Curiosity is a core component of human nature, and coupled with our desire for independence, has been a key element in driving exploration round the globe over hundreds of thousands of years. One of the ways we engage with our curiosity in today’s day and age is through tourism, which has grown rapidly as an industry in the last few decades. Many new forms of tourism have expanded enough to be their own dictionary entries (eco-tourism, medical tourism to name a few). At the same time, older mainstays of tourism such as cruising and backpacking have expanded their offerings significantly. Many once foreboding destinations have developed friction-free avenues for tourists to partake in new experiences.
This growth is accompanied by the simultaneous hand-wringing; how can we visit new places in an ethical way? Is it possible for attractive destinations to harness tourism in ways that benefit locals while also preserving their unique nature? Some of the reasons people travel to new locations are to experience different cultures, climates, witness natural and architectural sights, and sample the cuisine. However, I’m not alone in feeling that famous tourist locations start to bleed into each other, which saps from their intended distinctiveness. After all, there is no shortage of stories about long queues near Everest’s summit, or 🌈insert European city du jour 🌈facing popular unrest for an ever increasing influx of tourists annually (Venice, Barcelona).
The following opinions should definitely be taken with a grain of salt, since this piece does not employ more rigorous methods to illustrate my hunches. Additionally, humans are inherently biased towards pattern recognition, so it’s easy for me to find examples of tourist destinations blending into each other, whereas examples of societies leaning into qualities that make them unique are harder to spot. In both cases it’s also difficult to attribute societal direction solely to tourism itself.
With that said, there are certain characteristics that over-touristed places tend to share, a short list being overpriced basic services, decreased quality of food, overcrowded attractions, and infrastructure prioritized for visitors over locals. In these ways, unique places converge on a ‘touristy’ equilibrium.
Increased access by global supply chains into a place also tends to drive people to ditch local systems in favor of outsourced (and cheaper) solutions. For example, local farming in my parents’ hometown in Kerala has been unable to compete on cost with imported produce. Many of our neighbors in my parents’ generation talk about how the food quality has precipitously declined since their childhood, even in God’s own country. To be fair, many forces conspire to create these conditions, but I would argue that tourist destinations by definition are subjected to increased access.
What makes a place unique? When people lose agency over their land, the stories, celebration, foods built around those spaces cease to be embedded in substance, being instead embedded in memory. This is a familiar experience for folks who grow up in immigrant communities, where attempts to celebrate homeland culture far from home can ring hollow. That same hollowness takes over daily life in places where tourism changes the relationship of people to their land, because the purpose of the land is partly subsumed to provide novelty for visitors. If a Thiruvonam Sadhya in Kerala cannot source its ingredients from a local harvest, then what exactly is the Onam celebrating?
The experience of touristy places all blends together, because there’s a playbook that the tourism industry has employed to maximize the returns of an attractive destination. That in Nusa Dua, Cocoa Beach, and Niagara Falls can be found a Hilton Garden Inn is a clear indicator that the unique qualities in those places have yielded to the market conditions of meeting the supply/demand profit curve of lodging. In other words, Hilton is equipped with the expertise to maximise the value of land in a popular tourist destination. Whether it be local/national governments wanting increased tax revenue, well-capitalized businesses outbidding competition, or expats pursuing new income streams, the end result is the squeezing out of warungs, rice fields, and beaches in favor of anything offering a higher possible return on investment. Eventually, folks tired of the infrastructure woes of Bali go to Padang, declare it a paradise, and the playbook can be rinsed and repeated.
How can our natural curiosity be reconciled with the negative effects of tourism? I wasn’t expecting a book about the Salvadoran civil war to help with this dilemma, but reading What You Have Heard is True provides insight based on how one person (Carolyn Forché) engages with an unfamiliar place. The memoir explores Forché’s time in El Salvador as the country broke down ahead of a dozen-year civil war. Forché’s experience is highly dissimilar to that of most tourists, so there are limits in the conclusions we can draw from her reflections. However, her experience illustrates how our personal approach to tourism can focus on empowering the locals, while simultaneously exploring mutual political, economic, and cultural relationships.
