Jeffrey A. Epps, MBA, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
There are different travel niches; including gastro tourism (foodies), regional travel (particular countries, states, counties, etc.), solo female travel, adventure travel, cruising, etc. I like to focus on heritage travel because it fits my interests as someone who loves history and who tries to understand people that I meet during my travels, and the places that those same people come from. The best way to understand a destination is to give yourself a history lesson, as understanding the past will help you to understand the present and even predict the future. It’s our lack of understanding of people and places that causes people to be afraid of others, for people don’t like what they don’t understand because it creates a fear of the unknown. Every travel niche, in my opinion, should include elements of heritage travel.
What is Heritage?
Before I talk about “heritage travel,” it’s probably best that I first talk about “heritage.” Though there is more than one definition, according to UMass Amherst, “heritage is the full range of our inherited traditions, monuments, objects, and culture. Most important, it is the range of contemporary activities, meanings, and behaviors that we draw from them. Heritage includes, but is much more than preserving, excavating, displaying, or restoring a collection of old things.”
Understanding heritage means understanding the roots of a particular culture.
What is Heritage Travel?
Though there is more than one definition, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Heritage travel is “traveling to experience the places, artifacts and activities that authentically represent the stories and people of the past and present. It includes cultural, historic, and natural resources. In other words, Heritage Tourism is a type of travel where you search for an authentic understanding of how something, or a people, was like.”
Many people make the mistake of assuming that “heritage travel” only means traveling to places to explore one’s own personal heritage, but it can also mean traveling to places to explore other people’s heritage. So if I travel to the Cherokee Indian Reservation in North Carolina, then I could be aiming to explore my own personal heritage, but if I travel to Zimbabwe in Africa, then I could be aiming to explore the heritage of other people. These are both examples of heritage travel.
Understanding My Own Personal Heritage
I’ve always heard say that one of the best ways to succeed in life is to know thyself. When people know themselves, they understand their strengths and weaknesses. They know their limits and their vulnerabilities. People understand how they should challenge themselves to get better. And people may be unlikely to say and do things that don’t reflect them and their values. It’s also exciting to learn about famous (or infamous) people that you may be related to. When it comes to my own racial, ethnic and cultural background, like most Americans, it’s a bit complex. After all, the U.S. is a nation of immigrants and a nation of muts. Fortunately for myself, my Aunt in Texas does all the genealogy for our family. I’ve also done some of my own research. Most of us want to know who and what we are, where our people came from and just who is in our family tree. I hinted above that I’m part Native American, a 16th Cherokee Indian to be precise. Many Americans can trace their heritage to at least one (or more) Native American tribes.
My name, Epps, points to another direction; “Epps” derived from several English surnames, most notably “Apse,” which basically means “people who live near aspen trees.” The Epps name can be traced back to Essex and Sussex counties in the greater London area. Going even further back, it can be traced to the early Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples. The Anglo-Saxons were Germanic tribes that were made up of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The Angles came from Angeln (northern Germany), the Saxons came from Lower Saxony (northern Germany) and the Jutes came from various parts of Germany and Denmark. The English language is a Germanic language.
Many of the early Epps migrants to the USA can be traced back to Virginia, and other parts of the South. Most of those in my family tree that fought in the American Civil War were Confederates and to top it off, I recently learned that I’m related to the infamous Edwin Epps, the third and final owner of Solomon Northup who told his story as a kidnapped free black man, who was sold into slavery, in his memoir Twelve Years a Slave, which was later adapted into a Hollywood movie. Of course, as far as I know, most of my family tree is made up of good, hardworking Christian people. All of us have bad apples in our family trees, we can’t help that, but I feel that it’s important to understand it all so that one can take an honest look at their identity and be able to tell their story accurately. We don’t have to be proud or ashamed of our heritage, but we must not ignore it, as it’s all a part of who and what we are. The truth is, we’re all conglomerates of everybody in our families that came before us, who passed down their genetics and beliefs through generations, making us look, believe and behave in certain ways. Who and what we are will determine how society accepts us, or rejects us, depending on a multitude of external factors which are based on race, religion, prejudice, ignorance, history, identity, culture, politics, etc.
When a person looks in the mirror, they don’t just see themselves, they see their legacy.
