The Tourist Indians
… and other unpleasantries of the “New Tourism”
As a world-traveler, I cannot but instinctively promote world travel in order to inspire people to get off their couches and out into the world. Therefore, I focus on the many benefits of travel, specifically the educational aspects, as evidenced by my website’s motto, “Travel is the Ultimate University,” taken from my book, Destination Earth. However, I also have a responsibility to critique some aspects of travel when necessary. The way people travel evolves, and I have been encountering some quite unpleasant developments during my travels in the 14 years since I finished my around-the-world journey. As I encourage readers to face the unpleasant realities of the world when they travel, I must now also face and address all the unpleasantries of what I call the “new tourism” – here defined as the age of frequent overtourism, organized tours, social media sharing, and mindless tourist development.
Special thanks to my partner, Jane Kayantas, for her significant contributions to this piece and for helping me structure it.
Because the piece is long (counting as … three normal-length Tuesday letters!) and we are currently on a multi-month journey in East Asia, I will be taking a break from writing in September.
They were supposed to be Native Amazonian Indians who had moved from faraway to a place near the city of Manaus, at the heart of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. My guide had just dropped me off in their village – if it could be called one, with its few miserable wood and tin shacks scattered around in the middle of nowhere. This, he said, was the nearest he could find for me to experience “the life of Amazonians.” I had already researched the subject and I did not, of course, expect to find any indigenous people in the forest who lived as in another era. But I had hoped that at the very least, these locals would live in a traditional way and I could get some glimpse of how the Amazonian tribes lived before the Europeans arrived five centuries ago. I was to stay with them for three or four days, and when I was ready to leave, a villager would take me back to town.
My host family lived in a hut, and I soon befriended the older son, who spoke a bit of Spanish. Nothing special was happening in the village, just men fishing or doing some work in the forest, women cutting vegetables and cooking, and lots of children and chickens running noisily about. Their clothing was half Western, half traditional – a grass skirt here and there for women and a few older men wearing loincloths. A few young men even had mobile phones or some other modern device, such as mechanical tools or fancy knives. It felt like I was witnessing the daily routines of a poor Latin American village; the only difference was that this community was in the forest rather than a city. The “highlight” of the first two days was an annoying, nerve-racking rooster that would crow continually day and night (every fifteen minutes, like a Swiss Cuckoo clock!) – never encountered such a rooster before or since. The second day, when they were about to slaughter a chicken for lunch, I suggested they slaughter him instead, but they laughed and kindly declined. I think they, unlike me, enjoyed the constant loud crowing!
After an uneventful two-day stay, I decided to leave, but the son insisted that I wait until the next day so that I could enjoy some sort of planned celebration. And so I did. The next day, this sleepy village suddenly came to life in a quite odd way: Everybody started using hand-mirrors and painting their bodies and faces; they brought, from an unknown location, some loincloths for the younger men; and finally, bows, arrows, spears, feathered headdresses, and even some drums and flutes. I immediately smelled that something fishy was going on, but I deferred judgement. They told me to follow them to a huge, thatched longhouse a few hundred meters away. Upon entering, I couldn’t believe my eyes: About 50 or so tourists were already sitting there as if a theatrical performance was about to begin! And begin it did. As soon as the Amazonians entered, they started dancing in full regalia for the tourists. The dances were a mishmash. They rather resembled what the villagers imagined tourists would imagine indigenous dances to be: actually quite similar to Native American Indian dances as portrayed in documentaries and Hollywood movies! In the end, they all gathered together for photos (see above) and sold their crafts. I’m not sure how many of the tourists realized that this was all one big scam and that these were not “authentic Amazonian Indians who regularly dressed and danced like that in the forest,” but I’m sure from their reactions that some did indeed believe that they were fortunate to attend a very special, rare, and authentic display. Suddenly, it all made sense: These Indians were brought here “in the forest” by tour operators to perform, once or twice a week, an “authentic” Amazonian show for tourists. They were Tourist Indians! I was, in fact, duped even more than the tourists who attended the show, since I went “to live with them” in the hope of finding some authentic tribe living, well, … a tribal life!