For someone visiting El Salvador, there are plenty of options to stay in places Forché describes as quite beautiful. For example, the former residence of dictator Hernández Martínez, described as “spacious with shuttered windows and a mahogany wainscoting..” Later on during her stays, Forché makes friends with a socialite (secretly a resistance figure) and spends time at her home, where breakfasts were prepared lovingly: ”tortillas wrapped in a cloth, already-poured juice, a pot of coffee [with the maids] bringing white cheese, black beans, a papaya cut in half and filled with slices of lime.” This was a home with “a sliding glass door leading into a garden, where birds of paradise spiked against the walls and coral bougainvillea climbed them.”
For a tourist (especially an American) visiting El Salvador at the time, it would certainly be possible to find hotels or homestays with similar levels of luxury and comfort. However, given that most of the land and wealth in the country was highly concentrated in the hands of a few, these places would be highly non-representative of the daily experience of the workers and peasants (campesinos). Forché spends time in the campos and caserios in the countryside as well, noting the open trench bathrooms and corrugated metal walls common in the majority of homes throughout the country, contrasting with the hot water and window glass of her wealthier friends.
Someone staying at the properties of military officers or businessmen would very likely be lining the pockets of the wealthy and powerful, who, as the book makes clear, work very hard to perpetuate the dispossession of the campesinos. If Forché had spent her time and money in the opulent homes of San Salvador, she may have come home with some appreciation for the food, the nature, and may even have observed the gulf between the rich and poor from afar. However, it would have left her blind to the true extractive relationship between these classes. Her choice to spend time in the countryside also allows Salvadorans such as Gomez Vides to make inroads with the military junta, and for local poets to find a platform for their work.
Therefore, when traveling, a question to ask is: who benefits from the money that we spend? How can we as tourists empower people and spaces which are being consumed by tourism itself? To me, engaging tourism in this way enriches both the tourist and the touristed while also providing our natural curiosity an avenue to be expressed.
Understanding the interaction between our home’s political context and our destination’s is another way to engage in tourism in a more meaningful way. Every country operates in relation to the nations around them, and Forché certainly bears witness to this, contrasting the lifestyle of Salvadoran campesinos with the indigenous population in Guatemala. Much more of the book probes the relationship between El Salvador and the US, notably the relationship between US anti-communism policies and Salvadoran military aid. The contrast in lifestyles between the political elite and the campesino peasants is largely enabled by US monetary aid and by extension, the acquiescence of US taxpayers. The security state in turn entrenches their wealth in the name of order and the risks of providing the campesinos with ‘too much democracy’.
Looking back with hindsight makes it easy to identify the regional consequences of these interactions, which led to the Salvadoran civil war and modern day American migration patterns. At that time however, even with the US having just pulled out of Vietnam, the extent of foreign policy entanglements may have been less obvious to the average US citizen. Countries as powerful as the US and China have a gravitational effect on the entire world. It’s important for us to understand the effects that we have on our neighbors, and use that knowledge to make more conscious political decisions where such agency exists. When viewed through this lens, tourism actually becomes imperative for someone looking to be engaged in society. Forché herself takes her experiences in El Salvador to give voice to the poets she meets, and broadcast the political situation in El Salvador to a wider US audience.
Tourism irrevocably changes the character of the tourist and the touristed, The idea that tourism should cease due to its deleterious effects is nonsensical, since curiosity is an inherent part of our nature. Therefore, leveraging this curiosity to understand the state of the world is one of the best ways we can be tourists. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s vital that we engage in tourism, since experiencing a place firsthand is the only way to really know it (Descartes noises intensify). It’s far too easy to travel such that new places blend together without making a notable impression, but that reflects more on our level of engagement rather than the locales themselves. New places can augment our value systems, allowing us to synthesize our interactions into new moral frameworks and possibilities for the future.
