It might have been a Larry Niven book, where the protagonist felt the world had become dull once it acquired uniform culture. We’re just starting to take the first few steps in that direction, but as it stands now the world is filled with many diverse and fascinating cultures. One world culture is several centuries away.
The world is too crowded. No one goes there anymore.
To directly answer the OP:
Yes and no. While it’s definitely more of an “adventure” to have to deal with language barriers, cruddy maps, and weird/indifferent food, I think that overall, having things like smartphones w/GPS and widely known standbys like McDonald’s cuts way down on the less pleasant aspects of travel- you’re not reliant on some sketchy map, and you have far more research resources at your disposal for historical and cultural sites than you get from a paragraph or two in a guidebook. Plus, if you’re crunched for time or just generally stressed out in a train station or airport, being able to get familiar food for cheap is often very welcome, even if it is McDonald’s or Burger King. Sometimes, even savvy and adventurous travelers don’t want to deal with the hassle of figuring out menus and ordering food in other countries.
I think if it gets TOO homogenized, then yeah, traveling will lose a lot of charm. But we’re nowhere near there now. Even the UK as a travel destination is surprisingly foreign, even though our language and a great deal of our ihistorical culture and current entertainment hail from there.
While McDonalds and Subways (and Starbucks) do try for a bit of local flavour everywhere, they are actually some of the most standardised chains on earth. The McDonalds and Subway I have been to on three continents are quite interchangeable.
There is a reason the Big Mac Index exists.
I do think that its a peculiarity of Westerners that they seem to want everything to be the same overseas as back home with just one or two local “quirks”. I think its most obvious in Thailand, where IME the places which Westerners frequent are quite separate from the places everyone else (local Thais, Asians, Middle Easteners) and other go to.
It’s still pretty easy to get that 3rd world, backwater experience in every country. Even right here in the good ol USA.
Wasn’t most of rural Thailand not even electrified until the late 1980s? I’ve heard they had a huge program in the 1980s to electrify the country outside of Bangkok.
I’m not sure of “most of Thailand,” at least not in the late 1980s. Early 1980s? Maybe. I lived in the remote northern province of Mae Hong Son from 1988-90, and only two subdistricts – Bang Mapha and Sop Moei, which have since been upgraded to full district status – lacked electricity completely, with all five districts at the time having electricity to some extent. And You had to go off the beaten track not to find electricity in much of the rest of the country.
The Vietnam War has been credited with slowing down the communist guerrillas enough for Thailand to implement a massive infrastructure upgrade in Thailand, particularly in the Northeast. Thais looked with horror at the fall of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and were petrified they would be next. Electrification of the Northeast underwent a big push from the 1970s into the 1980s. It seemed to have worked. As recently as the early 1980s there were places in the Northeast you just couldn’t go to, but that had changed by the time of my arrival in 1988, and I saw a lot of electricity in the Northeast at that time. It depends on how much of the population outside of big centers were without electricity. You can probably find some today even. But I think a critical mass of electrified residents had been reached by the mid-1980s.
Villages without electricity were quite common in the mid 1980’s. And I stayed at one backpacker’s beach on the resort island of Phuket circa 1986 where the only electricity was from a gasoline generator run a few hours in evenings. During the late 1980’s electrification was very rapid.
In addition to electrification, villages wanted running water, paved roads, and telephone lines. Most of the villages near me didn’t get running water until well into the 21st century, and flow is still unreliable: we make a point of filling tanks when it is running. Road building and maintenance are major on-going efforts: One of the major tracks into my village was often impassible during rainy season in the mid 1990’s, but dirt roads are the exception now.
My village and its neighbors still lack telephone lines and plans to install them have been abandoned of course — everyone has cell phones!
I lived in Ireland for four months in 1990 (after a two-week visit in 1986), when much of the country (especially the western coast) was almost third-world*. It was charming, beautiful, and with a deep connection to the past that wasn’t Disneyified.
I just returned to western Ireland a month ago for a week, and was a bit dismayed at how modern and comfortable it’s become. Superhighways with same-as-anywhere rest stops. County Clare is filled with haute cuisine restaurants and expensive, predictable lodging, staffed by Eastern Europeans (I’m not at all anti-immigrant, but it does change things a bit.) Families with fancy cars and smartphones and shopping in glistening malls.
So, it was indeed harder to get to the “real Ireland” – I found it mainly in mountaintops and other natural areas (or more remote farmlands) – but who am I to wish that others were denied creature comforts? And how much of my disappointment just reflects some romantic notions of place, anyway? Would a visitor returning to Ireland in 1990, having first gotten to know it in 1964, have expressed similar complaints as mine? (Many humans have lived in an arguably “globalized” world since at least the 16th-century Age of Exploration…and many of our ideas of why one place is culturally distinct from another have surprisingly shallow roots.)
*“Developing” or “Global South” wouldn’t convey what I want to say here.
I’ve never traveled (yet!) outside my home country, the USA, but I can’t imagine it being any less exciting or exotic to me because of the things mentioned throughout the thread. Instead, being inexperienced and a little shy about doing so, I’m sure I’ll be comforted not feeling completely lost and out of place. And just like traveling in America, there’s ways to get around that isn’t the beaten tourist path and easily explored areas just outside the main roads that will give you close enough adventures of interesting things that you crave.
But what do I know? I can still find ways to be awed and entertained just by checking out new stuff locally when the population hasn’t exceeded 5,000 and I’ve been around for over thirty years here. It’s all how you look at it, IMHO.
Well, it’s true the Barack Obama shrine/superhighway rest stop is unique and awesome. 
I am surprised right now to learn that there are rest stops in Ireland, not because of some sense of the traditional countryside, but because you can travel from one end of the island to the other on one tank of gas.
In the movie Midnight in Paris, Owen Wilson’s character repeatedly travels back in time to Paris in the 1920s; he thinks this is great, because he’s nostalgic for that particular era. Late in the movie, while he’s in 1920s Paris, he and a 1920s female character travel back in time to the 1890’s - which she thinks is great, because she’s nostalgic for that particular era. He asks some of the 1890s Parisians what they think was the best era, and they suggest the Renaissance.
Point being that the OP has suggested 1989 as a time for “true adventure” in international travel, but a person living in 1989 might be just as inclined to lament globalization at that point, and to suggest 1963 as a better time for “true adventure”. And similarly for a person living in 1963, by which point modern technology and western culture had already made significant inroads into other countries.
If you want true-true-true adventure, set your wayback machine for a few hundred years ago so you can be among the first Europeans to show their faces in southeast Asia, or South America, or Africa.
Or you could replicate the feeling now by setting foot on North Sentinel Island. Of course, the reason the islanders are truly nonglobalized is because they attack everyone who tries to communicate with them, so good luck.
This occurs in the opening chapter of “Ringworld.”
So true! Americans, Canadians, and Australians are typically amazed at how quickly you can cross the entire country.
One thing is that it’s given rise to certain people who look down on you if you don’t travel.
I remember years ago seeing a report on 60 Minutes (by Morley Safer, I think) about how the hordes of tourists were ruining landmarks (such as how the breathing of all of those visitors to the Lascaux caves in France were ruining the artwork).
In Yucatan, Mexico, you could climb just about any Maya “pyramid” (there are dozens that have been cleaned/restored by archaeologists) up until a few years ago – now, you can only climb some of them.
I tend to agree with the OP. Some cities I have visited over the years are becoming just another shopping mall with the same store you can find anywhere. Gone are the local shops, as I have specifically looked for shops I used to visit to find them replaced by a chain store.