Defining My Own Personal Brand of Heritage Travel
My own brand of heritage travel consists of everything above, but with controversy. This is because heritage, history, culture and everything that revolves around these topics are controversial in their own right, as the truth typically is. It’s how I talk about it all that makes it uneasy for some people. I like to focus on demographics, race, race relations, religion, gender, ethnicity, immigration, cultural differences, politics and other relevant factors and how these factors have shaped certain destinations to be what they are today. It’s only fair to focus on the loser’s perspective in wars, battles and revolutions, where the winners have written the history and outcomes, telling their own versions of the stories, which have often led to the cultural genocide and disenfranchisement of those who are the losers. I can’t ignore all of the murders, oppression and repression that have helped to shape policy of civilizations for centuries. I also feel that it’s worth entertaining certain conspiracy theories that have been pushed by a select few over the years, which have created national and worldwide narratives that tend to only benefit a select group of people at the expense of others. After all, a theory is only a theory until it’s proven true (or false) with new evidence. I only give credibility to theories and revisionist history that I feel are worth exploring that may have factual and historical integrity, not because they’re popular. By taking on all these controversies, one can not only take an honest look at history, but also understand the past and learn to appreciate (or despise) the present, and often even predict the future with this information. Understanding the past will also help to encourage people to make the necessary changes, to promote more tolerable societies for everyone. It all can be utilized to benefit, or harm society.
I’m a truth seeker and I like most other people, I want to know the facts.
I believe that heritage, like religion, is sacred and that when people ask or force other people to disown their own heritage, it is sacrilegious, and that it should be forbidden. Every person in the world has the right to know who and what they are, and where their people came from, without restriction. Furthermore, people should be able to honor their heritage if they so choose without condemnation. Heritage should be protected at all costs and it should never be erased from anyone’s history, as we need to honor those who came before us that helped to make us who and what we are today. Respecting those who came before us helps us to respect ourselves.
Heritage Travel Can Help Us Understand Who and What We Are
When people visit places that they are partial to, that may pertain to their ancestry; this isn’t something that should be taken lightly. It is something that should be explored, understood, embraced, preserved and shared. These trips should be treated as spiritual journeys. This is who and what they are; these are the people and the places that came before them that gave them life, gave them their identity and gave them their future. And this is why I say that heritage is sacred, like religion, which both often involve each other. People of the past who looked a certain way, who practiced certain customs, spoke certain languages and just lived certain lifestyles will help those who are exploring their own cultural roots, understand themselves. By honoring those who came before us, rather than despising them, we can have a greater sense of purpose and appreciation for ourselves, our families and our communities rather than have a guilty conscience. People who have a clear understanding of their heritage, will love life more as they will feel that they are a part of something much greater than themselves, it will make them feel a part of a legacy with rich traditions, longstanding values, and the idea that they can add to it all will give them more of a sense of belonging and a purpose-driven life.
I explained above my own personal heritage, and knowing who and what I am helps me to not only understand myself but it also helps me to understand other people as well. Also, it allows me to find similarities among myself and other people. Sure, there will be differences, but given that differences are the reason why people don’t get along, I try to focus on similarities between myself and others (while also embracing the differences). When we understand ourselves, it helps us to understand other people, and that understanding leads to mutual respect and cooperation, which leads to a more productive and peaceful society.
Heritage Travel Can Help Us to Learn From Our Mistakes
According to Halstead 21st Century Group, “history tells us what happened in the past; heritage describes surviving materials of the past—evidence that exists now-in the present.” So it’s safe to say that heritage represents the tangible history that helps us understand what happened in the past. But heritage can also represent modern-day lifestyles that are based on traditions passed down from previous generations. This means that for heritage travelers, witnessing places with tangible historical evidence helps them to understand what happened in a given place, at a given time, and furthermore helps them understand what went wrong and how it could have been avoided, and how it still can be avoided. My high school history teacher my sophomore year asked me if I knew why we learn history. I really didn’t know how to answer him, but his answer made sense when he told me, “we learn history so that we don’t make the same mistakes over again.” What my history teacher said is very true and I also believe that history helps us to better understand and appreciate people in a particular place. Many questions can be answered for travelers who are just willing to take the time to give themselves a history lesson and those who do, will make much better tourists, guaranteed.
Unfortunately, bad history does repeat itself sometimes but it doesn’t have to, especially if we have a proper and elaborate understanding of it and know how to prevent repeated mistakes.
Learning history also benefits people by helping us to understand why people did and still do what they do, including our own people, by helping us understand cultures’ heritage and how people of the past made places the way they are today. We can find out which cultural traditions survived and which ones didn’t, based on if they were good or bad for societies; slavery, public executions and school spankings are all examples of cultural traditions that are woven into many cultures’ heritage, but are now seen as mistakes that were detrimental to society, so they aren’t practiced anymore (at least in most places). Most people learn from their mistakes, some do not. Again, understanding the past will also help to encourage people to make the necessary changes, to promote more tolerable societies for everyone.
