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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
5 8 September 2016
M
arrakech is a hard city to leave, because
someone is always tugging at your arm.
One hour south, near the highest moun-
tain in North Africa, you can hike to a pass
with a view of three valleys and still be
interrupted. I was alone up there for half an hour when
an elderly man appeared, smiled and presented me
with a sad lump of coal about the size of a tennis ball. I
almost laughed, but I was wrong. He opened the stone
to reveal a shimmering bed of purple crystals. It was a
piece of amethyst.
The old man seemed reluctant to part with his treas-
ure for just €20, and I felt a bit guilty about defrauding
him, but we shook hands and the deal was done. On
holiday one craves experience that feels privileged,
local, unusual. In Ireland that means drinking in a pub
after closing time, the ancient but highly regarded lock-
in. In India it might be a ten-day silent meditation.
Authentic and rare, here was another great travel
moment.
Half a mile up the road there was a hut with a rusty
Pepsi sign. That’s charming, I thought, I must be their
first customer today. But no! The owner was chatting to
my friend the amethyst dealer. Not talking, really, so
much as laughing, as if they had just played a practical
joke on someone. And look! There I was, sipping a luke-
warm Pepsi, not Lawrence of Arabia but something
more mundane. The first proper patsy of the day.
My amethyst story was not supposed to end like that.
Going on holiday is meant to broaden the mind. Saint
Augustine said the world is a book and people who
don’t travel read only one page. If that’s true, then we’re
in luck. It has never been cheaper or easier to fly to fara-
way places, and sometimes tourists have a benign
impact. In 2003, when going to Burma – with its corrupt
military dictatorship – was widely frowned upon, a dip-
lomat told me that one of the most encouraging
developments there was a rise in tourism, as it facili-
tated a more open society. In 2008 I discovered the
power of personal diplomacy when I spent three weeks
hiking in Iran. One day I taught a 12-year-old boy how
to juggle.
In Morocco I was a traveller until the moment I
became a stupid tourist. Still, I can’t blame the chap for
selling me that rock. The observer always affects the
observed. And there is often a tension between visitor
and host. In Barcelona, locals hang banners from their
balconies, begging tourists to allow them a good
night’s sleep. The 42-year-old mayor of the city, Ada
Colau, was elected on a promise to recapture Barcelona
for its citizens. In Hong Kong, local residents have
marched in protest against visitors from China, whom
they call ‘locusts’.
As they say in, well, everywhere, tourists are a pain
in the ass.
Why do we bother going on holiday, anyway? Person-
ally I travel to get away, to be alone, to escape myself,
or at least to meet a more attractive version of myself.
Peak
Tourist
Is it possible to be small,
cool and overrun?
CULTURE
by Trevor White
'Eight Million Tourists Expected
To Visit Ireland Next Year As Star Wars
Effect Lifts Off'
Headline in the Irish Examiner,
December 1, 2015
Mountains over Marrakech
September 2016 5 9
Such demands are seldom met. Sometimes there are
moments of transcendence – ‘that wine is delicious and
it costs half-nothing’ – but for the most part holidays
are confused, even disturbing, experiences. Consider:
Your flight takes off in just five and a half hours. There
you are, packing new clothes in an old suitcase. As you
fantasise about lounging by the pool it’s easy to forget
that you will be appearing as yourself. (Look! The skin
is falling off your nose.) Then there’s the quiet domestic
hell of other people. The comedian Kelly Kingham: “My
wife and I can never agree on holidays. I want to fly to
exotic places and stay in five-star hotels. And she wants
to come with me”.
Who among us knew that a hotel reception would
make such a lively venue for a family row? Or that a
short flight could be quite so depressing? Consider the
fatalistic niceties (“In the event of an accident…”), the
casual indignities and the cruel economies that are now
accepted as part of the bargain. When Michael
O’Leary of Ryanair joked about charging
to use the toilet, many of his custom-
ers thought he was serious.
The literature is of no assis-
tance. Brochures are works of
fiction. Travel journalism is PR
with a suntan. And guidebooks
are just as bad. Over-scripted
drivel, they rob travel of its
novelty, thus its charm. (“No
visit to New York is complete
without seeing the view at
sunset from the top of the Empire
State Building”.) Maybe we are not
explorers, you and I. Maybe we are
rough girls and lonely plonkers – a nui
-
sance, frankly, with all our demands that strip a
place of what made it attractive in the first place.
