
Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love - bribroder
http://www.spiegel.de/international/paradise-lost-tourists-are-destroying-the-places-they-love-a-1223502.html
======
sytelus
I grew up with stories of people like Maco Polo and love of travel but my
recent trips to Europe has almost repulsed and disillusioned me. Tiny European
countries are being swamped by huge swath of tourists, everyone with Rick
Steve’s guidebook, they all go look at exact same thing, take exact same
pictures and even eat at exact same recommended restaurants. There is a lot to
see and little to reflect when you are among herds of camera clicking
tourists. I wonder if there are any other guidebooks people use (especially
for Europe) that puts them more on path of becoming traveller and less on
tourist.

~~~
torpfactory
I often wait until I have a personal connection to a place, such as a friend
or related hobby, before traveling. The experience becomes very removed from
that of a tourist, and so much more rewarding.

Am I selfish if I put extra effort into maintaining friendships with foreign
friends so I might end up visiting them?

~~~
avh02
This is one of my favourite ways to travel (when feasible), but if there's
somewhere you want to go, just go.

I was lucky to work in a city full of expats - so I now have friends all over
the world to lean on.

In return, they lean on me when they want to visit my home country and I
happily oblige.

------
ahelwer
Always worth posting Wallace's quote on the subject:

"To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien,
ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you
can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very
unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places
that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in
lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension
of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become
economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead
thing."

A similar phenomenon is happening in the outdoor industry. Instagram is
(depending on your perspective) ruining everything or democratizing access to
natural beauty. Most people I know practice some variant of a digital leave-
no-trace rule: don't post photos in publicly-trafficked areas of the internet,
or if you do then don't say where they were taken. It's not so much
gatekeeping as ensuring people who want to experience that beauty have to put
in the work - read terribly-designed websites, meet actual people and gain
their trust, or even take a backcountry travel class which hopefully instills
a healthy respect for the environment you're enjoying.

Another strategy is to delve further into mountaineering, where the obvious
danger of the terrain repels everybody with a working survival instinct and
ensures some degree of solitude :)

~~~
sonnyblarney
"alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have"

I find this hugely classist. (Edit: and I'm generally not someone to use that
terminology)

Most (even American) travellers are just trying to see some sights, have a
normal and are not particularly rude or problematic.

The issue is now that 'everyone' can afford to travel ... it's causing
problems.

This is a problem of prosperity.

~~~
Bucephalus355
I really appreciate you using the term “classist”. I think that term, and not
“racist”, needs to be much more widely applied these days.

That being said, I really enjoyed the author’s post. If anything, the people
who are going to these places are the social climbing, upwardly mobile middle
class, determined to burnish their brand on Instagram.

Also the free flow of tourists is a problem that parallels a lot of other
things in the world currently. Information, capital, trade, all these things
have moved so much and so fast they have loosed control from national
government sovereignty that used to regulate them. As the anti-globalization
train begins picking up speed, all these will be severely restricted, for
better or worse.

~~~
sonnyblarney
I get it.

I love travelling and I'm soured at how overrun places are.

But it's not a problem of the 'ugly tourist' it's a problem of just 'too many
people'.

I don't go to tourist destinations, I just go to places.

Every French or German village is 'interesting' to those who don't know them.
They are all full of history.

Same for so many other places.

The only 'non destinations' on planet earth are the suburbs, and places where
there are a lot of Starbuckses, unfortunately, that seems to be what we are
building everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. The suburbs of Toronto,
Singapore and Istanbul are oddly similar in too many ways ...

~~~
manicdee
The ugly tourist the piece refers to is all tourists being somewhere the
wouldn’t otherwise have been except for relative affluence and the
opportunity. Lots of people who just go places, which by definition become
tourist destinations.

------
fipple
Interesting to see Den Spiegel sympathize with the people who “no longer feel
comfortable in their neighborhood because they have become a minority in the
cafés and restaurants they traditionally frequented.”

That’s one of the main complaints of the opponents of Germany/Europe’s liberal
immigration and refugee policies. They admit this in the article but dismiss
it instantly.

