Banned: Tourism

Travels Narrows The Mind

A friend of mine came back from South America a few weeks ago. It was just the latest in several big foreign trips he has taken in the last decade: he works for a few months, saves his money then buggers off for as long as he can. Fair play, you might say. I wouldn’t. On his return from Brazil a few of us went out and met him for a drink, and, for a short while, he told us about his journey. Now, he doesn’t like to travel with tourists and stay in posh hotels. He is a strictly Lonely Planet-type traveller. Hostels, buses, you know: really getting a feel for the country. Except that he doesn’t. Ever. And that’s why I am banning tourism this week. He is typical of all tourists, and they need banning.

It’s always the same. He comes back. He tells us some really basic stuff about where he has been: stuff we already know, stuff you can read in books or on the web. Yes, he meets lots of people on his travels: and to a man and woman they are always, British, American, Canadian or Australian. He never meets anyone from the country he visits, or if he does it is simply for day-to-day transactions. He moves around with this group of Lonely Planet tourists, and they devour the world. “A magical place,” he said of Brazil. “Buzzing with full-moon parties, psychedelic drugs and trance.” Travel broadens the mind? No. Travel narrows the mind. Travellers take their little bit of the world and their narrow mindset with them, and expect the world to accommodate them in comfort.

The first thing travellers do when they reach a destination is make themselves comfortable. For the well-off this means hotels. Hotels that cater for the ‘international traveller.’ So, no matter where you are in the world, all hotels are (architecture aside) the same. You have your wi-fi in case you die from not checking your e-mails or suddenly need to bang one out over Porn Hub. You have room service and running hot and cold water. You can order the newspapers from your home country. You can, should you desire (and most of you do) stay in your little cocoon and never trouble yourself with interaction with the locals. You can get food that is exactly the same as you get at home. Someone will launder your clothes for you. Only 5% of you will ever learn the basics of another language, so there is absolutely no way you are going to speak to anyone local and learn anything about the way the live. You’re just there to take some pictures, maybe get some sun, pick up some trinkets and tick another place off the list. The Big Stupid List of places you have visited. Big deal. You might as well have stayed at home for all the change it will make to you.

Righteous travellers are much, much worse. For them, the beaten track is a bore. They need to find more remote places to ruin: Goa’s attraction to travellers forty years ago was its unspoilt beauty. Well, the millions of pseudo-hippies who ‘do’ Goa each year have put paid to that. Two hundred and fifty charter flights leave Britain each year for Goa. More people travel to Goa each year than live there. It’s like a big, new Benidorm. Isn’t it weird that hippies can so happily fly around in jet-fuel spilling 747’s as long as there is a bong full of Charis and party at the end of it? Sewage from hotels has poisoned the water wells in dozens of villages; plastic water bottles form a mountain of waste. Trustafarians gather on the beaches at Baga or Anjuna, maybe hook up with fellow travellers to sort out some drugs and a trance party, then kick back tanning their tattooed, anorexic bodies as they braid each other’s hair and talk shit. All the time praising the place for how cheap it is. Would that it was really expensive. It might have saved it. All the crap spoken about how tourism creates jobs and money for the local economy? So what? A minimum wage so that tourists can suck down a Big Mac and get a foot massage for a few rupees? That’s progress. You can get an egg sandwich and chips on Anjuna beach now. That’s ace isn’t it? You don’t have to eat the mucky local food.

It’s the world over. So many tourists go to the Galapagos Islands now, to ‘see’ it, that they have problem a trash mountain. Maybe they should just dump it in the sea. Guess what? The Galapagos Islands are there: you going there doesn’t confirm this or make you a better person: it ruins the Galapagos Islands. Just like everywhere else already ruined by tourists. Lonely Planet should be renamed Crowded Planet, and they should stop telling unimaginative people where to go to fuck up next.

I have travelled a lot and I am guilty. I didn’t learn much about any of the places I visited, really. The friends I have made have been when I actually lived somewhere for a while, not from a holiday. If you live and work somewhere you can’t help but learn. Living somewhere is good, it’s fine. It isn’t tourism. Tourism is holidays. I chase the sun in the summer, look for cheap deals, follow the hoards. And it has to stop. I am banning myself from travel outside the UK. My wife and daughter won’t be too happy but that’s too bad. Tough decisions are needed in the next few years, and I’m the man to make them. Tourism is killing the world.

It wasn’t always thus. A hundred years ago I can imagine travel really did broaden the mind. Travellers came back with tales of other people and other ways of living. People at home had their eyes opened to the fact that theirs was just one way of life. Now the opposite is true. People travel now and everywhere ends up looking and sounding the same: like Universal Western. Same shops and restaurants, same clothes, same entertainment. It’s boring. The only way to stop this blanding of the world and to ensure there are at least a few places left untouched by the curse of the tourist, is to ban tourism immediately. Stay at home. Learn something about the place where you live. Or virtually travel: simply download a picture or video, and blag it. You can save money, it’ll sound more authentic than your real travels were, and no one will be the wiser.