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Traveling Around the Incredible Shrinking Planet by Brian Edwards Tiekert |
In February it just plain sucks to be at Wesleyan. Andrus field, depending on the weather, resembles either a quagmire or an ice-skating rink. The wind is cold enough at night to make breathing painful, and when the sun grudgingly rises over the Connecticut River it has about as much presence as a student nodding off in the back of a lecture hall. It's the time of year when we pause thoughtfully while applying chap-stick, turn to each other, and start asking soul-searching questions:
"Where are you going for spring break?"
If there's one bug that everyone on campus catches this time of year, it's wanderlust. Maybe you're not actually going anywhere over spring break, maybe you can't afford to travel all summer, maybe you're not even doing a semester abroad in an exotic third-world country-but you want to. And, more than that, you want to find out where everyone else is going so you know what you're missing.
MTV culture has given us a pretty good notion of what a standard spring break looks like: sand, surf, sun, sex, and inebriants. Like it or not, snorkeling in Cancun and wet T-shirt contests at Daytona Beach are the first things that come to mind when someone says the words 'Spring Break.' It's part of a larger phenomenon: for years, Club Med commercials and glossy travel brochures have sent us the message that heaven is a place on earth-a pristine expanse of ivory-white sand, breeze-ruffled palm trees, and crystal-clear ocean-and that all you need to return to Eden is a plane ticket, sun block, and a fat wad of cash. It's the one place you can go where your problems won't follow. This Paradise Myth is one of the foundations of the travel business.
For those of us who are unimpressed with the passive self-gratification of the beach resort sun-worshipper, there exists an alternative model: that of the Noble Traveler.
Disenchanted with our material culture, the Noble Traveller stuffs the necessities of survival into an REI backpack, slips some traveler's checks into a money belt, and flies of into the sunset. Poor, dirty, and hungry, the Noble Traveler enjoys meaningful cross-cultural encounters with smiling natives in exotic locales, loses himself in enlightened self-contemplation, and then, his last penny spent, flies back to civilization with a broader mind, a deeper spirituality, and a killer tan.
Those of us sold on this model believe that if we just look hard enough, we'll find some tucked-away corner of the world untouched by the dirty hands of globalization, somewhere the people have never seen a Coke bottle or eaten a Big Mac. And when we get there, when we finally find something 'authentic' in the age of corporate culture, it will transform us into better, happier, wiser people.
The Noble Traveler is Marco Polo, he's Sinbad the Sailor, he's Jack Kerouac, he's the Lone Ranger. And he's popular. If you pack a bag and travel around the world this summer, you'll be one of over 500 million people who take international holidays each year. And when that many people go in quest of pristine landscapes and authentic cultures, neither one lasts very long. On the secluded beach where you go looking for peace and solitude, there's a busload of tourists looking for the same thing. Or, worse yet, some multinational is building a new resort hotel. And the 'smiling natives' won't be smiling at you-unless someone's paying them for it.
But hey, that's business. The tourism industry, grossing more than $3.5 trillion a year, is arguably the world's largest, vying with oil for top status. After World War II, the World Bank earmarked tourism as an ideal means of economic growth for third-world countries, but those countries haven't grown half so much as the industry itself. The number of people travelling abroad per year will have gone from one million at the turn of the century to an estimated 650 million by the end of the millenium.
All the investments made in tourism in the last 50 years have paved the road for the exploitation of developing countries by their wealthier neighbors. Today, multinational corporations are strip-mining third world nations for their 'authentic' indigenous cultures and 'pristine' ecosystems. Hotel chains, airlines, and charter services market smiling natives and ivory beaches to an elite first-world leisure class. In the process, they manage to trample over most of what they're selling.In the words of Dr. Koson Srisand, former executive secretary of the Ecumenical Coalition on Third World Tourism: "[Tourism] does not benefit the majority of people. Instead it exploits them, pollutes the environment, destroys the ecosystem, bastardizes the culture, robs people of their traditional values and ways of life and subjugates women and children in the abject slavery of prostitution . . . [It] epitomizes the present unjust world economic order where the few who control wealth and power dictate the terms."
"But," the beach resort sun-worshipper protests. "Tourism can prop up struggling economies; foreign money means more jobs; if tourism's an industry, then at least it's a clean one-no smoke stacks, no oil spills-we have a good time, the locals make some money, and everybody goes home happy." Actually, it's just another way for multinational corporations to make a quick buck in the third world. And the business is anything but clean.
US multinationals run resort hotels the same way they run sweatshops. They pay locals a barely livable wage, charge astronomical prices for the product of their labour, and pocket the difference. All that foreign money leaves the country as fast as it came- In some places as little as 20% of the money 'pouring in' from tourism actually stays in the country. The locals aren't making a buck off the tourists, they're just moving from one form of poverty to another.
Cancun's beaches, for example, are so overrun by foreign-owned hotel chains, restaurants, and charter services that all the signs in the city are printed in English and every price is quoted in US dollars. Mexicans work for peanuts cleaning suites and driving cabs while American tourists lie next to the pool on the beach in front of their $300-a-night hotels. The corporations running the show are doing what they've always done in places like Mexico: taking advantage of cheap labor and exploiting natural resources- in this case the beaches, the ocean, and the coral reef.
