This is how he starts the book:
"You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveller's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler." (p.1)
I've a thing for sipping coffee in shop windows while watching the world go by, no matter where on the globe I am. I'm in another window, in another Seattle coffee shop, in another Exclusive Books, in another Christmas decoration-bedecked shopping mall.
Two years ago, roughly this time (give or take a week or two) I was frequenting coffee shop windows not unlike this one, voyeuring my way through London, Prague and Marrakesh.
I was also reading Stephen King's 'On Writing'. I'd bought it at a Waterstones just off Trafalgar Square on a deeply overcast, cold Saturday afternoon while well-heeled Londoners clipped past in their patent leather shoes, or scraggily expensive trainers, clutching over-size designer shopping bags (that piqued both my curiosity and good natured envy).
I was also reading Lonely Planet's Guide to Travel Writing... a book that ironically spelt out just how nigh impossible it was to survive as a travel writer - I'm pausing to inhale the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans that's making me cross-eyed with satisfaction - so much so that I burst into tears out of sheer hopelessness. I was reading the book at dusk on the rooftop of my Marrakesh hotel, inbetween staring at the full moon above the snow-capped Atlas Mountains distantly outskirting the city. (I put the book away then and have never picked it up again.)
My favourite coffee shop so far must be the Starbucks just across from the Hampstead underground station in north London. Mere metres from another Waterstones book shop, there I've spent hours reading, writing, watching while recovering from the bone deep cold suffered while exploring Hampstead's west heath and enviously tramping her streets.
Reality check: I'm sitting here watching people watching other people, aware, too, in my peripheral vision of those curious about me. All-in-all it's an immensely satisfactory late afternoon heading for dusk. And I thank God from the bottom of my heart that it's not two years ago this time.
Now to check the spelling of au fait in one of the bookshop's dictionaries... can you hear my chuckle? (For those in the know, I pose the question: So where, Charlie Brown, has the sex gone?)
The This Tourism Week e-letter below by my great, Knysna-based friend Martin Hatchuel was published as long ago as 15 August, but re-reading it again I felt compelled to post it here. To read it on his website, with its accompanying links, click on the above title.
You've probably noticed that I don't write about surfing (although, of course, because you've been onto my blog - www.thistourismweek.co.za - you're familiar with my surf board).
But no - I do sometimes write about surfing. I've written about the feeling (which, as they say, only a surfer knows), about the stoke, about the surfing life - but I hope never to fall into the trap of writing about, of actually naming, the places where I've surfed.
There's an important reason for this.
Although I haven't danced with the ocean for almost a year, surfing is, for me, the most important, life-defining sport I've ever had the privilege to experience. It saved my life and through it I met the boy who became my foster son (and who, 18 months ago, presented the world with a boy of his own - who is now, therefore, my grandson).
These are gifts greater than anyone can hope for. And the selfish truth is - I don't want to share the giver with anyone. THAT'S why I don't write about the places where I surf.
I don't want you to know about the places that are most important to me. I don't want you there surfing with me. I don't want you to crowd your way down to my home break, to trample all over my bit of paradise - because even if the waves there aren't that great, they're nice and quiet and they're my waves, OK?
It works like this: you write about a secret place you've just discovered and then you sell your piece to some big surf mag (which exists really only to market expensive surf clothing - which is nuts, because all a surfer needs is a board, a wet suit and a pair of old baggies. And something warm and preferably cheap and old for afterwards).
The magazine flies off the shelves, you win some obscure writing award and the next thing you know everyone's flying down to the secret spot you've just unveiled. Because sometime in the eighties (or maybe it was the 90s) surfing took off and everyone wanted to play rebel-rebel - without actually, you know, rebelling - and now EVERYONE'S marketing surfing because it looks, you know, rebellious, and so everyone wants to try it and ...
You get my drift?
This evening, while I was doing a bit of tidying up before sitting down to write (read: 'looking for inspiration'), I found a copy I'd kept of an article by the Australian travel writer Tom Neal Tacker.
