Isla Holbox Tourist Culture, Travel Myth, and Loathing in Paradise By Brian Edwards-Tiekert The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, according to Douglas Adams, devotes precious little space to Earth. Located in 'the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of a small galaxy,' it merits (in the expanded edition) a two word entry: "Mostly Harmless." The point, presumably, is that tourist literature has an amazing capacity to reduce, compress, and ultimately offend its subject. Lonely Planet: Mexico (a popular 'budget' guide for the 'independent' traveler) has a similarly concise description of Isla Holbox, a town where I spent some time over break. In the space of four lines, it informs the reader that Isla Holbox makes a pleasant 'break' from someplace like Cancun, but that the water is 'murkier' than on the Caribbean, and 'the modern amenities are in short supply.' It describes how to get there-you take buses to the 'unappealing' port town of Chiquila ('Chiquila is a hole of a town,' it proclaims, 'try not to get stuck there for the night') where a ferry may or may not be running to the island. Under the heading "Places to Stay" it lists only the Hotel Paradiso by the dock, though there are more (and cheaper) places to stay in town-presumably some intrepid travel writer made it to the island, scribbled down the name and number of the closest hotel, and then got back on the ferry before it left him stranded. If he had taken the eight-minute walk through town, he might not have minded. The streets of Isla Holbox are paved with white sand, and traffic consists of three things: the intermittent whisper of bicycles, the passing whine of a moped, and the Superior beer truck that each morning lumbers from the ferry to the bar to the cervezeria and back again. Two hundred meters from the dockmaster's office a thrumming diesel generator housed in a tractor trailer powers the entire town; it's the only noise you can hear for a block in either direction. Further in, the Holboxiños have built their homes and shops of cement, painted them blue or yellow, and roofed them with thatch or tin; some have ringed their roofs with makeshift gutters to collect rainwater in covered cisterns. In the middle of town is a large zócalo. Children run down cement paths that have shed fist-sized slivers into the sand. Lovers hold hands in chairs joined at one arm for precisely that purpose. As the sun sets, boys and men chase up and down the basketball court while girls watch from across the street. It is mostly women in the church behind them; they shuffle in and out beneath a crooked concrete cross held standing by a piece of string. In a town where the fishermen bring back red snapper, shark and lobster every afternoon, the only popular restaurant is the second-floor pizzeria overlooking the square. Past the zócalo it is only two more blocks to the beach at the end of town. The breakers still hold the shape of concrete sacks stacked in columns at low tide; at night tiny fishing boats tug gently at anchors on the shore. Three miles to the left is a lagoon where flamingos spend the night; the beach terminates in mangrove clusters four miles to the right. Once, a plane filled with cocaine crashed in the mangroves. Now eight soldiers with machine guns patrol the beach all night long lest Colombian cartels use Holbox as a drop; every six weeks a new group replaces the old, lest the soldiers get friendly with the locals. A hundred miles west of Cancun, the Holboxiños watch their soldiers, talk of mega-resorts consuming the Caribbean coast beach by beach, and marvel. The town doesn't have any singular attractions and it's not on the way to anywhere-the tourist maps are slow to include it. The island itself is on the border between the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, which places it just outside of the realm of coral sands and turquoise waters that give developers wet dreams. Holbox is beautiful in the way that many small towns are beautiful: carefree nine-year-olds bike though the streets at midnight and their parents don't worry. It is beautiful in the way of Mexico: they've seen their share of gringos, but they'll still invite you in for dinner. It is beautiful-with mangroves, sandbars, and flamingos-in the manner of most tropical islands; but it still isn't the right kind of beautiful to merit a page-long entry in the Lonely Planet. Thank God. When I got there I figured I'd out-witted the travel guides and snuck into Paradise. It is the nature of travel guides that if you go someplace the guide devotes more than a column to, you're destined to see a hundred people with the same book. I'd seen Mexico's tragic monuments to tourism: Cancun's coastline of casinos and hotels, Chichen Itza's Disneyland of concessions and Mayan souveneir stores, the 'aquarium' in Playa Del Carmen where for $200 you can swim with dolphins in a tank. And then there were tourism's casualties--the dead reef off Cancun, stories of dolphins that killed themselves trying