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Are you a tourist or a traveller?
Less than 40 years ago, tourism was encouraged as an unquestion-able good. With the arrival of package holidays and charter flights, tourism could at last be enjoyed by the masses. Yet one day,it seems feasible that there will be no more tourists. There will be ‘adventurers’, ‘fieldwork assistants’, ‘volunteers’ and, of course, ‘travellers’. But the term ‘tourist’ will be extinct. There might be those who quietly slip away to foreign lands for nothing other than pure pleasure, but it will be a secretive and frowned upon activity. No one will want to own up to being one of those.
In fact, there are already a few countries prohibiting tourists from entering certain areas where the adverse effects of tourism have already struck. Tourists have been charged with bringing nothing with them but their money and wreaking havoc with the local environment.
It won’t be easy to wipe out this massive, ever growing tribe. Today there are more than 700 million ‘tourist arrivals’ each year. The World Tourism Organisation forcasts that by 2020, there will be 1.56 billion tourists travelling at any one time. The challenge to forcibly curtail more than a billion tourists from going where they want is immense. It is so immense as to be futile. You cannot make so many economically empowered people stop doing something they want to do unless you argue that it is of extreme damage to the welfare of the world that only the truly malicious, utterly selfish and totally irresponsible would ever consider doing it.
So tourism is being attacked by more subtle methods, by being re-branded in the hope we won’t recognise it as the unattractive entity it once was. Adventurers, fieldwork assistants, and volunteers don’t go on holidays. ‘Un-tourists’ go on things called ‘cultural experiences’, ‘expeditions’, ‘projects’ and most tellingly, ‘missions’. While this re-branding is supposed to present a progressive approach to travel, it is firmly rooted in the viewpoint of the Victorian era. Like 19th century Victorian travellers, the modern day un-tourist insists that the main motive behind their adventure is to help others. Whereas the mass tourist and the area they visit are condemned as anti-ethical, the ethos of the un-tourist and the needs of the area they wander into are presumed to be in tune with each other.
The re-packaging of tourism as meaningful, self-sacrificing travel is liberating. It allows you to go to all sorts of places that would be ethically out of bounds to a regular tourist. Mass tourists are excluded from this new kind of un-tourism. Pretending you are not doing something that you actually are – going on holiday – is at the heart of the un-tourist industry. Every aspect of the experience has to be disguised. The expeditions, projects and adventures are advertised in publications more likely to resemble magazines with a concern in ecological or cultural issues. The price is usually well hidden as if there is an unwillingness to admit that this is a commercial transaction. There is something disturbing in having to pay to do good.
All tourism should be responsible towards and respectful of environmental and human resources. Some tourist developments, as well as individual tourists have not been so and should be challenged. But instead a divide is being driven between those few privileged, high-paying tourists and the masses. There is no difference between them – they are just being packaged as something different. Our concern should not be with this small number but with the majority of travellers. But should we bother? We who concern ourselves with this debate are potentially or probably un-tourists. We aren’t interested in saving leisure time abroad for the majority of people: we are interested in making ourselves feel good.
[1] The White House – (here) the President
[2] The Texan – (here) the man representing Space Industries of Houston, Texas.