When I tell you that Starbucks tastes just the same
in Marrakech, I should be blushing.
It was the German writer Hans Magnus
Enzensberger who first argued that tourists
threaten or destroy what they have come to
see: originality and local colour. That was
nearly 60 years ago. Enzensberger’s
theory (“Tourism anticipates its refuta-
tion”) still seems topical. Writing in the
Guardian a few months ago, Tobias
Jones observed the same Faustian
pact: “The more visitors you have
and the more money you make, the
less you are the naive, folkloric,
authentic, untouched place of
the tourist imagination”.
Last year there were 1.2 bil-
lion tourists. There will be
two billion tourist arrivals
by 2030. We coach-tour
insects like to think of
ourselves as a benign
presence. We imagine that
a long journey absolves us
of any petty provincialism.
It’s good of us to meet the
people. But most of the time the exchange is purely
commercial. We are just a source of revenue, and most
of it goes to elites.
In 2006 the Canadian journalist Martin Regg Cohn
lamented that European capitals have become giant
theme parks. “Beset by swarms of tourists, the Acropo-
lis looks more like an anthill than a Greek temple.
Invaded by cellphones, Westminster Abbey feels like a
playpen for tour groups rather than a revered place of
worship”. These are fair observations. Even in pleasure
zones it is becoming ever harder to have the sort of
authentic experiences that attracted the fashion
designer Yves St Laurent and his partner, Pierre Bergé,
to Marrakech. In his book, Letters to Yves, Bergé
remembers the old days:
“Those young Moroccan men were so kind and hand-
some. We had a relationship with them that had neither
a whiff of money nor vulgarity about it. It wasn’t sexual
tourism, something we’ve always disapproved of,
in the same way we hate those who profit
from the poverty and misery of
others... It was still the old Morocco
that hadn’t yet been invaded by
mass tourism, when luxury
brands were unknown and they
didn’t even know your name”.
(How often do we consider
the political implications of our
presence in a place? I only ask
because Moroccan law prohib-
its same-sex acts. On an annual
index produced by Freedom
House, the country is currently rated
as “partly free”, with a score of 41 out
of 100. Thailand (32) and Dubai (20) are even
more popular destinations. Freedom and civil rights
are important to everyone, but for some of us they are
not as important as sandy white beaches.)
In 1980 Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent saved
the Jardin Majorelle. Visiting this large garden remains
a charming experience for travellers, who are advised
to arrive at 8am, an hour before the tourists. However,
even this precaution is no longer sufficient. Bergé and
Saint Laurent did such a good job of inventing ‘Mar-
rakech’ that no one can visit the city without paying
homage. In the garden’s café I was disappointed to find
myself sitting between two English-speaking couples.
This is what happens when you become the number-
one visitor attraction on TripAdvisor.
In the old days nobody went to the Majorelle Garden.
“It was mysterious and abandoned”, says Pierre Bergé.
“When the real estate promoters wanted to destroy it,
we did everything to stop them and bought it ourselves.
Today, the garden welcomes more than 600,000 visi-
tors a year and I believe we can be very proud of that”.
Heritage attractions are enjoying a boom. In China,
over 100 new museums opened in the last 12 months.
In the Little Museum of Dublin, where I work, footfall
has quadrupled in the last three years. We have capped
visitor numbers at 100,000 because our building is too
small to accommodate more. The museum is alive but
not throbbing. (What makes us human? We never think
we are the problem.)
By 2020 the plan is
to attract 6.2 million
tourists to Dublin.
That’s the target, five
times the city’s current
population
Our concern for
the environment
had extended
to the waste
of precious
resources in a
country far away,
but not to how we
got there
Coal or amethyst
6 0 September 2016
CULTURE
Visitor restrictions will become more common
as we approach Peak Tourism. Italian authori-
ties already limit the number of tourists in the
Cinque Terre, while super-sized cruise ships are
banned from entering the Venetian lagoon.
Writing in the Financial Times in 2015, Simon
Kuper worried that such measures could “com-
plete the transformation of Europe’s nicest
cities into gated communities for the super-rich.
Then tourism might again become the elite priv-
ilege it was in 1950, when only 25 million people
travelled internationally”. But is there a sustain-
able alternative?
Four and a half million people visited Dublin
last year. The city has a shortage of 4,000 hotel
bedrooms. This is great if you are a hotelier, but
not so good if you are a tourist on a tight budget.