to escape capture, Mayan traditions made the stuff of T-shirts, tchotchkes, and wage labor. Here was a beach that hadn't been trampled, a culture that hadn't been yoked, a quaintnesss that hadn't been commodified. Then I saw a large new hotel on the downtown beach ('large' meant ten rooms and three suites, but it was the biggest in town). Two miles out of town I found a small cabana resort that raked its beach and booked its rooms through travel agents and flew in guests from Cancun and even had a webpage (though they had only two cabanas filled when I was there during peak season). Then someone told me foreigners owned nearly all the property that fronts on the island's crunchy beaches and slightly-less-than-perfect waters (Lonely Planet warns that there's actually seaweed in there), and though massive development seemed impossible on an island without paved roads or a fresh water source, I thought of the Lonely Planet entry and imagined these foreigners tapping their fingers in infernal board rooms, smiling malevolently, and biding their time. It was a vision of Tourism hovering hungrily on the edge of Eden, and I resolved not to be part of the Fall. I would spend my money where the locals spent theirs, swear off English, shun other gringos at all costs, and silently resent those insensitive tourists who, with their Isla Holbox T-shirts, cappuccinos, and $50-a-night suites, were already changing the island for the worse. I rented a concrete room from a fishing family who kept a pig in the backyard, ordered my lunch at the pizzeria, and spoke nothing but Spanish for six hours straight. That was about how long my resolve lasted. Most places I've traveled to I've noticed this trend: people, particularly 'independent' travelers, arrive with the best intentions of experiencing local culture and then, after a day of struggling to communicate across social, cultural, and/or linguistic gaps, they gladly latch onto the first fellow-traveler they find, order a round of beer, and talk about home. In Third World countries, it helps that the overwhelming majority of international travelers are white-it's easy to pick the other foreigner out of a crowd of, say, five-foot-tall Maya, and odds are that even if he isn't from your hometown, he's still going to speak English. Travelers and tourists form instant cliques that are the foundations of a tourist micro-culture in any well-traveled location. They speak the same language, talk about home, travel, and the tourists they've loathed, and build for themselves a cultural comfort zone in an alien land. Any town with a growing tourist industry sees its micro-culture grow accordingly, and the micro-culture can fuel the growth of tourism-when a place like Guatemala's Lagos de Atitlan gets a reputation as a traveler's hangout, it draws still more travelers. Presumably, the micro-culture expands without limit until, driven in no small part by the wallets of its constituents, it eclipses local culture and becomes the dominant culture. The most extreme example is Cancun: twenty years ago it was a sleepy village with a more than marketable reef; now, with a population of 300,000, it's called an "American City in Mexico." All the signs are in English, all prices in dollars, and the locals struggle to learn English so they can work more lucrative positions in the service industry. And so tourism takes on the mantle of colonialism for the 21st century. No matter how independent an 'independent' traveller, s/he paves the road for further tourism-his or her very presence is a comfort to other Westerners, and another tally mark in the minds of locals gauging the market for a new T-shirt shop. The notion of the traveler as an 'individual' itself is a myth-both traveler and tourist are socially-produced identities built on the wealth gap between tourist and local and driven by corporate travel culture's myths of paradise, adventure, and the quest for the 'authentic.' The conditions that produce one traveler and one destination can hardly help but produce more travelers headed to the same place-this to the endless frustration of travelers who've been sold on the notion of exploring the exotic, touching the untouched, and discovering things for the first time. In the end most travelers have an innate loathing for the tourists that spoil their vacation spots and have to find some way to seperate themselves from late capitalism's cultural refuse. Everyone's got a favorite straw-man tourist. For some it's 'Eurotrash.' For some it's dirty hippies. Some target the camera-clicking Japanese. Some point at gringos. Some still hate the stereotypical Hawaiian- shirt-and-clip-on-sunglasses sightseer. To be honest, when I worked in a restaurant in Woodstock, my pet peeve was Israelis-another waiter had coined a name for visitors from New Jersey: 'Urban White Trash.' In the pizzeria, I sat down with a school-teacher from North Carolina, an anthropologist from Germany, and a mural-painter from London. We ordered a round of beers and talked about home