The whole experience reminded me of the comedic scene in the 1994 film Maverick, where Maverick (played by Mel Gibson) and his Native American friend, Joseph, stage a fake hunt to swindle a Russian archduke. The archduke is eager to experience the “real West” by … shooting an Indian! Therefore, Maverick disguises himself as a Native American, complete with warpaint, and pretends to be shot by the archduke. Of course, it’s all part of a con: Later, Maverick tricks the archduke into paying him $6,000 to avoid being exposed to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for his “hunt.” Both the real incident I experienced as well as the fictional one of the movie are tragicomic: Tragic because there are people who both seek such experiences and pay for them – and others who are willing to play the roles in this deception for money – and comical because of how they portray something so contrived as the genuine article.
A. Contrived Authenticity
This, which happened in 2006, was my first experience of the sort, but I would witness more during my travels. The most recent was a few weeks ago in northern Vietnam, when we visited the picturesque rice fields around Mu Cang Chai. Two local motorcyclists drove us up to the hills to admire some of these rice fields. We arrived to see the terraced landscape when, from behind a mount, there appeared an indigenous woman dressed in traditional attire with her adorable children. She held a water buffalo by the reins, thereby completing an idyllic scene that could have been from some other century. I immediately hurried to capture the moment, but the way the children looked at us and their posture suggested something was off.
Well, soon after, the lady asked for money for the photo (we didn’t give her any as a matter of principle in order to discourage such behavior), but even worse, later on, when she thought nobody was watching her, she took out her super-modern smartphone and spoke with someone – probably the next biker bringing more tourists to photograph her!
My Amazonian experience in 2006 and the one in Vietnam were separated by almost 20 years, but this new trend is increasing and becoming ubiquitous. We may call it contrived authenticity: locals, especially in areas where tourists seek authentic experiences of worlds and cultures long lost, create contrived and inauthentic displays that emulate in “con-fashion” the real experience. These two personal examples were on a quite small scale, but the phenomenon is now also being delivered by big businesses. Two in particular come to mind: The first is the kechak dance in Bali that originally was a trance ritual performed in villages by small groups as part of a sacred ceremony. Now, the kechak is performed every single day for tourists, sometimes with over a hundred performers in huge open-air theaters throughout Bali. The second is the color festival Holi in India, which traditionally was an intimate community celebration where family and friends would gather, play with natural colors, and share festive foods. Now, with its growing popularity among tourists, Holi has become much larger, commercialized, with organized events and parties that involve huge spectacles. I’m sure many tourists do not realize how contrived and industrialized these and other similar events have become.
Such contrived, artificial, fake events simply satisfy the demand for spectacle and have nothing to do with the original culture of a nation that the visitor supposedly is interested in discovering and understanding. I have nothing against spectacles per se. But these specific spectacles are tourist spectacles posing as the real thing.
B. Instagram Travel
The Holi example of hundreds of tourists taking photos of themselves in crowds showered with colored powders leads us to another unfortunate development that is probably the fastest-growing of this new tourism: the “I was there” effect – traveling to places or attending events for the sole purpose of posting about it on social media. Visiting Santorini? Let’s find a small rooftop overlooking the white cubist-like houses and the blue sea to admire the sunset. Traveling to Kyoto? Let’s rent a kimono to become a geisha for the day and pose in those picturesque alleyways. Going to Bali? Let’s drive immediately to that oversized swing with the fairytale rice field backdrop. And immediately after, to the famous “Gate of Heaven” to take the iconic photo with the reflection.
Yet all these Instagrammable (a new adjective!) locations are the result of clever promotion by tour operators, local authorities, and vain travelers who want to boast that they “were there.” These places are all, in the end, fake, because they simply perpetuate a lie: Wearing a geisha dress doesn’t make you a geisha nor does it help you experience the history and culture of Kyoto. The huge swing in Bali was placed there so you could pay to take a photo; and it has completely destroyed the beauty of the place, and vanquished its ancient Soul. The reflection at the “Gate of Heaven” is not mirrored in the lake in front of it (no lake!), but is the result of a mirror the locals place under the camera lens to create the effect and sell you the photo. And the Santorini rooftops are so replete with tourists that the main skill a photographer must have is cutting the other tourists out of the frame! Actually, in a kind of self-mockery revealing self-awareness, when the sun finally sets before them, the thousands of tourists who have gathered in the town of Oia to wait for the perfect photo … applaud. They actually applaud the sunset! (Or is it for themselves, for managing to take the iconic photo together with all the others?) Without realizing it, they all regress to prehistoric times, or to the age of the Incas who worshipped the Sun God.