------
blondie9x
Traveling is overrated. Often times in modern life it feels as thought
traveling is a competition rather than for leisure and pleasure. People are
often competing to take pictures and say they have been to as many places as
possible. Props to travel companies for propagating the travel craze and
selling people on the allure of taking pictures and eating food in another
spot on Earth. Count the number of people's profiles on social media that do
not say they like traveling.

Okay let's be honest for a second what does most traveling boil down to? You
basically use a form of transportation to ping pong from one point of Earth to
another to say you visited a piece of land named X or Y, a country let's call
it, named by some person or group who is no longer alive and maybe started a
war with other humans to solidify the country name and its artificial border
lines. We are moving people from A to B back to A every day and in the process
destroying our planets climate because people are bored with the lives in the
place they inhabit.

We need to find out what is causing the boredom. Understand it and work to
solve it so that people can enjoy the places they live. To embrace our shared
humanity and environment in front of us everyday if we do not overlook it
during the hassle of everyday life.

~~~
wepple
I disagree that it’s due to boredom, or that it is overrated.

Learning about other cultures and other people’s way of life is incredibly
important in an increasingly divided world. I strongly believe that if the
average American spent time living with an Islamic family in the Middle East
for a week, we might break down a lot of barriers between all the folks that
share this rock we live on.

It’s another question as to whether that’s the type of travel people _want_ to
do, or whether it’s all collecting Instagram photos because #wanderlust is
trendy and accessible right now

~~~
blondie9x
All of this can be done via the internet.

~~~
enraged_camel
You remind me of an old lady I met while living in Southern California. This
lady was extremely _proud_ of the fact that she had never set foot outside of
California her entire life (by choice, as she was quite wealthy). I asked her
about it and she said “Honey, why bother? It’s _paradise_ here. If I ever
wonder about life elsewhere, I can read about it or watch a documentary!”

I mean, to each his own, but to me it’s the difference between reading
documentation about code vs. writing code. The former may give you some good
information, and may even be essential, but it’s not the same as experiencing
the real thing.

~~~
blondie9x
Please don't compare reading and writing code or a book for that matter to
getting on a plane and staying in a hotel or a apartment.

~~~
enraged_camel
Your comment lacks substance.

Care to explain why you have an issue with my analogy?

------
the_mitsuhiko
I went with my wife to Hallstatt this year. It's a tiny picturesque town in
Austria. I was there not that long ago, maybe something like 10 years and it
was nice and memorable but for a local no big deal. This time we went on a
wimp and jesus christ there were so many tourists. It was insane how utterly
impossible life must be there for people. There are signs in Chinese and
Japanese everywhere about local laws, not to fly drones, not to take pictures
of little children etc.

I'm not sure what the solution is but that town is effectively ruined for
normal people.

//EDIT: also the worst part is that instagram and whatever else people are
using now is so ridiculously prevalent that you can literally sit down
somewhere and hit the refresh stream to see the selfies of people _right in
front of you_ appear on the geo tagged location page. It's literally going
there just to make a stupid picture.

~~~
ryanianian
There is an interesting (but perhaps not very insighful) connection to
gentrification in this.

It sounds like that city is still having growing pains with tourism influx,
but it also sounds like the local economy is probably doing pretty well, so I
don't know if "ruined" is the right term (in absolute terms).

Put another way: the locals will have a much more annoying but (hopefully)
much richer existence as a result of that influx. Those that dislike this can
either move or work with local governments to transform policies to stop the
tourism (and fight those who prefer the income).

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
> It sounds like that city is still having growing pains with tourism influx,
> but it also sounds like the local economy is probably doing pretty well, so
> I don't know if "ruined" is the right term (in absolute terms).

The actual local economy is suffering but is getting replaced with a new one:
tourism.

------
notacoward
The problem is that limiting access to those with the greatest means
(factoring in leisure time as well as money) is horribly elitist. This is
similar to a conversation about teleportation that I've had several times with
my wife and more recently my daughter.

"Sure, it would be great if we could teleport to some unspoiled natural place
without having to deal with the hassle of regular travel and hiking for
hours/days to get there. Maybe we could even maintain a place there, so we
could visit whenever we want. But wait, if everybody else did that then it
wouldn't be unspoiled any more. So maybe if teleportation cost a lot ... but
not so much that we ourselves were excluded, naturally. But we're not elitist
scum, are we? Oh well, let's keep walking."