Is it possible to be small, cool and overrun? In
some parts of the Mediterranean one struggles
to eat like a local but can order a full English
breakfast 24 hours a day. Bakeries and grocery
stores have been replaced by souvenir shops
and currency exchanges.
The population of Venice has shrunk from
120,000 in 1980 to only 60,000. Twice that
number arrive to gawk at the place every day. A
report in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
recently concluded that the city has been
“mummified” and mutated into “a walkable
postcard landscape”. By 2020 the plan is to
attract 6.2 million tourists to Dublin. That’s the
target, five times the city’s current population.
I wonder if it’s the optimum number.
In the tourism industry they talk about chang-
ing the dispersion profile as a way of controlling
demand. This means getting consumers to go
when and where they don’t want to go. It’s why
you can fly to Hamburg for €19.99 in February.
And sometimes price is used as a lever to keep
tourists out. In Bhutan, which was off-limits for
decades, visitors have to spend up to $250 a
day. Spain is trying something similar. In an
effort to tackle gridlock, pollution and water
shortages, a sustainable-tourism tax has been
introduced in the Balearic Islands, which have
a total population of one million people. This
summer thirteen million visitors descended on
the islands.
The International Air Transport Association is
a lobby group for high flyers. Acknowledging
that air travel has a significant environmental
impact, the Association’s CEO, Tony Tyler, says
the industry wants to achieve carbon-neutral
growth. “But we need governments to help by
agreeing a global market-based measure, to be
implemented from 2020... We urge all govern-
ments to agree a global solution and help air
transport meet its goals for a sustainable
future”. Such panglossian talk is rather under-
mined by the cynicism of many within the
industry. As Michael O’Leary once said of global
warming, “It’s all a load of bullshit”.
At least the young are a bit more hip to the
problem. Trend-spotters assure us that millen-
nials are very conscious of their social
responsibility when they travel. Preferring eco-
friendly or sustainable hotels, they claim to
enjoy authentic experiences and want to con-
tribute to the local community. If you like a fresh
towel in your hotel bathroom every morning you
were probably born before 1980. But no matter
what age we are, everyone is fighting for the
same low fare on the plane.
Cruise ships dump sewage into the oceans,
pollute our beaches and contaminate coral
reefs. Besides, I didn’t have time to sail to
Morocco, so I bought a plane ticket in the full
knowledge that air travel is a major contributor
to global warming. For €189 I flew 7,000 kilo-
metres. This is not unusual. In the age of rising
temperatures and low-cost flights, how much
do we really care about sustainability?
At dinner one night in Morocco, a Frenchman
complained that a lot of water is used to keep
golf courses green in semi-desert. Incroyable-
ment: “Golf!” There was much tutting, yet the
four people sitting at the table would soon fly
back to Europe, guiltlessly. Our concern for the
environment had extended to the waste of pre-
cious resources in a country far away, but not
to how we got there. That night I thought of the
veils we wear, those who are cast as visitors and
hosts, and of the lies we tell ourselves on the
road.
Everyone frets about excess baggage. No one
considers the weight of our collective miscon-
ceptions – how travel promises, say, to make
us feel cosmopolitan, then turns us all into
patriots. Suddenly, for the first time in history,
that small-town weatherman matters. (“Look,
it’s him!”) But in a neat twist it turns out that the
most patriotic thing we can do is also the most
sustainable: holiday at home. Keep it local.
In 2006 the founder of the Lonely Planet
Guide, Tony Wheeler, was asked about air pol-
lution. “I haven’t got an answer”, he said,
“except we should all stay home and raise veg-
etables in our gardens. But that won’t work”.
This view, that holidaying at home is unreason-
able or even silly, is often expressed by
promoters of travel. However, Google searches
for the term ‘staycation’ have gone up by 10%
each year for the last five years.
Staycations may yet become a social epi-
demic – if, that is, something happens. It could
be the arrival of virtual reality, rendering the
exotic in lush detail, but it may be something
more dramatic still. Imagine the environmental
cost of air travel being factored into the price;
high oil prices bringing an end to low-cost
travel; imagine if flying becomes too danger-
ous, or even if flying seems too dangerous.