The seeking of ideal spots to capture the sunset is actually conquering the world: from the Salaar of Uyuni in Bolivia, to the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan, to the Olgas in the heart of Australia, convoys of jeeps gather every day in particular spots to unload tens or hundreds of visitors to take the photo. This has even become a new industry: “the sunset photo” industry. Well, at least when you take a photo of the sun, you face the camera lens towards Nature rather than towards yourself!
Furthermore, all these Instagram photos (as shorthand for all social media) are completely altered, edited to look more impressive, otherworldly, and fairytale-like. Some travelers, who have become disgusted by this phenomenon – or probably because they were themselves duped by such idealized photos to visit said place to their disappointment – are now revolting. To expose the scam (which completely tramples these sites themselves and the authentic experiences visitors used to have there), some people have started posting the polished picture-perfect Instagram photo next to unedited photos of the same shot, or of a photo in tourist brochures next to the real place – oftentimes called Instagram vs. Reality.
Instagram Travel is not real travel nor even basic tourist travel. It does not bring the visitor into any true contact with the foreign culture; it does not open any doors to “the other.” It is self-centered, narrow in its focus, frivolous, childish, senseless. You have been there and taken that photo. Just as millions of others did. So what?
Such “travel” misses everything that is real about our world.
If I were to attempt some psychological explanation of this new phenomenon, I might say that it foremost expresses a “need to belong” to a group who travels in a cool manner taking cool photos at cool places. It is a need to show off, to promote oneself as a member of that social media group. Sometimes it is also a form of self-aggrandizement. And nothing better proves this than the now ubiquitous selfie-sticks that, instead of pointing outwards towards the world one is traveling through, point to one’s own face with the world serving as a beautiful background! It’s as if the world only exists to serve the Instagram-traveler’s sense of importance and self-absorption.
But why has choosing perfect photos in perfect locations become such a status symbol? Well, I have a weird explanation for this: behind it lies a yearning for a lost Paradise, a place that ought to exist but doesn’t – so we create it and then place ourselves in it! “Look, dear Instagram followers, at the amazing places on the planet that resemble Paradise; places to which I happen to have traveled. Here’s the photo to prove it; look, it was perfect, and I had a great time. And I urge you to reproduce this experience for yourselves.” It is a call to one’s community to partake of a world that we imagine, but which exists only in the deepest recesses of our soul.
C. Sanitization of Reality
Just as Instagram photos create an idealized version of the world, there is now a general tendency that we may call the sanitization of reality.
The prime examples of this phenomenon are the all-inclusive hotels and cruises in the Caribbean. The hotels essentially keep guests within the property by providing several dining options, entertainment, and a variety of excursions, all designed to create the perfect Caribbean vacation getaway. And the cruises dock in sheltered ports, transfer their guests on buses, and take them to specific natural attractions on the islands without stopping in between to see the real country. The Sandals All-Inclusive Resorts and Royal Caribbean Cruises are two of the top brands offering such vacation packages. And while the guests may have a wonderful time, they do not ever actually see the real Dominican Republic, St. Lucia, or any other Caribbean Island, for that matter. Tourists are shielded from the poor villages with the tin-roofed homes, local overcrowded buses that need 90 minutes to go 30 kilometers, the pothole-marked roads away from the tourist areas, and the local markets where live chickens are slaughtered.
But the sanitization of reality goes beyond the shielding of visitors from reality. In many places it has resulted in destroying age-old traditions in the name of literally “sanitizing” things for the sake of tourists! For example, nowadays the largest “street market” in Bangkok is at the ICONSIAM shopping mall! The once vibrant street markets of Bangkok with food hawkers cooking a huge variety of delicious dishes in their makeshift kitchens with intoxicating smells wafting through the air have dwindled down to only a few. Tourists and well-heeled locals alike happily flock to the mall, where they mistakenly think the chances of getting food poisoning are slim. However, and contrary to what many think, the street food markets are actually more hygienic than restaurants! As a rule, most tourists who suffer from food poisoning get it from restaurants rather than street food stalls. Because many locals eat at the street stalls, the reputation of each vendor/cook depends on his or her good name, and all vendors are obsessively clean to avoid ever causing harm to their regular customers and, of course, to tourists.
