Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ments of torture preserved as a cautionary museum are now part of a new phenomenon
known as “dark tourism.”
One morning I took the five-minute ferry across Bangkok's Chao Phraya River to the
Oriental Thai Cooking School of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. My fellow students in-
cluded a professional chef from Australia working on a yacht, a Portuguese financier visit-
ing from Hong Kong and a newly-wed bride from Brazil. They were expert with knives and
Asian spices, and able to take advantage of an expensive course: roughly $100 for a three-
hour, hands-on lesson that became our three-course lunch. Chef Narain Kiattiyotchar-
oen's menu that day included pad thai, the spaghetti of Southeast Asian cuisine. For me it
was an introduction into the world of “gastronomic or culinary tourism,” which brings in
as much as 5 billion euros to Italy alone. Ultimately, I decided to spotlight wine tourism
in a trip through Bordeaux. Likewise, my interviews with young Spanish hotel owners try-
ing to cobble together a gay-friendly tour circuit had to be put aside. The gay and lesbian
tourism market is considered potentially among the most lucrative, as is the retired-seniors
market, but this topic is not meant to be encyclopedic.
I crossed the two continent-size countries central to the travel industry; in China, trav-
eling roughly north to south from Beijing to Shanghai and then Xian and Chengdu, and
in the United States going east to west from the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia
to the beach on Waikiki in Hawaii, readjusting my interview schedules as I examined the
connections between the two behemoths. Gambling in Macau undercut gambling in Las
Vegas. Generations of dreams of Disneyland translated into theme parks in Shanghai.
Everywhere, I ran across wilderness areas modeled after America's national park system:
a favorite was an island off Costa Rica that was a former penal colony left to return to
nature along with its surrounding seas, where we swam in crystal-clear water.
In the sands around Dubai and Abu Dhabi, I watched the stream of airplanes taking off
and landing that have turned this once-deserted corner of the globe into a massive tour-
ist hub, rivaling Singapore and Britain. Europeans have become so concerned about the
pollution caused by the constantly growing air traffic that they have included airplanes in
their carbon emissions trading system and as of 2013 are imposing a small carbon allow-
ance on every airplane ticket for travel to, within and from the continent—roughly $3 per
ticket.
Pollution and environmental degradation are the serious downside of those crowds of
tourists and travelers who are making 1 billion discrete foreign trips every year and possibly
three times that many trips within their own countries. With over 7 billion people now
on Earth, there is little doubt that the number of trips will rise, raising urgent questions
about responsibilities. Travel is an extraordinary pleasure and was once a privilege. Now it
is considered a basic right without limits or a sense of responsibility for how all this travel
is affecting the places we love.
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