I totally understand the urge, I feel it myself, but my aversion to being or
becoming part of a new aristocracy is even stronger. The only _fair_ way to
keep places unspoiled would be to issue licenses via a lottery. Non-
transferable licenses, or else you might as well just sell directly to the
rich. Other than that, this is just an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence
of giving people freedom (and the means) to travel where they will.

------
infinity0
Funny that they blame Ryanair and Easyjet, who only serve Europe, in the first
sentence, then plaster a big photograph of a field full of Chinese tourists
that most likely did not use Ryanair or Easyjet to get there.

~~~
mavdi
Lots of tourist from outside Europe use "hub" airports and then travel to
their final destinations, often using low cost airlines. This why German and
Dutch airspaces are so busy.

~~~
infinity0
It would usually be the same airline that did the long flight or one of their
partners - but Ryanair and Easyjet don't do those partnerships with Chinese
airlines. I've also gotten a lot of their flights and hardly ever see Chinese
tourists, mostly local (or other European) tourists in fact.

~~~
mavdi
Well that's why airlines like Ryanair exist. If say Lufthansa is booked up by
Chinese tourists and prices are rocketing, that leaves a gap in the market
that these airlines fill.

Also people aren't stupid. They shop around and find good deals. I've seen
many South Americans using London or Amsterdam as hub airports before jumping
on cheap flights to Spain/Portugal etc.

~~~
infinity0
You're speculating wildly here. When have you ever seen a Ryanair or Easyjet
plane full of Chinese tourists??

------
siruncledrew
At a fundamental level, I think the mysticism and admiration of many of these
tourist destinations in Europe has greatly eroded in our internet and social
media age. It's not like how tourism was 50 years ago when people mostly
relied on anecdotal and literary knowledge of places to get a glimpse of what
they are like. It's much more of an experience to have to go see something for
yourself to really get a substantial view of it, in a sense. Now, I could go
see what Barcelona or Prague or Rome is like today on Google Maps, look
through Instagram stories of people who live there, and sort through countless
"10 Things to do in __" guides on the internet. Of course, there's pros and
cons to each way, but in modern times tourism really is more about "I just
want to do predetermined cool stuff in a place for my 1 week vacation" rather
than "I want to experience a place and immerse myself in the culture for 1
week".

~~~
fullshark
> modern times tourism really is more about "I just want to do predetermined
> cool stuff in a place for my 1 week vacation" rather than "I want to
> experience a place and immerse myself in the culture for 1 week".

They were always fundamentally the same, the former is just being more honest
about what you are doing.

------
seanalltogether
Isn't this in a sense the goal of globalization? Each region adapts more and
more to the niche that they serve best.

------
ggm
"hell is other people"

I think most anti tourism pieces are elitist. I also find crowds and queues a
drag but either it's a lottery or it's priced out to most people. Which is
better?

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
I new this band before they were cool man. Now I can't afford tickets because
of all the Johnny come latelies who can't truly appreciate their music like I
can.

~~~
ggm
I'm also reminded of US and British tourism in hyperinflation Weimar Germany:.
"oooh look you can live like a king for a dollar a month"

------
sparkling
Recently, in the german edition of the Spiegel, there was a similar column[1]
saying there was "something really going wrong" when a flight from Berlin to
Cologne costs 15€ while the train ticket for the same destinations costs 120€.
The same article said that the flights were "absurdly cheap" and that the
budget airlines are "displaying the type of capitalism that is disconnected
from reality".

Im not joking. The question they asked themselves was not why the Deutsche
Bahn [2], receiving billions ins subsidies every year, is unable to compete
agains budget airlines, but why the government doesn't forbid such low costs
flights. The elitism of the authors really scares me. It almost seems as if
they want a minimal ticket fee, making flying a luxury once again.

Ryanair and Easyjet are well run companies that are enabling millions of poor
people to see the world, visit family members they haven't seen for decades,
leave their countries for better opportunities abroad.