The magic of the street food markets has been lost, and unfortunately, this tendency is now growing in many other places throughout Asia, including China, which used to have the largest and most lively markets of them all. Street food markets can still be found in many other cities around the world, but they are a dying tradition.
D. Invented Tourist “Attractions”
When places don’t have many traditions or attractions to showcase, they either create them out of thin air or resurrect old ones for tourists. An example of the first is Dubai, which managed to create many new attractions for its millions of visitors per year. I take no issue with this new modern city that grew so fast in the desert sands and which has few historical and cultural sights to present. Dubai’s leadership methodically and purposefully decided to create reasons for tourism to thrive: They built the Burj Khalifa, the highest skyscraper in the world that also happens to be the most beautiful one; they created amazing plazas and other cityscapes that are true attractions in themselves; artificial islands, beaches, waterfalls, ski slopes! More recently, the “Museum of the Future,” which focuses on innovation and technology. Such new attractions being built in such a new city are perfectly fine and welcome.
However, when governments or local authorities try to resurrect dead traditions or desperately hold on to them to create “more attractions” for tourists, the whole endeavor can backfire. Let us take the example of Vietnam’s colorful floating markets that once upon a time served an important function in the community. Locals traded produce and wares from their boats because river transportation was the easiest and most efficient way to do so. Yet, with the construction of roads and more affordable vehicles, these traditional floating markets became less relevant. It is much easier to ride your scooter to the local shops than to wake up at the crack of dawn and head for the floating market. These traditional markets, however, caught the imagination of tourists who had heard about them and who were willing to pay a fee to visit them. And so, with the support of government subsidies, the traditional markets of today basically exist only to serve the tourism industry. It’s an illusion, a tradition forcibly kept alive for tourists – an invented attraction. There are no floating markets where hundreds of locals gather to buy produce. There are just boats gathering to pretend they do commerce for tourists to take pictures and maybe buy a few fruits to “feel” they went to a market. What betrays the whole scam is that, unfortunately, the few remaining (and subsidized) boat merchants sell to tourists at thrice the price the same products they sell on land! And because this is now so obvious, many tourists have begun writing negative reviews about the markets on travel sites; they feel duped because they can discern the inauthenticity and the financial exploitation.
Same with the Uros floating villages on Lake Titicaca in Peru. These villages, each with a very few huts and fewer than 30 inhabitants, are completely tourist villages … just as the Amazonian village I described earlier. These villagers simply continue to live on these floating islands, where they dress (when the tourists arrive) in traditional attire to be visited by tourists who are taken there by tour operators. These operators basically count the Uros villages as one more “attraction” in order to charge more.
But even natural wonders can be cunningly turned into manufactured attractions! This is achieved when the tourism industry creates various tour packages that are supposedly “the best way to experience the natural wonders.” A good example are the two-nights-three-days tourist cruises in Ha Long Bay in Vietnam. Ha Long Bay is a natural wonder of beautiful karsts scattered about in a picturesque bay. You can easily take a boat to see these beautiful natural formations in half a day. Yet local tour operators have decided to offer these unnecessary overnight luxury cruises. Sadly, this is an utterly manufactured attraction: Why cruise for three days around a bay that can be explored with a small fishing boat in a few hours? These tours have propelled overtourism and have completely destroyed the beauty of the area. Now there are more tourist boats in the bay than there are karsts! The boats overwhelm the landscape, which ends up receding into the background. Wherever you turn your eye, all you see are boats and tourists desperately trying to take pictures … without boats in them!