Islamic fundamentalism has already compli-
cated the way we get from A to E. If you’ve ever
worried about being blown up you know the
threat: A Bomb Could Destroy Everything. In
Morocco I found a razor at my throat as news of
another atrocity emerged on Al Jazeera. (The
barber didn’t flinch.) But Europe is no safer. A
few months ago my wife turned to me in the
middle of Covent Garden. She said, “Let’s get
out of here”. I knew exactly what she meant.
My wife declined to join me in Morocco this
summer. Perhaps there will come a time when
all flying seems unduly reckless. That would be
terrible for the tourism industry, yet it would
also present opportunities. We know, for exam-
ple, that holidaymakers crave the exotic, even
close to home. That is why there is a tropical
island outside Berlin, a ski slope in Dubai and
a German village recreated brick-by-brick for
Chinese people to see what Europe is like. It
gives me no pleasure to predict that we have
not seen the end of artificial beaches.
On the final day of my trip to Morocco I told
my tennis coach to visit the Majorelle Garden.
“You must go”, I said, earnestly reminding him
that to be a tourist at home can often teach us
something new about who we really are.
“I can’t’, he replied.
“Why not?”
“It’s too expensive for a Moroccan”.
Back in Dublin, I searched my case for the sad
lump of coal that became a piece of amethyst.
It wasn’t there. So, in a final flourish, it became
an unvouched gift to the maid in the riad. I
thought about the amethyst and the pollution
caused by that flight home. The jewel and the
carbon footprint. And then, consumed by guilt,
I decided to take my family to Kerry next
summer.
I love County Kerry. So does everyone else.
In 2015 the final scene of 'Star Wars: The Force
Awakens' was filmed on Skellig Michael, an
island that was home to a monastery in the
sixth century. Conservationists warned that
shooting could damage a World Heritage Site,
just as tourism chiefs made promotional films
in which cast and crew extolled the beauty of
the natural landscape. Luke Skywalker called it
“indescribably beautiful”. He neglected to men-
tion the best thing that you and I can do for
Skellig Michael: stay away, preferably forever.
Before it became the one place on earth that
features in the new 'Star Wars' film, 132 people
My wife turned to me
in the middle of Covent
Garden. She said, “Let’s
get out of here”. I knew
exactly what she meant.
September 2016 6 1
were allowed to visit Skellig Michael every day
during the four-month summer season. Even
now, after the daily limit was increased to 180,
hundreds of tourists come away disappointed.
This is the result of a blockbuster connection
and shrewd marketing. As someone who works
in Irish tourism I must support ideas that gener-
ate jobs and revenue. As an Irish citizen I am not
sure that jobs and revenue should trump all
other considerations.
The Star Wars Effect is to take a small, remote
destination and turn it into the centre of the uni-
verse. The result is somewhat dazzling. Less
impressive is the act of making a promise one
cannot, or should not, keep. Part of me wants to
see Skellig Michael enjoy the fame it deserves.
Part of me wants to see Skellig Michael before
the place is ruined.
Such oppositions are within the bailiwick of
the 21st Century Tourist, for whom the lie travels
further than the truth. I am not going to visit
Skellig Michael next summer, but I did think
about it. To justify the intrusion I told myself that
I am not some coach-tour insect, but a light-
footed explorer, teaching the world to juggle. For
even a journey of a thousand miles begins with
a pack of lies. Some of them make us feel better
about stomping all over this fragile planet.
Others are designed to show how corporations
care about people and places they exploit for
profit.
In Morocco I realised that there is no art in
being a tourist. Or else we have forgotten how
to journey lightly. I don’t want to stay at home
forever, but I do need to get better at seeing the
world. That might mean travelling less, to more
obscure places, without myself; that is, without
the weight of all that baggage. And perhaps we
should all consider the possibility that this is not
the beginning, but the end, of a Golden Age.
That we are approaching Peak Tourism.
Imagine more chronic overcrowding. More
bombs. More taxes on travel. More restrictions
on our movement. Climate chaos. Empty planes.
Imagine becoming the owner of a useless pass-
port. When this seems all too real, remember
that in the year 2016 you could fly to anywhere
in the world for less than the price of a new
mountain bike. Finally, try to recall what it was
like to be a stupid tourist, and why, for all its
depredations, that facility was worth defending:
because it brought you closer to a proper under-
standing of the human condition.
Travel teaches us that freedom is something
you have to defend from time to time, but also
that freedom is nothing without responsibility.
This may be one of those times.
Skellig Michael
