Travel Versus Tourism: turning over a rock

This is a long post on a topic I've been thinking about for a while. Coming back from a vacation is a great motivation to finally type it all out. Here it is: a critical examination of whether travel is really different from tourism.

Many Americans are full-on tourists. They go on cruises. They book vacations at all-inclusive resorts. All they care about for their vacation spot is that it has sun, sand, the comforts of America, maybe a little exotic cultural display. Other Americans (like me, and most people I know) hate that kind of stuff. When I travel, I'd like to avoid other Americans. Otherwise, why bother leaving home? We prefer to truly "travel", to meet new people and explore new places, challenge ourselves and return with not just suntans but actual knowledge.

A lot of backpacker-type budget travelers (not just Americans, but from all corners of the world) have a deep emotional investment in the idea that their kind of travel is different from tourism. They are morally superior. They suffer for their knowledge. They read those dippy Paulo Coelho books.

A while back I decided that there was no point in building up a traveller identity in order to feel morally superior. I've started to explain my reasons to my friends and family, with varying results. Here's the gist of it. The traveller/tourist dichotomy is incredibly important for the identity of the traveller, but almost meaningless from the point of view of the local!

I used to work in the tourist industry in Miami. In Miami, the only industries are tourism, entertainment, drug-dealing and geriatric care. Miami, the unofficial capital of South America and the Caribbean, is also kind of a foreign country from the point of view of most Americans.

People like me did not have a very high opinion of the tourists we served every day. I would divide them into several categories:

1. Pasty-faced, pathetic northerners. Good tippers.
2. Eurotrash. Bad tippers.
3. Latin American elitist trash. Bad tippers, unless you spoke Spanish and acted especially servile.
4. English trash. Bad tippers. These were the absolute worst, because unlike Eurotrash, they could humiliate you in your own language. I reminder a friend of mine who was waiting tables for a Scottish tourist. Out of the blue the guy started harassing Americans for being shallow and stupid and not knowing anything about culture. And at the time, my friend was reading The Heart of Midlothian for her literature class, which is a 19th century, densely packed, highly Scottish novel. That guy probably hadn't even read it himself...

(You'll notice a certain bitterness creeping into my tone. But once I left the tourist industry I started liking foreigners again. My family briefly lived in England and I've always been sort of a UK-o-phile.)

Americans don't think of Miami as having a particularly deep or interesting native culture. I think a lot of Latin Americans have a similarly negative opinion of it. Yes, Miami has been debased by tourism, but we were still real people... I feel resentful anytime someone says "oh, that place was ruined by tourism. They don't have any culture over there." That guy trying to sell you the hideous sculpture of Christ made entirely out of glued-together seashells has a culture. Everyone has a culture!

Here's another categorized list. I really like it. It contains different ways that local people think about tourists, and what they want from tourists. The list is numbered from the point of view of a heavily touristed place such as Miami.

1. MONEY. Very simple and very powerful. Just give us money. Preferably cash money. We really need it. We'll work hard for you in order to get it. We might also steal it from you if we get the chance.
2. RESPECT. Don't humiliate me. Don't humiliate my family or friends or neighbors. Don't look down on my culture. You don't have to know all the ins and outs of how we do things down here, just show that you're exerting the minimum effort. Don't come into my place and treat me like like I'm beneath you.
3. SEX. If you're attractive to us, we'd like to have no-strings-attached sex, or a romantic affair. Your foreign sexual customs are either very appealing, or else disgusting but still morbidly fascinating.
4. HARM REDUCTION. Don't trash my place. Don't steal from us. Don't damage natural attractions so that the appeal of our place is damaged for future tourists and our economy implodes. Don't let your fun ruin our long-term future.
5. CULTURAL EXCHANGE: We want to learn about your culture. It's fascinating to us. If you're interested, we'd like to teach you about ours as well.
6. HOSPITALITY: We have a cultural obligation to show kindness to strangers. Fulfilling this obligation also provides us with deep satisfaction.

The problem with this list is that so many of the items are contradictory or even mutually exclusive. Money and Hospitality, for example. The longer and deeper tourism is embedded into a local economy, the more the value of hospitality is eroded. I noticed it when I visited Hawaii. Hospitality was isolated, an exception rather than the rule. I don't blame Hawaiians. If strangers are continuously coming to your place and ripping you off, you learn how to stop being friendly to them.

Money is also contradictory to Respect. People in the service industry have to give up demanding respect in order to receive their paycheck. Locals are also frequently willing to harm their own future in exchange for short-term money. They'll let tourists overfish, pollute, build accomodations for them that aren't accessible to other local people.

One of the nastiest things about tourism in Miami is the way that locals became second-class citizens. A Norwegian tourist gets shot? Call out the riot squad. We can't let other tourists think Miami isn't safe! A black person in a ghetto like Overtown gets shot? Expend minimal attention, look the other way.

Let's take that list and apply it to a rural, isolated, indigenous village in the mountains somewhere in Central America. A traveller comes to the village. The first priority is to show them Hospitality, next comes Cultural Exchange. The villagers are fascinated and want to learn as much as they can. The traveller might be too weird and alien to be considered in terms of Sex. The villagers don't think to protect themselves from this harmless person.

Flash forward ten years, and the village has become a semi-regular tourist stop. Some of the tourists have been littering the natural attractions, getting drunk and harassing women... Harm Reduction, Respect and Money come into play.

The movie Y tu mamá también has one of the most brilliant depictions I've ever seen of the ebb and flow of tourism. You have to see the movie, and see the natural beauty of the location, in order to understand, but I'll try and give a summary. The protagonists end up at a remote beach in Mexico. Chuy, a local fisherman, lives there with his family. He rents them a room in his thatch-roofed home, cooks dinner for them and ferries them around in his small motorboat.

After the protagonists leave, there's a voiceover that tells the audience about Chuy's future in a very matter of fact way. A resort gets built on his beach. He has to sell his boat and go work for them as a janitor.

Here's my last list: a series of questions on how to have good tourism.

• Do the locals have control over the location, or is control held by foreign corporations, or an exploitative local elite?
• Are there many spaces that are accessible to tourists, but off limits for locals? As an example, I've heard that some nightclubs in the Cancun tourist strip don't let anyone in who looks "too Indian", in order to preserve the illusion that tourists aren't really in Mexico.
• Is tourism depleting local resources? This is why ecotourism, whenever possible, is such a good form of tourism. It encourages locals to conserve their own environment. In Costa Rica, a stronghold of ecotourism, many locals have deeply held environmentalist beliefs.
• Do locals have any choice to engage in other industries, or are they forced to enter into tourism?

So in closing, I think there are good tourism structures, bad tourism structures, good tourists, bad tourists, good locals, bad locals, and everything in between. That's kind of mushy, I know. A good message for all of us: please don't ever, ever mess with live coral, or eat sea turtle eggs. That's always wrong.