NEW ORTHODOXIES IX
THE LAST RESORT
Tourism makes people
IF a new charter of the rights of man (in the First World, or North, or whatever you like to call the part where people do not on the whole starve) were to be drawn up, there is no doubt that the right to be a tourist, to go to a Spanish beach and turn the colour of sangria, or to visit places endorsed as being of cultural or scenic interest, would be prominent among its clauses. Like most things which become unquestioned rights, this is entirely understandable in its origins, and ultimate- ly ruinous in its effects. It is based on the desire to escape from drab, circumscribed reality to a brighter, freer, more interesting world: a desire especially strong, for ob- vious reasons, among the industrial work- ers of northern countries. The mythology of tourism is that of the idyll — of outdoor pleasures, copious eating, drinking and love-making with neither hangover nor remorse, perpetual summer and youth. But whereas the ancient poets knew that idylls were an art form, modern tourists are persuaded to believe that they can be bought for the price of a plane ticket and a hotel room.
When dream and reality are so confused, it is not surprising that so many tourists, despite their bright summer plumage, their shorts and sandals and merry colours, look bewildered, dazed, even at times despon- dent. I live for most of the year in a tourist town, a place of great historical interest and architectural beauty, and many thousands of tourists pass underneath my window every month. Mostly they look as numbed and benighted as the people cross- ing London Bridge on their way to work in The Waste Land, but there is one sight guaranteed to bring a smile, even laughter to their faces. The historic castle? The beautiful perpendicular gothic chapel? No: the Reliant three-wheeler invalid carriage which belongs to a friend of mine. There must be as many photographs of this technological marvel in Japanese homes as ever there are of Windsor Castle.
The laughter is short-lived, however. The tourists are soon brought back into line and forced once more into their cultural quick march by the tyrannical tour organisers (one, apparently, allows pre- cisely 17 minutes for a visit to the Louvre — just the time it takes to spring from the entrance to the Mona Lisa, snap it, and spring back). It is no wonder that tourists do not look happy.
They are exchanging the comforts of home, where a particular way of living has been laboriously and lovingly created, for the uncertainty of existence in a foreign place, the soullessness of cheap hotels, the wear and tear of constant travel. To be translated suddenly into an unfamiliar en- vironment is a shocking and alienating experience: if it is not to constitute an unpleasant trauma, both preparation be- forehand and time for adaptation after- wards are essential. Too many tourists allow themselves, or are allowed, neither. The first preparation for travelling to a foreign country is to acquire some know- ledge of the language. Tourists who go to a country where they cannot say 'Good morning' or order a cup of coffee in the native tongue are putting themselves in the position of infants, but monstrously over- grown ones, who can expect no sympathy in their defencelessness.
Another reason why tourists in reality do not look as happy as the smiling figures in the brochures is that the activities open to them, far from being liberating, are both limited and unbalanced. Lying on a beach and visiting museums may be fine in their different ways, but to do either continuous- ly for days on end must constitute a kind of hell. Certainly, touristic activity cannot compare in richness and satisfaction with living at home, talking to friends, being part of a culture, however tangentially, rather than an outsider looking in and never gaining access. It may be that tour- ists go abroad because their wage slavery allows them no time to lead satisfying lives at home, but they are the victims of a tragic delusion. It will be far more difficult and time-consuming for them to make friendships and develop an interesting range of activities in a foreign country. The idea that this could be achieved in two weeks in a place as remote from Britain as, say, Turkey, would be laughable if it were not sold so assiduously, and in consequ- ence believed so unquestioningly.
Among those who consider themselves educated, of course, it is orthodox to denigrate tourism and to refer to one's own holidays as travels. Armed with a travel book written by another sensitive, intelli- gent person as superior to the massed hordes of tourists as oneself, one spends a month or three in South America or the Far East. I fear that this distinction is becoming less and less valid in direct proportion to the increase in the number of travellers. 'Travellers" routes in Peru or Eastern Anatolia are now as well marked as tourist trails round London or Paris. Travellers will meet other travellers, rather than natives, in an ultimately sterile, nar- cissistic round. Three months is not long enough to 'do' South America: it could take a lifetime.
The strongest arguments against tour- ism, however, are based on the damage it does to the countries which are toured against rather than those which tour. The most striking examples are in the 'Third World' and especially in the Far East, where the metaphor that tourism is pros- titution has become all too literal. Millena- rian cultures which have survived centuries of armed assault have not been able to resist this more insidious form of colonisa- tion: the dollar is mightier than the sword. We do not need to go as far as Thailand, however, to see the effects of the new colonialism. Western Europe's own play- ground, the coasts of Spain, France, Italy and Greece, offers ample evidence of its destructive power. The most obvious effect is ugliness. The shores of the Mediterra- nean, the well-spring of Western culture, have become an enormously extended suburb of concrete blocks for the worker- tourists and detached 'villas' for the better- to-do. The harmony of landscape, sea and sky has been destroyed by this imposition of industrial architecture in an inappropri- ate setting.
It is not just the physical environment which is ruined by tourism. A great influx of people from different countries with different values and a great deal more money is bound to create confusion and envy in the host population. This is espe- cially the case when the incoming tourists are ignorant and insensitive (because they are encouraged to think that buying a holiday gives them temporary rights of possession of the country), and when their aim is freedom from responsibility. Closely knit rural societies with strict taboos are torn apart by the advent of northern Europeans with no taboos, or rather with the opposite of a taboo the belief that sex is a harmless tonic like Lucozade.
Physical environment and culture may suffer — or better, change — the apolog- ists for tourism argue, but great economic benefits are produced. This is not neces- sarily the case. At least in Third World countries, most of the foreign money brought in goes straight out again, via the foreign-owned companies which exploit tourism. The jobs created by tourism — an irresistible carrot for Mrs Thatcher's gov- ernment and especially for her Employ- ment Secretary Lord Young —are for the most part exceedingly menial and low- paid. In the long term, above all, the effect of reliance on tourism must be to reduce a country to a servile, parasitical condition, selling its past and its image to richer, more dynamic people who are in control of their destiny, and, in the end, that of the country they are visiting.
Thus we should be deeply alarmed, though perhaps not surprised, by the pre- sent government's enthusiasm for tourism (`the biggest growth industry in Britain') and by the British Tourist Authority's eagerness to fulfil its avowed aim of `marketing Britain'. As everything in the country has already been sold, it is the logical last resort.
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