In 'Don't Eat The Snake,' Mr. Tacker said that "responsible tourism takes its lead from responsible travel writing. Leading from the front, travel writing is supposed to set an example for those who follow. What happens if it's a bad example?
"...In an article that recently appeared in the weekend travel section of a respected newspaper, the author gave an account of his lunch at a restaurant located near Hanoi. He ate a snake. In increasingly vivid detail, he described the preparation of the meal with meticulous remarks about flavour, texture and the apparent male sexual energy boost derived from drinking the live snake's bile stirred into Mekong whisky, a kind of serpent Cialis shooter.
"I question the story's failure to address the ethical dilemmas that it clearly presents: that it is wrong to bring a live snake to a table to kill it with a razor blade and extract its bile while its heart still beats, to remove its lung, liver and other organs and finally to skin it in order to carve its flesh from its skeleton to put into a soup. That snakes are being harvested in the wild to serve a trade which harms the local environment and ultimately the people who live there.
"My respect for snakes is maintained through mutually well-defined distance; we are not close companions. However, I would not authorize via payment the torture of any animal, no matter how little regard I had for it, nor would I endorse its slaughter to provide a cocktail mixer and a bowl of soup. The reporting of its death was neither fair nor balanced.
"What is important is the journalistic nonchalance that uses a cheapened life, even a snake's life, to milk a story out of cultural difference perceived as ersatz exoticism."
For me this was a rare and refreshing attack by one member of the media on another. I've begun to think that there's a kind of honour amongst thieves when it comes to writers, and, because I've personally come across so little criticism of travel writing, I've begun to believe that travel writers - who in many ways have the ability to make or break a destination - have come to be seen as untouchable by both themselves (which is fatal) and their supporters in tourism (who want nothing more than more and more visitors).
I've trawled the net and watched the papers and magazines for years - but a discussion of the role of the media in responsible tourism eludes me. Even the International Centre for Responsible Tourism seems to have very little to say on the matter.
The site carries the full text of the Cape Town Declaration (the outcome of the first International Conference on Responsible Tourism in Destinations, 2002) - but there's no mention of the media there.
Six years later, the 2008 International Conference on Responsible Tourism in Destinations came up with the Kerala Declaration (after Kerala in India) - which I think rather weakly addressed the problem by saying:
"We urge the media to exercise more responsibility in the way in which they portray tourism destinations, to avoid raising false expectations and to provide balanced and fair reporting.
"We urge the media to communicate the ideas of Responsible Tourism and the enhanced visitor experiences it can provide and to promote Responsible Tourism enterprises.
"We ask that the media exercise independent critical judgment when reporting on companies and destinations and address the Responsible Tourism agenda."
But that's all. There's a News page but no media page on www.icrtourism.org.
Of course the only real effort I did find was on a privately owned website - two articles on Ethical Marketing for Sustainable Tourism by a marketing consultant name of Valere Tjolle (Part 1 here and Part 2 here).
If I feel the way I do about surfing, how do people whose lifestyles and cultures get turned upside down by tourism feel about the influx of tourists to the places where they live?
How does the environment react to being trod all over, climbed up, swum through, and generally used to pander to our latter-day need to discover the already discovered? (Nietzsche: "We moderns, we half-barbarians, are in the midst of our bliss only when we are most in danger.").
So now my question to you is this: besides the fact that "the members of the media are friends not food" (thanks, Nemo), how does the tourism industry believe we writers should behave? Is it cool to write glowingly about everything we see just so that you, the product owner, will get more and more bums onto your seats or bodies into your beds (whoops - that didn't sound too kosher! ha ha!)?
Where does this leave travel writing? How should the media report on destinations? And is it OK for people like me - and Mr. Tjolle - to decide?
Martin Hatchuel
BarefootWriter
ABOUT THIS TOURISM WEEK
This Tourism Week is a personal e-letter and informed commentary on issues affecting South Africa's tourism industry. Please note that the articles in This Tourism Week may only be reproduced with permission. Want it? Mail me - martin@thistourismweek.co.za.
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