[1] [http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/billig-fluege-
der-...](http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/billig-fluege-der-airport-
kapitalismus-a-1223690.html)

[2] The major german railway company, privatized in 1994, but still fully
owned by the government

~~~
Spooky23
Cheap airlines are unsustainable and subsidized.

I just flew Norwegian from New York to Europe for less than $75. Parking my
car at the airport cost more than the flight. That entire airline is some sort
of financing scheme and won’t exist in a couple of years.

~~~
sparkling
Out of curiosity: what was the origin and destination airports?

~~~
Spooky23
Stewart Airport (Newburgh, NY) to Shannon, Ireland. They fly out of several US
cities.

They run specials frequently and you can get flights to London, Bergen,
Barcelona, etc. A friend and his wife were able to fly to London to see
Hamilton last year for less than it would have taken to see it in NYC!

------
dougmwne
Everything must be matained forever or it will disappear. Areas of economic
unproditivity will be capitalized on. If there were no crowds of tourists
filling ancient cities, there'd be less incentive to maintain them or not
replace them with new construction. If no one used our national parks they'd
be sold off to developers or resource extractors.

You can't have it both ways. Either tourism and outdoor recreation are popular
and the market will respond by preserving unique places worth seeing. Or there
will be no interest in preserving these places and our very large and resource
hungry population will put these places to more productive use.

------
mattbierner
I've been playing tourist in Switzerland and northern Italy recently and had a
few thoughts related to this article.

\- Knowing the tourist stereotype and not wanting to be that makes me self-
conscious. I've intentionally avoided some popular attractions because I
didn't want to be part of the tourist scene. Worse, I've felt pressure to
modify my normal behavior so as not to appear touristy. For example, at home I
go into the city with my camera fairly often to photograph the streets and
trash cans and shit like that, but I hesitated to do that in Zurich because I
didn't want to be that tourist walking around with their camera. That's really
stupid.

\- The most fun I've had has been taking the wrong bus or a random train and
then just going wherever looks the most interesting. The same with restaurants
or bars or events: just head out without a destination and pop in wherever
looks cool. If you do use Trip Advisor or other popular guides, wander around
the destinations and discover what else is nearby. (Atlas Obscura and Google
Earth have also taken me some fun places.)

\- With your phone, you never really have to leave home or truly get to know a
place. I can always reach my friends and family if I am just board; I can
always use Translate; I can always look up transit directions. One effect of
this is that meeting people—including other tourists—can be very hard because
not only are you in your own little phone bubble world, they are also in their
own little bubbles (not that this is any difference from home actually). I
can't imagine what it would be like to travel while uploading images or
commentary for the world.

\- Tourists are only doing what systems have optimized for. We tourists go to
Florence because the tools and infrastructure make it easy, and because the
guides tell us that it is somewhere that we _must_ visit. Then we take selfies
to prove we were there because our culture values and rewards experience
consumption. I'd like to think that we can build tools and culture that has a
broader view of what travel can be and what you get from it. Because not only
is travel an essential way to learn about and see the world, it also helps you
better understand yourself and the place you come from.

------
Karrot_Kream
While I think this is being exacerbated by the social media culture of travel
("I love to travel, crazy wanderlust" reads a profile, next to pictures at
every guidebook location), this is just the consequence of a global world,
where transportation between places has become cheaper and easier than before,
and incomes have made much of the world accessible. I for one welcome the
human progress. My grandparents had stories of saving up, leaving from their
job, and going on long trips on barges for travel.

Hopefully we can contain the tourists in a small touristy part of town,
friendly to travelers.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
An excellent YouTube channel called Rare Earth did a video on this subject:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8quMliXCIV4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8quMliXCIV4)

------
Invictus0
In my mind, this could be solved fairly simply with government regulation. The
government can sell tourism passes to enter the country, therefore socializing
some of the profits of tourism, or even just hand them out in a lottery. It
seems obvious that this will need to be done at some point; there are
fundamental limits on how many people a country's infrastructure can support.
Without the government stepping in, it will only get worse.

~~~
wwweston
This is actually done with certain destinations in the US. For example, after
"The Wave" in Southern Utah became tremendously famous (driven, IIRC, by a
very nice desktop photo distributed with Windows), access became permit-only
determined by BLM lottery.