Invented attractions may also just be brazen tourist exploitation: Costa Rica is full of amazing natural wonders, flora, and fauna. Yet some locals still find ways to manufacture attractions. Near the Arenal Volcano National Park, there is a private park dedicated to sloths, where they offer a 90-minute sloth tour and lecture from a “sloth expert” for $50 per person. The reason they can get away with this is that sloths are shy, mostly nocturnal animals, and many families visiting with young children who are eager to see them do not manage to do so when visiting the rainforests. So, basically, this is a single-animal zoo charging $50 per person – more expensive than any other zoo on the planet. For perspective, the annual pass fee for all the national parks in the USA is $80, which grants entry to a car carrying up to seven people!
E. Disneyfication
When I was in my mid-twenties, I discovered the book The Most Beautiful Place in the World, published in 1986 by the preeminent photographer Jay Maisel. It was a gorgeous coffee-table book that featured the best photos from other famous photographers of their favorite places in the world. The book sparked my imagination, making me want to travel to all the places photographed. Many years later, mostly during my around-the-world journey in the 2000s, I did finally end up traveling to eight out of the ten places in the book: New York City, Maine, the Sierra Mountains, Venice, Morocco, Papua New Guinea, the Sahara Desert, and Guilin.
What struck me most as I visited these places, though, was the difference between how they were portrayed in the book and how they looked in reality. And no, the great photographers of the 1980s did not use digital means to make their photos Instagrammable! Those photos were non-enhanced and did actually capture the true Spirit of each place – which is why they had impressed me so much. But thirty years or so after the book’s publication, tourism had already altered them. The Goroka Show in Papua New Guinea, photographed in the book by Burt Glinn, was now held in a local stadium, not organically in the fields. There was even an entrance fee, and the tribes were conscious that they were giving a show for the tourists who attended and who happened to be more than the locals. It felt a bit like I was in Rio de Janeiro’s annual Carnival competition that is also held in a stadium! Although I did like it, and took my nice pictures too, the whole event felt contrived – something to be consumed rather than something real, as portrayed in Glinn’s photos.
Similarly, the Morocco I saw in Marrakesh and Essaouira had nothing in common with Harry Gruyaert’s photos, since those places have been overwhelmed by tourists. I did get glimpses of the old Morocco, though, in Fez that is yet to be destroyed, which I documented in a travel essay.
I can live with a show being moved into a stadium, or a swarm of tourists in Essaouira, provided there are still authentic tribes dancing in Papua and still Moroccans living in the old towns. But unfortunately, the situation in many other places has taken a very different direction.
Recently, Jane and I revisited the area of Guilin in China – yet another of the locations featured in Maisel’s book. Guilin, one of the most impressive landscapes on the planet, is dotted with seemingly endless karst formations bisected by the Li River and its tributaries. For centuries, it has been tied to folklore, history, art, and Chinese identity. As you arrive to the area, either by train or car, the karsts appear in the distance, some covered in mist, suggesting an experience similar to Hiroji Kubota’s portrayal of the region in the book, and setting expectations high. However, upon arrival to one of the towns from which tours depart, you find yourself in queues waiting to buy tickets to board a boat or a bamboo raft, or walking along traffic-jammed country roads flooded with hundreds of tourists. Once you arrive at the bamboo raft, you discover it is made … of plastic imitating bamboo culms and that it is propelled by a noisy motor rather than a traditional oarsman paddling up the river! And once you are on the water, you realize that there are hundreds of other rafts all around you, as well as larger boats with hundreds of tourists on their decks, overwhelming the landscape. People and noise and “traffic jams” along the river make the whole experience haunting rather than idyllic. And as if all this was not enough, our Chinese co-passengers on our raft of four had not stopped talking with their parents and friends on their phone, showing them “we are here”! They were spending more time focused on the six-inch phone screen than being immersed in and enjoying the surrounding nature. At some point, I asked them to be quiet for ten minutes so we could have some communion with the imposing karsts. It was only after my reprimand, when they became silent, that they finally started to truly experience the awe of Guilin. You have to be silent in Nature in order to hear the voice of Nature.
But that is not all: Along the riverbank, multiple independent (paid) photoshoots happen all day long. Young women rent colorful indigenous layered dresses with embroidery and silver accents, together with towering silver crowns. With the help of a photographer, they set up various idyllic scenes where they pose on a bamboo raft with various props and a live cormorant provided by a local fisherman! (Don’t ask why; this is a Chinese thing.) Ten meters away, on the noisy, overcrowded road, others wait, also in costume, for their turn to create their own Instagrammable fantasy Guilin photo.