Heritage Travel Can Educate, Inspire and Enlighten Us
When people travel with the sole purpose of learning about a place’s heritage, whether it be their own or someone else’s, they typically always learn something new that they never knew before. We’re all taught certain “facts” growing up in school, among our families and even our places of worship. But all too often, these “facts” can be distorted with bias, prejudice, half-truths, theories and just plain lies. This is especially true if you’re like me and you come from a small town or rural community in the Upland South region of the United States, or any place that is very homogenous with respect to race, religion, language, general beliefs and ways of life. The great Malcolm Gladwell has often quoted the age-old Yiddish proverb, “to a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.” I translate this as meaning to see something with a single perspective, due to lack of understanding or exposure to evidence that would convince people otherwise. We only really understand what we’ve been exposed to; our surroundings that we’ve become all too familiar with and what we see and hear from those around us every day, and through the mass media. This is why not only education, in general, is important but also why travel is equally as important, as travel in itself is a very powerful educational practice. People just can’t learn what they can learn from travel by doing anything other than travel, at least to its entirety. Second-hand news is never a substitute for first-hand experiences. There is no substitute for it, not in a classroom, around family, in a church or on the Travel Channel. It’s true that seeing leads to believing, and believing leads to understanding.
When people travel, they learn first-hand how cultures are because they’re able to live them. They’re able to learn from the locals, perspectives that can only be taught be mingling with locals. They can visit museums with artifacts and guides that tell the complete story of a civilization that they were short-changed with by their educators in their schools, kindergarten through college. They can take hikes and tours and see UNESCO World Heritage sites and immerse themselves in priceless pieces of world history as real-life Indiana Jones characters. All of these kinds of experiences, whether you’re focused on heritage or not, will educate, inspire and enlighten you.
How many false Western stereotypes are there about China, really? You will never truly know unless you’ve been to China. But as a person who lived and worked in China for several years, I can tell you that there are a lot of them. This is because the people who believe them just don’t know any better, due to being brainwashed by the propagated Western media, lack of exposure to China and Chinese people, and just what they hear from other people, in general. A heritage trip to China can help to cure all of this by helping people understand China’s vast and complex 3,500-year history, including the invaluable interaction with Chinese nationals.
Heritage Travel Can Help Us to Maximize Our Travels
When people travel they often miss out on some of the best experiences that places have to offer. Sure, they do all the fun stuff like embark on jungle excursions, explore old town areas (without knowing the history), indulge the best cuisines, drink stellar wine, take photos and create videos of top tourist attractions, party in the best nightclubs, etc. But I feel that most travelers don’t really focus on all the legends and stories that come with the history of places. The truth is, every single part of the earth has its own unique story to it. It’s not always pretty and much of it tends to be controversial, but by learning what places have to offer with respect to their past, people can have a better understanding of where they are and thus can appreciate and enjoy it that much more. Not to mention, it can help to alleviate fears of the unknown.
Maximizing your travels, in my book, means soaking up as much of a destination as possible, with respect to its notable attractions, ethnic cuisines, immaculate scenery, world-class wine, vibrant nightlife and of course, its unique history and heritage that is responsible for it all.
I always make efforts to visit Civil War battlefields in the American South, explore Mayan ruins in Mexico, hike the Great Wall in China, soak up old town areas in Europe, see museums and historic places of worship all over the world. And I don’t just visit these places, I do my homework first. I talk to people who have vast knowledge of these places, and those who have been to these places. Then when I get to where I’m going I can put myself in the shoes of those who helped to make these places what they are today, including the people who became prominent figures in their own respective cultures. I personally believe that any trip anywhere is incomplete if travelers are not fully immersing themselves into a destination, with respect to those destinations’ historical entities that helped make those cultures what they are today. When travelers research their destinations’ history, they are more comfortable visiting these places because they will have sufficient cultural and historical knowledge of them, and they will see places of cultural and historical significance with greater understanding and appreciation.
Heritage Travel Can Help Us to Promote Peace and Tolerance
By taking the time to learn about destinations before traveling to them, I mean with respect to those places’ heritage beyond what the travel agents sell people, travelers have a real opportunity to bridge longstanding cultural miscues. Oftentimes travelers are guilty of sending the wrong signals with their words and actions when they arrive at a place. This is for multiple reasons and it’s not always the tourists’ fault as it’s impossible to know everything.
The mass media can often portray a culture in a very negative way, due to geopolitical tensions and this gives travelers negative impressions of places. Some people are scared to death to travel to Mexico because of fear of the Cartels. Some people are afraid to travel to China because it’s a “Communist country” and they don’t want to “get sick from eating cats and dogs.” Some people are afraid to travel to Saudi Arabia because it’s a “Muslim country” and they think that jihadists are going to murder them for being Christian. It’s not that the media is entirely wrong about these concerns; it’s how the media presents it all and how frequently they talk about particular issues. With that said, one should not ignore the warning signs about a particular destination, but don’t limit what you think you know to just one source. For American travelers, I recommend always checking the U.S. government travel website before, as they will tell you about any dangers to watch out for, but even more valuable than this are Facebook expat groups full of people who serve as insiders to a particular place. Anyone can request to join groups like “Expats in Russia” and you’ll most likely be able to get into these groups easily and be able to ask people what these places are really like, and find out what you need to know to get ready for your trip, assuming your destination is safe. Of course, don’t ignore travel guides, especially the free online ones that can provide you with some tips and info on not only what to see, do, eat and where to stay but will also advise you about what you should and shouldn’t say or do.