I've been trying the lottery w/o success most months of the last year. It's
frustrating not to win, but it's a fair way of meeting the demands of both
access and preservation.

------
Existenceblinks
Tons of people would never got chance to enter most of the world. See this
third world passport thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17778108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17778108)

------
based2
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/30/chinese-
villag...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/30/chinese-village-
secret-long-life-bama-guangxi)

------
jacquesm
When - not if - cheap oil finally runs out tourism will be a fraction of what
it is today.

~~~
jogjayr
No hope for electric planes then? Or high-speed train travel?

~~~
jacquesm
It's cheap flights that make this work, electric planes are for now a pipe
dream for international and intercontinental flights and high speed trains are
not that high speed compared to aircraft.

------
SergeAx
Author fell into a common fallacy - mistook lust for love.

------
baxtr
As a side note: I have the feeling spiegel.de is getting worse and worse by
the day. Ever increasing click-bait titles, aricles with little depth, more
and more content paywalled. And don’t get me started on the page filling
ads... or is it just me?

------
scraft
Why bother traveling? Well I live in the UK and want to experience:

-Swimming with sea turtles in the wild

-Seeing whales breach right in front of me

-The feel of the finest sand I have ever experienced at Whitehaven between my toes

-Swimming in the warm sea

-Learning to surf with the perfect waves

-Sleeping in a ger with a family in Mongolia and getting an insight into how they live, what is important to them, understanding the things which can make people happy (which is very different to what lots of people think makes you happy at first glance)

-Hearing the emotion in a guides voice as he talks about the personal loss his family had due to communism, feeling connected to someone and caring instead of reading a fact in a book and it meaning very little

-Looking up at buildings I have seen countless times in photos and yet speechless, as the photo had zero impact on me yet seeing it in real life is amazing. For example the Taj Mahal blew me away, looking at it from different angles, seeing the detail close up, getting a true feel of the scale and spectacle of it.

-Dancing on the sand in bare feet through the night at a full moon party surrounded by people who are there to have fun and be happy. Sharing moments with other people. Moments that you can recall in a heartbeat throughout your life and mean something to you.

-Going to iconic places from films, tv, books from your childhood and feeling that sense of excitement which seems to erode away as we get older, but as an adult you still get that buzz when it is seeing something that meant something to you as a kid.

-Tasting home cooked food from an Indian family which tastes nothing like any Indian food I have ever tasted in the UK.

-Being surrounded by wild deer and feeding them special deer cookies. Laughing as they shake their heads around and then having to run away as too many of them surround us.

-Experiencing the lack of things, the lack of drinkable water from a tap, the lack of hygienic washing facilities, the lack of western toilets and getting so much more appreciation for what we have.

-Hearing what local Tibetans thinks about Tibet and China and contrasting it to what is put across publicly

-Seeing a sky full of stars reaching out to us from the opposite direction and being in the middle of the ocean or on an island without any lights on and get amazing views devoid of light pollution.

-Seeing how unfair the world is and questioning so much about life and how we are currently living it. Perhaps making life-changing choices, moving to a different country, changing vocations, etc.

-Filling up your senses with things which aren't available in the UK

I mean I could go on and on and on. I am 34 and have taken a year off to
travel the world, seeing 20 countries, getting some classic Instagram snaps,
drinking with a bunch of British people in remote places, doing things which
are cliché and doing something which I don't even like for no good reason.
Finding the most British food I can and being happy to taste coke. But that is
all just one small part of the experience. When you have been in Asia for 5
months and have basically had a stomach which has never quite been completely
right, the most western classic food can be very much welcomed. I personally
find it tiresome to hear people for ever complaining about what you should and
shouldn't do. If you want a Starbucks in Vietnam then have one, you don't have
to drink their (very different) coffee (I have given up coffee so not
something for me personally). If you like McDonald's in Malaysia then go have
it (McDonald's is great in terms of something safe, reliable, cheap, easy,
although not much good for me as a vegetarian).

Taking a year off to travel is one of the best decisions I have made. I am
confident it will change my life (it already has) and also confident it will
create memories which will stay with me and something I will always look back
on positively.

