Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
is one of those double-edged swords that may look like an easy way to earn desperately
needed money but can ravage wilderness areas and undermine native cultures to fit in-
to package tours: a fifteen-minute snippet of a ballet performed in Southern India; native
handicrafts refashioned to fit oversize tourists. What is known is that tourism and travel is
responsible for 5.3 percent of the world's carbon emissions and the degradation of nearly
every tropical beach in the world. Without global enforcement of basic rules, cruise ships
are a major polluter of the seas and pose serious risks. The dramatic capsizing of the Costa
Concordia cruise ship off the Italian coast in 2012 killed at least 32 people and raised ques-
tions about the safety of these mammoth ships.
To make way for more resorts with spectacular views, developers destroy native habitats
and ignore local concerns. Preservationists decry the growing propensity to bulldoze old
hotels and buildings in favor of constructing new resorts, water holes and entertainment
spots that look identical whether in Singapore, Dubai or Johannesburg; a world where di-
versity is replaced with homogeneity. Another catastrophe for countries betting on tour-
ism has come from wealthy vacationers who fall in love with a country and buy so many
second houses that locals can no longer afford to live in their own towns and villages.
Among the more thoughtful questions is how mass tourism has changed cultures. Afric-
an children told anthropologists that they want to grow up to be tourists so they could
spend the day doing nothing but eating. The tourists who do not speak the local language
and rely on guides to tell them what they are seeing and what to think marvel at countries
like China with its new wealth and appearance of democracy. Environmentalists wonder
how long the globe can continue to support 1 billion people racing around the world for a
long weekend on a beach or a ten-day tour of an African game park.
In reaction, concerned industry leaders—large and small—and environmentalists have
created the idea of ecotourism, a form of travel to promote the protection of natural habit-
ats and eventually the preservation of local landscapes, cultures and people. The idea has
become so popular it has entered the lexicon of political correctness. Philanthropists are
underwriting ecolodges in Central America and wild game parks in sub-Saharan Africa.
Tourists opt for vacations on organic European farms, while some add volunteer days at the
end of their vacations in Asia to build homes for the poor. Few nations have shown more
caution about the tourism industry and its downside than Bhutan. The Himalayan nation
that measures progress through its happiness index has purposefully kept the number of
tourists low to insure that the country's culture, environment, faith and economy aren't
perverted by huge influxes of foreign tourists. The government says it limits tourists by reg-
ulating how many hotel rooms are available and limiting other tourist “infrastructure” as
well as imposing a high tourist tariff. Bhutan calls this “low volume and high value” tour-
ism.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are countries like Cambodia and cities like Venice.
Cambodia encourages so many tourists to visit its great eleventh-century temple complex
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