and then one of them asked me if I'd like to join them on a boat trip the next morning and I said yes. A small man with a small boat took us to an island bird sanctuary slightly larger than the Campus Center courtyard. There was another boat anchored there full of Mexicans who sat where they were and looked at us as we walked ashore. Our guide didn't say much except 'walk around,' so walk around we did. Cameras appeared. Birds of every description blanketed the trees and there wasn't much in the way of paths so we just bumbled around beaches until someone figured out that if you got your camera up and walk into a bush, you get a great shot of the pelicans spreading their wings and taking off. Our guide didn't say anything. I figured an island so remote must not have enough visitors to worry about impact. Then I rounded a small tree in quest of my own photos and came face to face with a monster. He was huge: six-and-a-half feet and at least twice my weight-there were two Germans and a Mexican with him and they all fit in his shadow; his Whalers T-shirt hung out over a pastel blue bathing suit; he had a camera the size of my head in one hand, two telephoto lenses hanging from his neck, and he was using a fishing rod with a noose tied to the end to try and catch an iguana that bolted when I appeared. "YOU SCARED MY IGUANA." He had hearing aids in both ears. "SOMEONE TIE ANOTHER NOOSE." He told me he was from Queens, that he'd been to this island fourteen times, then he hooked a bigger iguana which slipped the knot and ran off with the noose around its neck. Then he spotted a boa, demanded his snake hook from the German girl, and I left . The Mexicans were still watching us from their boat. I put a hand on one of the beams of a small wooden tower in the bushes-you could get some great photos from on top , but there didn't seem to be a ladder. The Monster's guide was there, and I asked him if I could climb it. He said yes. I was ten feet up a pole, about to swing onto the platform when something as big as I was took off from the roof. "THAT'S AN OSPREY. THAT'S MY FAVORITE BIRD IN THE WORLD." My guide was with the Monster. He told me, very passively, that I wasn't supposed to go up there. I got down, I apologized, and he shrugged. I told him I didn't know. He didn't say anything. And then we left. That night I found out nobody was even supposed to walk on that island-our guide had lost his boating permit for two weeks, but it had still been worth it for the $40 we paid him. Part of me had known that you're not supposed to go bushwhacking through nesting grounds, and part of me knew the tower had no ladder for a reason-I realized that the line between me and the Monster was thinner than I'd ever care to admit. Let me elaborate: a friend once vented his frustration to me about a particularly popular line of environmental logic that he called "Save the Humans"-i.e. fix the ozone because we'll get skin cancer, save the rain forest because we need the oxygen, save this species or that one to maintain biodiversity; in the end it all comes down to self-interest. Radical environmentalism, he contended, held all things natural to be valuable in and of themselves, whether they benefit us, ignore us, or eat us. I realized that Tourism creates an even more twisted logic of conservation: "Save it for Me." The tourist develops a profound admiration for the sights s/he sees, but it is coupled with the desire to consume them. You appreciate the pyramids, the rainforest, the reefs and waterfalls, count yourself an enemy of anything that would pollute or destroy them, and you do it for one simple reason: you want them to be around so you can enjoy them. It's an outrage that anyone would log the Amazon before you get to see it. You get angry at other tourists because they're the reason you have to wait in line, because they get in your pictures, because they encroach upon your experience, because you know that the sheer volume is sinking the pyramids and killing the reef; but what you don't recognize is that you more or less all want the same thing. I'm sure the Monster from Queens was all for keeping the sanctuary protected-it'd leave him more boas to hunt and iguanas to noose. Some part of me knew all along that I wasn't supposed to be on that island, but I wasn't about to ask questions. I was going to climb a tower so that I could get a better photograph than anyone else and enjoy what was rightfully mine. So he wanted to catch a lizard. I wanted to climb a tower. We both rationalized something we knew was wrong. It wouldn't be a problem if there weren't so many other people ruining things that we had the right to ruin for ourselves. In the end, you see a little bit of yourself in the ugliest of ugly tourists. Some part of me wanted to catch a boa too, just to see what it felt like, to have it too myself, to get a good close-up. What it all comes down to is this: if you care about people and places, then travel-particularly sight-seeing-will always be a process of self-loathing.