Understanding what kind of tourist one should be for a respective destination will help people make more local friends and also make them more affable foreigners, thus contributing to breaking age-old stereotypes that are on both sides of the fence. Learning a few words in a country’s native tongue also never hurts when it comes to being more welcome somewhere. One can never be too prepared for a trip to a new destination, and the more prepared people are, the better tourists they’ll be and the better ambassadors they’ll be for their home countries. All of this leaves positive marks and helps bridge negative cultural gaps that the mass media reinforces. And again, by knowing a destination’s history and heritage, you’ll better know its people and this helps to filter out the media’s false narratives and awful biases that help to fuel geopolitical tensions.
Thanks to travel influencers, they also offer a viable alternative to the mass media with their own first-hand experiences, and accounts of those experiences via their social media platforms.
Why and How I Promote Heritage Travel
I focus on heritage travel because of who I am, where I come from and what my interests and life experiences are. As I mentioned above, I grew up in a small town in the Upland South region of the United States that is very homogeneous, culture-wise, and I was limited to what I knew of the rest of the world. This all made me extremely curious about other kinds of people and other parts of the world. My mother was a traveler, and she passed her love of travel down to me. I was never really around people different from myself until I joined the U.S. Army in 1997 after I graduated high school. After the military, I started college in 2001 and that exposed me to even more diversity and knowledge of other cultures. However, I never even traveled outside of the United States until after I graduated with my second Master’s degree from the University of Miami in 2012, which is when I moved to China to live and work for several years until 2019. It was my Christmas trip in Jakarta, Indonesia (my 5th country), in 2016 that inspired me to want to become a world traveler. I started to travel the world and I created my own travel business, Outcast Vagabond, in early 2017. Since 2010, when I moved to south Florida, I have lived life as a white, English-speaking minority in places like Miami, China, Mexico and the Philippines and this has forced me to become a curious, open-minded and tolerant person. I’ve created a very diversified social network of people from all over the world. I’ve traveled to over 100 countries and this year I will take a year off from full-time travel, so that I can return to China and spend another year there teaching English again. I’m currently based in Manila, Philippines.
My interests, growing up where and how I did and my life experiences have all made me curious about the rest of the world. It’s all made me want to learn more about people, learn about their differences and why they do what they do based on their own interests, experiences and where they’re from. I yearn to learn from people who aren’t like me, with hopes that they can learn from me as well. I capture as much of my travel experiences as I can and put it all together with photos, videos and articles that describe what I’ve experienced and I share it all across my social media platforms. I feel that my own brand of heritage travel helps those who follow my travels understand the world through a very unique lens, in a practical way with informative storytelling. I don’t believe that history should be sugarcoated; it needs to be told with authenticity.
My primary goal as a world-traveling digital nomad is to help bring people together through mutual understanding, by debunking age-old cultural stereotypes and by encouraging dialogue among people who come from different backgrounds, while highlighting similarities.
In 2019, I embarked on my first major road trip across the United States with the goal of exploring my own personal American heritage. I visited 15 Southern states and 10 Western states; while doing this I stopped by and explored American Civil War and Revolutionary War battlefields, graveyards, museums, Native American Indian reservations, monuments and other places that pertain to my own story. I spoke to many historians and locals. I conducted extensive research. This was an inspirational journey for me and I didn’t want it to end. I learned more about my Country, and myself, in two months, than my previous 40 years of life. It helped me to discover what kind of traveler I need to be, as I could feel it in my heart. Needless to say, I started taking more road trips across the USA and even started filming more vlogs about my other adventures after that 2019 trip, and now I’ve driven through every state except for Alaska and Hawaii. I’ve created several vlogs as a part of my Heritage: A Travel Campaign project, which is a subseries to my greater Road Trippin’ USA: A Travel Adventure Series project with the former being about my American heritage and the latter being about American road trips, in general.
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Jeffrey A. Epps, MBA, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Jeff manages his travel business, Outcast Vagabond, where he provides marketing and consulting services to travel-related brands and individuals. He has been to over 100 countries and aspires to travel to every country and territory in the world. He spent 7 years living and teaching in 3 separate Chinese cities, from 2012 to 2019, and has been teaching online, part-time, since 2020. As an avid investor, he helps to coach others on money management and with investment advice. He has 3 college diplomas including a Bachelor's in Marketing (SIUC), MBA in Marketing (SFASU) and a MALS degree from the University of Miami. He is currently based in Makati, Metro Manila, Philippines.