This new phenomenon of altering tourist attractions to accommodate greater numbers and of offering many paid “experiences” while making the whole area sanitized and family-friendly with lots of creature comforts has a name: Disneyfication.
What is going on in Guilin is an open-air Disneyfication. But there are enclosed Disneylands too, which make the use of this term even more pertinent. I first tasted a “tourist enclosed-Disneyland” again in China (where the phenomenon is most prevalent) in 2008, when I visited a few of the remaining “Chinese Venices” (Zhouzhuang, Tongli, etc.). In one of them, I fell upon a pedestrian boom gate where the gatekeepers asked me to buy an entrance ticket! I couldn’t believe it: pay to enter … a whole town? How could they possibly gate an ungated town from all sides?! I refused to pay. Instead, I simply walked a bit further down and entered from one of the other streets that didn’t have a gate. Today, I see there are entrance fees for all such Venices, and I’m sure that by now, the local authorities have found ways to stop visitors like me from entering these towns from “the other streets”!
Well, as it seems, the real Venice itself must have learned from the Chinese, for last year it also introduced an entrance ticket for day-trippers, officially called the “Venice Access Fee.” It was first implemented in April 2024 and was extended for the 2025 season. The fee was designed to manage overtourism by charging visitors who don’t stay overnight in the city – €5 last year and €10 this year. The local authority that voted for the law presented it as “a tax to help the city and its citizens battle overtourism.” But since the fee was small, it was not effective at all, and the number of tourists actually increased during this measure. Therefore, last month they decided to abandon the whole project – for now. The experiment failed, but I have no doubt that one day in the future there will be a permanent year-round entrance fee.
What is most disturbing of all, though, is the following: Because the historic center of Venice is huge and the possible entry points number in the hundreds, enforcing this entrance fee turned the whole city into a completely monitored one. There were various checkpoints asking you to show your passes, digital tracking systems, and huge fines if you were caught trying to evade the system. Delimiting a whole city as “an attraction” is a new phenomenon in history! I see this expanding in other places with overtourism such as Florence, Prague, or even the centers of London and Paris. It is already happening all over China (way beyond the Venices around Suzhou) since domestic tourism has skyrocketed in the past decade.
Recently, during the same aforementioned trip to China, we visited the well-preserved picturesque villages of the ethnic Dong and Miao in Guizhou Province. We especially wanted to visit Xijiang, the largest Miao village, perched on a hill overlooking beautiful rice fields, which I had first visited 17 years ago. I recall the strong impression it made on me the moment I set eyes on it as I approached it with a car driving along a quiet country road with beautiful cultivated fields left and right. And I wanted Jane to have the same experience. But a few kilometers before the village, huge new modern buildings with neon signs and many hotels and restaurants flooded the landscape, destroying the once bucolic approach. Large tourist buses and pedestrians crowded the streets. Confusion descended in my mind as I tried to grasp what was happening. The taxi driver, however, kept going, and insisted that the village’s main entrance was further away. A few minutes later, at the main entrance, the scene was even worse – more tourist buses, vans, cars, wandering pedestrians, group leaders holding their umbrellas high, and more groups, more people, more vehicles, chaos. All were charging towards the “village entrance square” that was encircled by buildings in the Miao traditional architecture to imitate the real square a kilometer away. The poisoned cherry on top: an aerial cable car near the entrance to shuttle tourists back and forth to take photos of the village from the air! This was Disneyfication on the grandest scale possible. Gargantuan, unimaginable, shocking! Gone are the rice and corn fields as you approach the village. Gone is the nature enveloping it. Gone are the lovely locals who warmly welcomed visitors. My heart sank when this new reality set in: My beloved Xijiang no longer existed; tourism has killed it. I then forced myself out of the taxi, elbowed my way through the crowds to the entrance square to snap a photograph of the demise (as a record of the catastrophe), and told the taxi driver to take us out of Hell as fast as possible. We did not visit Xijiang and never will. Although it is dead and gone, at least its once magnificent form and soul resides in my heart. In the evening, after Jane fell asleep, for the first time in my life, I shed tears for a lost village.