The growth of resort areas like Cancun changes the local economy forever. People move from sustainable livelihoods-i.e. fishing and agriculture-to unstable low-wage service jobs. Sometimes the move is voluntary; other times there's no other option when the government pushes them off their land to expand a resort. When the people become dependent on tourism, so does the economy, and the fate of a nation rests on its aesthetic appeal to the wealthy elite of first-world countries. The money that these countries invested in tourism for growth leaves them victims of a new form of economic imperialism. The real irony of the scenic Club Med commercials is that the biggest threat to the pristine expanses of palm-studded beach they advertise is the buisiness they draw. Build a big enough city-even a resort city-on the ocean, and pretty soon you won't want to swim in the water.
Environmental problems plague all aspects of the tourist industry. First world travelers import their wasteful habits into third world countries that can't support them. In places where fresh water is scarce, tourists expect hot showers every day-in Hawaii the average tourist uses six to ten times the amount of water a local does. Our obsession with disposable packaging dogs us wherever we go; tourist money is incentive enough for locals to wrap everything they can in shrink-wrap and cellophane.
In Guatemala, peasant women sell tamales to travelers on busses: they put the tamale in one plastic bag, tie some hot sauce into another, and put the two together into a third. All this in spite of the fact that you don't see any trash cans there-garbage just piles up in the gutters. What does get hauled away doesn't get far-they dump it ten feet off the highway on the edge of town. In the smaller villages, people just burn piles of plastic in their back yards.
The worst habit that foreigners import is playing golf. Maintaining a well-manicured eighteen-hole golf course wastes spectacular amounts of water-and every resort worthy of the name needs at least one. Add to that the tons of fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides that run off into nearby waterways and drinking wells, and you've practically got a Superfund site on your hands.
The Noble Traveler in search of an 'authentic' village of smiling natives might be searching for a very long time. Over the years, pursuing the popular quest for unspoiled cultures has proven to be the surest way of spoiling them.
The first problem is that no matter how light you try to pack, you're still carrying a certain amount of cultural baggage wherever you go. This is why anthropologists tear their hair out trying to analyze their own effect on the cultures they're observing. One anthropologist visiting a good-sized tribe might not have any lasting effects, but how about a hundred tourists? How about a thousand? We don't just interrupt the norms and values of native cultures with out presence-we also bring our own into the equation. And when we bring our money as well, we start enforcing those values.
Bear in mind, too, that if you're traveling in a third-world country, you're a walking advertisement for the unsustainable, consumption-crazed society that happens to be running the planet. Even the happiest of smiling natives can't help but look at our Noble Traveler and think that for the price of that REI backpack he could feed his family for a year.
At the same time, we tend to romanticize the notion of the 'authentic' indigenous culture that we're destroying. So much so that culture becomes a commodity. Suddenly, jaded, de-cultured locals are being paid to live up to tourist's ideals of a colorful primitive society. Small villages in Bali perform ritual dances for paying tour groups that they stopped performing for themselves years ago. Mayan craftsmen carve likenesses of gods they haven't believed in since the time of the Spanish missionaries, then sell them to tourists looking for Christmas presents. Some bright entrepreneur sets up a disneyfied village where the locals, wearing animal-skin loincloths, go about the business of day-to-day life in a primitive bushman village. Tourists, duly impressed, get off the bus, snap some photos, and get back on. When they leave, the bushmen light cigarettes, change clothes, and put on rap music.
We pay locals to bastardize their heritage to live up to our expectations: tourism doesn't just speed up the break-down of cultural traditions; through our romance with the 'authentic,' we make a farce out of whatever remains. The problem with visions of pure natue and smiling natives is that to pursue them is to destroy them: Paradise can't be sold; the Noble Traveller is a joke. As long as we cling to those visions, corporations will be able to monopolize them at the expense of poorer nations. And they'll keep destroying new peoples and places every year until it stops.
The water at Acapulco is polluted enough, the beach cluttered with enough trash, that it's losing popularity as an international resort. At Cancun, damage done to the coral reef by the hundreds of thousands who explore it every year is swiftly destroying the entire ecosystem. What happens when these two resorts get so trashed that they stop drawing tourists? The Mexican Government finds another pristine stretch of beach, moves the peasants off the land, and invites the multinational hotel chains to start the whole process over again.
The moment a beach loses its pristinity and the resort loses its market, the multinationals simply break ground on another stretch of deserted coast. When an 'authentic' culture's been mainstreamed by the volume of tourists seeking it out, the flow of travellers just shifts its weight to another part of the globe (I hear Thailand and Indonesia are hot right now). We're constantly moving on to trample greener pastures.There are ways to travel that don't involve pursuing some impossible vision: plenty of organizations offer 'working holidays,' where you spend your vacation doing volunteer conservation or humanitarian work abroad. Better yet, travel as a human rights observer. Right now the Commite de Chiapas is organizing students to record human rights abuses by the military in small villages in Chiapas. Turn your status as tourist to good use: military thugs are much less likely to fire into a crowd of protesting peasants if there's a few Caucasians standing in front of it.
One thing's for sure: don't plan a trip because you're trying to live out an unacheivable fantasy. And don't assume that just because you're spending money abroad, you're doing the people there a favor. Next time you're blowing on numb fingers, while someone tell you about their plans for spring break, don't ask where you'll be traveling, ask why.