Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and introducing themselves to me. I had forgotten the basic rule that locals know their
town, know who normally mingles in that square and would pick out foreigners like me in
a heartbeat.
That scene was repeated countless times during my travels for this topic. Strangers
opened up their lives and guided me through their role in the industry. This topic is a
narrative of those journeys; of the people who graciously explained how they fit into the
industry, demonstrating why it is known as the hospitality industry; of the countries with
their special history and culture that determined how tourism worked whether in Europe
or the Middle East; of the tourists and their experiences on trips that cost them a nice
chunk of their income. All with the goal of trying to grasp the extraordinary dimensions of
the industry. There seemed no better way to describe the “product” and the industry than
actually taking those trips and telling the story from every possible perspective.
In Sri Lanka, a senior diplomat who had been transferred to the Tourism Ministry ex-
plained to me how, just months after Sri Lanka's long civil war finally ended, the country
was betting its future on tourism. Bill and I tested that assertion, touring the tropical south-
ern coast to meet hoteliers and investors, and traveling up the hills around Kandy on
bumpy roads with monkeys swinging in the trees and the proverbial paradise waiting to be
exploited.
On a typical Caribbean cruise from Miami to Belize and back, fellow tourists told me
in the cavernous, elegant dining room that they rarely got off the ship to visit a foreign
port and then attended ship lectures on how to buy diamonds mined in Africa and sold in
shops at the Caribbean ports expressly designed for cruise passengers. A few months later I
flew back to Miami, where the head of the cruise line explained why his company refuses
to register as an American company and be subject to many American laws.
In Brazil I went from a lavish banquet with international tourist executives at an At-
lantic coast resort to the vast, seemingly empty Amazon forest, where some of those same
travel leaders were trying to save a corner of the wilderness. History was everywhere, espe-
cially in nature. During an African safari in Zambia, the normal road to our base camp was
flooded, forcing our Land Cruiser to take a circuitous route through the hills and allow-
ing me a rare glimpse, at twilight, of one of Africa's majestic sable antelopes. They could
disappear, I was told repeatedly, since those wildlife parks are still viewed suspiciously as a
legacy of white colonial rule rather than as an essential part of Africa's culture.
The most familiar countries offered surprises. During my first research trip to Cambod-
ia I asked the minister of tourism a basic question: what is the most popular tourist spot in
Phnom Penh, the capital? His answer was “Tuol Sleng.” I nearly dropped my pen. Tuol
Sleng is the former torture and execution center of the Khmer Rouge. Like other research-
ers, I have spent countless hours studying its files, doubling over with horror at the story
they tell of sadism and pain: the antithesis of “tourism.” Yet Tuol Sleng's cells and instru-
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