F. Mindless Tourist Development
But Xijiang is just the most tragic such demise. Unfortunately, many of the most beautiful Dong and Miao villages in Guanzhou now have entrance tickets priced between $7 and $14 per person, which is a huge amount for a Chinese family to bear. Some of them have dances for tourists every evening while the bigger ones have golf carts or small open-air electric buses to carry the tourists who don’t want to walk a lot.
In the name of “development,” many villages around the world that have had a unique living culture of maintaining their traditions, crafts, music, and dances are gradually deciding to “cash in” on the many tourists who have discovered them. Even when the incentive is not financial but a vain attempt to make the village “more famous” in the country and beyond, the development is mindless. The reason is that the “developers” are none other than the villagers themselves – most of whom have never traveled beyond their own province and do not know how to deal with the crowds and tourism in general. So they imagine how tourists want things to be, and they are getting it wrong!
As a result, by turning real villages into tourist displays and selling their traditions, these clueless “developers” have destroyed both their own villages and their cultures! For the villages cease to exist as villages going about their normal lives and become focused on those activities that bring in more tourist money – shops and retail in general, creating special events with tickets, tours, etc. The younger generation that becomes involved with these new activities loses touch with their own culture and stops preserving it. Gradually, it will disappear. The golden rule in all these cases is not to “address tourism” but to be yourself! Visitors go to places to see how they truly are, not to be served artificial and contrived cultural elements catering to what locals mistakenly think the tourists are seeking. Just as we visit beautiful natural landscapes to enjoy nature undisturbed by humans, tourists similarly want to experience a culture in its natural state. Visitors cannot avoid altering a place, but the magnitude of this disturbance can be reduced if locals stop seeking to make more money from tourism and simply go about living their lives by not minding the visitors. In the end, such attitude actually ends up being more financially profitable, too!
The proof of this can be found in the living-villages of France, where life goes on as normal despite being visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. France receives more visitors than any other country, but it has mostly avoided selling its soul to short-term tourist profit. The village farmers’ markets are true markets catering primarily to locals rather than to tourists; traditional festivals are held just as they were held centuries ago without the influx of visitors having altered them; and of course, all villages are easily accessible without an entrance ticket. And exactly because there are so many beautiful villages in France (thousands actually!) where the residents go about their normal existence, the tourists can spread out among them without choosing a few to overpopulate (as is the case in China, which has very few well-preserved villages and hundreds of millions of domestic tourists who cluster to see them).
But mindless tourist development is found in larger towns too. When I visited Omkareshwar in India, last year, I couldn’t recognize the small, quiet town, one part of which is built on the banks of the Narmada River and the other on an island that has the shape of the sacred syllable Om as it is written in Sanskrit. The local government built a very ugly and huge concrete pathway leading to a multistory concrete structure of even more pathways that has engulfed Jyotrilinga, the island’s main temple. The pathways were supposedly created to accommodate the increasing number of tourists, but as the number of visitors who can enter the temple remains the same, this structure ends up keeping those outside enclosed in narrow, claustrophobic corridors (rather than outside where there’s plenty of space). As a result, the temple itself cannot be seen at all from afar – not even from 50 meters away. The (non)sight is jarring. This is mindless development par excellence! Unfortunately, this is happening right now all over India, destroying many attractions, sacred sites, and natural wonders.
Mindless development is to be seen in many other parts of the world. Here is Jane’s piece on why we didn’t visit Machu Picchu in 2023. The only way to save the places that have been destroyed is to blacklist and expose them in the hope that one day the local authorities and state governments may see the light.
***
This presentation of the unpleasantries of the “new tourism” was not intended, of course, to demean or disparage travel itself. It is a record of some bad realities we all need to face and, whenever possible, try to amend or completely extinguish. We may all do this by discouraging these new negative realities through our own behavior – and by exposing them, as I have done here.
For more Tuesday Letters on Substack, click here.
For more content, visit nicoshadjicostis.com.
Enjoying my Tuesday Letters? Check out my books, available at Amazon.com and your local bookstore by special order.
If you are not already a subscriber and you liked this essay, you may subscribe below to receive the bi-weekly Tuesday Letter.