By Tracy Sorensen
With their neatly strapped backpacks and boots good enough to tackle mountains, the two young women sitting opposite me in a crowded tram radiated health, intelligence and independence. Prague in summertime was laid out before them. As we wound through the cobblestone streets of the old city, they gazed out the window, pointing and talking quietly between themselves. Above their heads, in big red letters, was a sign: "These seats reserved for the sick and elderly".
Of course, it was written in Czech, a language these young Europeans, who probably spoke three or four languages, obviously didn't understand. As Brian Witty, tour development manager with One World Travel, says: "Tourism can turn people into creatures they don't want to be".
I became a creature I didn't want to be in Bali, that great sun-surf-sex mecca for Australians. As I entered the grim struggle with those who would sell me things — fingers tugging at my hair (only 20 cents to plait it), arms waving lengths of sarong and trinkets — I stopped seeing human beings and began to see only an irritating, never-ending swarm. I was almost envious of those revolting Australian men, half sloshed and slathered in suntan oil, who could stake out their corner of sand and wave their hands as if against flies: "Bugger off, will yas? I don't want anything."
If tourism can shred the humanity of the visitor, its social and environmental impact on the visited can be devastating. In the name of getting to know each other, broadening one's mind and having a good time, hotel developments rip up coastlines or wreck sacred sites, children are dragooned into prostitution and whole societies find themselves forced to wear their "ethnic" gear and pose for photographers.
As British journalist Pratap Rughani wrote in the July '93 New Internationalist: "In a world dividing rich and poor ever more starkly, the rich travel without boundaries and amuse ourselves with the 'discovery of the past' ...
"We arrive as representatives of wealth and opportunity, unwilling to see that Third World poverty is the price of our short-term success and distorts any contact we may have in the South."
The big hotel chains arrive offering hard currency in exchange for "paradise". In the Cook Islands, for example, ITT Sheraton has signed an agreement with the tiny south Pacific island of Rarotonga to build a 204-room five star hotel in partnership with the government.
In the April 30, 1993 New Statesman and Society, Hannah Pearce writes that the Cook Islands government is now struggling to raise the finance to complete the project, which is expected to cost more than the entire annual budget of the islands.
"The islanders", writes Pearce, "continue to oppose the project, and dread a future in which all 15 of the Cook Islands are swamped with wealthy American tourists".
In Hawaii, where the wreckage of sacred sites in the name of tourism began long ago and still continues, the locals were able to relive what it was like before the tourists only after Hurricane Iniki swept through on September 11, 1992.
"The absence of tourists after Hurricane Iniki came as a welcome realization", writes Kaleo Patterson, a pastor on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, in the New Internationalist. "... Local residents were ecstatic at being able to return to a favourite beach. Kauai, its people, land and sea seemed appreciative of the solitude and measured pace of life."
Mounting pressure from environmentalists caused some of the biggest hotel chains to sign the International Hotels Environment Initiative in 1991. New five-star resorts will now use less water in their toilets and sport lights that turn off automatically — hardly an adequate response if the hotels themselves are built on ancient burial grounds.
Other responses have included solidarity campaigns by church and social justice groups against sex tourism and child prostitution, and the "responsible travel" or "eco-tourism" movement.
While some among the latter do little more than add a thin green gloss to their existing packages, there are also small-scale initiatives offering a genuine alternative to the exploitation of the mainstream tourism industry.
One of these is One World Travel, a branch of Community Aid Abroad, which has been organising "study tours" since 1965.
According to Brian Witty, One World's "learning and leisure" strategy is about fostering a caring attitude towards people and their environment. The study tours, to be called Travel Wise from next year, are designed in collaboration with local people who have lived in Australia.
Tourists are thoroughly briefed about a country's history and customs before they go; groups are purposely kept small, and they travel with bilingual, bicultural tour guides who soften the social and environmental impact of the tour as far as possible, and maximise human exchange between visitor and visited.
Before the CAA study tour to Vietnam, participants are encouraged to learn as much of the language as they can. Their itinerary includes the Open University in Ho Chi Minh City and a visit to the East West Foundation in Danang. They use modest hotels and eat at local restaurants — thus spreading the money around and circumventing the "leakage" associated with the mainstream tourist trail (where money spent at big hotels goes out of the country to buy supplies or as profit for company headquarters).
In its own small way, says Witty, this approach is developing an alternative model of tourism in a country desperate for cash. While the big European and US investors are still held back by the US embargo, Thai, Japanese and Singaporean hotel developers are moving in on the Vietnamese coastline.
The One World approach, says Witty, attempts to win back the positive aspects of cultural exchange. In its own small way, the strategy is working: "Some of those who have toured with us have gone back to teach English, or they've made financial contributions to our projects".
Other planned One World tours include Laos, Cambodia, Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Tanzania, Mongolia and a combined Cuba-Guatemala trip. Those interested in finding out more can ring Brian Witty on 008 81 4848 or in Adelaide on 341 1422.